#from the homeless to Harvard

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 70 – American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis

I’m honestly not sure I ever would have gotten around to reading this on my own, but ended up buying it through the ‘blind date with a book’ thing a bookstore in New York was doing when I was visiting (incredible gimmick, for the record). The fact that it then took me a solid three months to actually finish probably tells you something about how genuinely difficult a read I found it. Not in the sense of being bad, but just legitimately difficult to stomach at points. Overall I’d call it a real triumph of literature.

Not that anyone doesn’t already know, but; the book is spent inside the head of Patrick Bateman, high-flying wall street trader and Harvard blueblood at the close of the Reagan era. Also a serial killer. The story is told as a series of more or less disconnected vignettes, jumping from dinner conversations at one exclusive bar or club or another to the brutal torture and murder of a sex worker to several pages of incredibly vapid pontification on Nina Simone’s discography. The story vaguely tracks Bateman growing ever-more alienated and out of control as the year goes on, but there’s very much not any real single narrative or cathartic climax here. - most stuff just happens (stuff that’s either incredibly tedious or utterly nauseating by turns but still just, stuff).

So yeah this is an intensely literary work (obviously), a word I’m here using to mean one that is as much about the form and style of the writing as about the actual events portrayed. Bateman is a monster, but more than that he’s just an utterly boring and tedious husk of a man, traits which are exaggerated to the point of being fascinating– if you told this story in conventional third person narration without all the weird asides, it would be a) like half as long and b) totally worthless. The tonal whiplash of going from an incredibly visceral depiction of Bateman cutting out the eyes of a homeless man to six (utterly insipid) pages on the merits of The Doors is the selling point here (well actually I think Ellis goes back to that specific well probably one time too many, but in general I mean).

Bateman is a tedious, unstable monster, but as far as the book has an obvious thesis it’s that he differs from the rest of his social milieu only in degree. A symptom of a fundamentally rotten society, not a heroic devil among sheep. The book’s climax, such as it is, involved Bateman getting into a drug-fueled gunfight with the NYPD, shooting multiple people in the middle of the street, and then stumbling home and leaving a rambling confession to every crime on his lawyer’s answering machine – but despite very clearly wanting and trying to get caught and face some sort of consequence or justice, people just refuse to believe that someone like him is capable of anything like that. (It’s not, it must be said, an especially subtle book).

There is, as far as I can recall, not a single character who gets enough screentime to give an idea of their personality who I’d call likeable. Sympathetic, sure, but that’s mostly because it’s pretty much impossible not to sympathize with someone getting horrifically tortured and torn apart (at one point a starving rat is involved). The upper crust of New York yuppie-dom is portrayed as shallow and vapid, casually bigoted towards quite literally everyone who isn’t identical to them, status-obsessed to the point of only being able to understand the world as a collection of markers of class and coolness, and totally incapable of real human connection. Bateman is a monster not because of any freak abnormality, but just because he takes all of that a few steps further than his coworkers.

The book is totally serious and straight-faced in its presentation, and absolutely never acknowledges any of the running gags that are kept up through it. Which shows impressive restraint, and also means that none of them exactly have a payoff or a punchline – it’s just a feature of the world that all the expensive meals at trendy restaurants everyone competes for tables at sound disgusting when you think about them for a moment, or that the whole class of wall street trader guy are so entirely interchangeable that ostensible close friends and coworkers constantly mistake each other for other traders and no one particularly cares. Or – and I’m taking this on faith because fuck knows I’ve got no idea what any of the brands people are wearing are – that the ruinously expensive outfits everyone spends so very much time and money on for every engagement all clash comically if you actually looked up what the different pieces looked like. The book’s in no way really a comedy, so the jokes sit a bit oddly, but they’re still overall pretty funny, at least to me.

I like to think I have something of a strong stomach for unpleasant material in books, but this was the first work of fiction that I had genuine trouble reading for content reasons in I can’t even remember. I’m not sure it’s exactly right to call the violence pornographic in a general sense, but as far as American Psycho goes the register and tone Bateman uses to describe fucking a woman and torturing her to death are basically identical (and told in similarly explicit detail), and all of Bateman’s sexual fantasies are more or less explicitly just porn scenes he wants to recreate, so. Regardless, the result’s pretty alienating in both cases – his internal monologue never really feels anything but detached and almost bored as he relays what he does, sound exactly as vapid and alienated as when he is carefully listing the exact brands and designers every person he ever interacts with is wearing at all times, or arguing over dinner reservations for hours on end with his friends and lovers (though both those terms probably deserve heavy airquotes around them). He legitimately sounds considerably more engaged when talking about arguing over sartorial etiquette. It all adds up to a really strong alienating effect.

Anyways, speaking of sex and violence – perhaps because my main exposure to the story before this was tumblr making memes out of scenes from the movie, but I was pretty shocked by just how explicitly awful Patrick is ‘on screen’. The horrible murder, sure, but also just the casual and frequent use of racist and homophobic slurs, the pathological misogyny, the total breakdown he has at the idea of a gay man being attracted to him and thinking he might reciprocate – all of these are entirely in character for an asshole Wall Street ‘80s Guy even if he wasn’t a serial killer, but it’s still oddly shocking at first to see it so thoroughly represented on the page. It makes how comparatively soft-pedaled the bigotry and just, awfulness, of villains in a lot of more modern books stand out a lot more, I suppose? I have read a lot of books that are in some sense About queerness and/or racism in the last year, and no one in any of them holds a candle to good old Patrick Bateman.

Part of that is just the book being so intensely of its time, I suppose. The New York of this book is very much one of the late ‘80s, incredible wealth living side by side with social rot and decay, crippling poverty everywhere and a society that has to a great degree just stopped caring. Absolutely none of which Bateman or any of his peers care one bit about, of course – they’re too busy showing off the latest walkmans and record players, going to the newest clubs, and just generally enjoying all the fruits of Reagan’s America. Recent history has made the fact that Bateman’s personal idol is Donald Trump almost too on the nose to be interesting, but in 1991 I’m sure it was a bit more subtle in how telling it was.

Anyway, yeah, horrifying and exhausting read, triumph of literature, my god did Easton Ellis hate America (this is a compliment). Now time to go watch the movie!

#book review #literature #american psycho #brett easton ellis

[mushroommushy]

Please please tell me your ideas I will be so normal about it I am not at all desparate for Broken Masquerade content

Boy I have so many ideas I actually need to put this in a draft to list all of the brainrot things I’ve had circling in my head!! This does include some negative things so feel free for me to ask to tag.

All of the colleges (Particularly Harvard) adding Thaumaturgy to their classes is extremely cool in the canon and I think there should be many more schools

Site-43 College beloved I want to go there so badly please be real c’mon :[

Those Facebook mom groups…oh boy there’s so much drama

Lord help all the poor kids with minor anomalous power

Segregation with schools, even restaurants

A lot of anomalies end up in homeless shelters because not many jobs are willing to take the backlash of anomalous employees

Shitty parents faking their kid having a dangerous anomaly so they can send them away

Because they think the foundation would just kill them because of all the propaganda

You know that the cults are gonna take advantage of this to try and grow their numbers

Chaos Insurgency propaganda against the foundation

A flag that shows your support for the foundation, GOC, anomalies hanging outside your home

New Genders from the tumblrinas like us

Twitter DNI’s are a genuine hell

‘DNI IF YOU SUPPORT SCP’S/THREAT ENTITIES/OBJECTS’

‘Block me if you call anomalies SCP’s that’s a slur’

Speaking of slurs there’s probably a lot more

COTBG members constantly calling the Nälkan’s Sarkics just to piss them off

And Maxwellium members getting real pressed over internet drama

Someone trying to make the nicknames the Serpents Hand has into a slur

Dr. Glass walking down the street and just has someone scream ‘JAILER’ at him and he is desperately trying to not commit a crime

Also Twitter being Twitter

‘Is it wrong to kin SCP-076-2? I’d murder too if I was under the ocean.’

Extremely dangerous TikTok trends involving anomalies that makes both the GOC and SCP have collective heart attacks

Some girl posts a video from a foundation site doing Macarena during a breach and is just immediately cancelled on every platform

You know there’s gonna be dumbass teenagers trying to find some real dangerous shit to seem cool

‘Oh a lake full of bodies that makes you enter through mind control??? Sounds cool and not totally dangerous I’m gonna find it and go swimming’

Gonna readmore this it’s getting long lol

Five missing teens later the foundations getting slandered even though they did nothing

Articles with the ‘How to tell if ‘X’ is an anomaly’

Of course they’re bullshit and usually offensive

Charities to support anomalies

An actual cult around 2662 that didn’t spawn anomalously

You fucking know that the Christian’s will either take 343 well or absolutely horrifically

There’s also two sides of people when it comes to Cain and Able

The ones who hate Cain and think Able is reasonable and the people who think the opposite

Cain’s also not allowed to leave site-17 for more than just the fact he’d kill plant life it’s for his own safety tbh

Meri does get chances to wander the woods! Just..not in public because they rampage that would happen with the amount of broken phones and cars would be horrible

Iris gets to go home because she deserves it

I feel like Gerald would become a meme in general and people pay his hospital bills for him lmao

Parents keeping their kids out of school and switching to online or homeschooling to keep them away from anomalies

Conversion camps to send your kid to so people can ‘release them from their curse’

Those got the serpents hand real heated

Speaking of them they have the snarkiest Twitter account ever and just roast the living hell out of every word that comes out of the foundations mouth

Podcasts

So many fucking podcasts

There already is a writing on the broken masquerade hub of the foundation making a video with outdated slang to appeal to kids

But I think Dr. Gears should just stare at a camera and say swag with a straight face it would be beautiful

Kondraki, Clef and Gears get called dilfs and not a single one of them knows what it means

‘Kain’s the goodest boy’ even though he’s morally corrupt as fuck is very common

But he will Fuckin run if you even try to touch him he does not need his fur messes up

Ok I don’t want this to be a mile long so I’ll stop here but!!!

If you want more dm me so we can talk 👀👀👀 I need SCP friends

#scp foundation #SCP #broken masquerade #dr. kondraki #Dr. clef #Dr. gears #Dr. Gerald’s #Dr. glass #scp 073 #scp 076 #kain pathos crow #serpents hand #church of the broken god #sarkicism #scp 105 #scp 166 #SCP 2662 #SCP 343 #SCP 2316 #chaos insurgency

[ecoamerica]

Watch the American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 now: https://youtu.be/bWiW4Rp8vF0?feature=shared

The American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 broadcast recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by active climate leaders. Watch to find out which finalist received the $50,000 grand prize! Hosted by Vanessa Hauc and featuring Bill McKibben and Katharine Hayhoe!

#ACLA24 #ACLA24Leaders #youtube #youtube video #climate leaders #climate solutions #climate action #climate and environment #climate #climate change #climate and health #climate blog #climate justice #climate news #weather and climate #environmental news #environment #environmental awareness #environment and health #environmental #environmental issues #environmental justice #environment protection #environmental health #Youtube

[tam-shade-song]

Anti-hero Sophie AU

Kotlc au where after Sophie witnesses the death of her mother while also hearing the mind of the human responsible, Sophie believes her mission is to fix the forbidden cities: the reason for her powers. She's ambitious, she wants to go to Harvard for a degree. She doesn't care about other's opinions of her, because when she's stopped climate change, the homelessness crisis, and capitalism then they won't matter.

Sophie has more confidence in her abilities, but she is also incredibly obsessive with her plans. She notices everything wrong with the lost cities at once, from gender norms to the class system, and she decides that she's going to fix that too, then the forbidden cities

Sophie firmly believes her worth is based on what she can do for society, but she determines her value herself and cares less about what others think.

Sophie is completely ruthless. Remember what Verspera said in Nightfall, about Sophie being able to destroy everything if she used the entirety of her powers? The extent of her powers made her a weapon, not of the Black Swan's making but of her own.

Sophie is completely ready to kill for her goals and has been since she was only nine years old.

#kotlc #kotlc fandom #kotlc headcanons #kotlc tam #kotlc linh #kotlc thoughts #kotlc au

[voskhozhdeniye]

Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, advocates and policy analysts have warned of a homelessness “tsunami.” It’s the worst-case scenario where the combination of lost income, backlogs of owed rent, and a lack of local government foresight contribute to a surge of people losing housing and ending up on the street. Well, it has arrived—and it’s poised to get much worse as the Supreme Court is set to decide whether to make homelessness a de facto crime.

This past month, many cities and counties conducted their annual point-in-time homelessness counts. The results of January’s counts won’t be known for several more months, but they’re likely to be dire. The end-of-2023 results found that approximately 653,000 people were experiencing homelessness. That’s up more than 70,000 over 2022, or a 12 percent increase. In the 12 months since that data was collected, those numbers have likely gone up.

But the raw numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. As more people end up experiencing homelessness, they’re also facing increasingly punitive and reactionary responses from local governments and their neighbors. Such policies could become legally codified in short order, with the high court having agreed to hear arguments in Grants Pass v. Johnson.

Originally brought in 2018, the case challenged the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, over an ordinance banning camping. Both a federal judge and, later, a panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck the law down, saying that Grants Pass did not have enough available shelter to offer homeless people. As such, the law was deemed to be a violation of the Eighth Amendment.

The ruling backed up the Ninth Circuit’s earlier ruling on the Martin v. City of Boise case, which said that punishing or arresting people for camping in public when there are no available shelter beds to take them to instead constituted a violation of the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause in the Eighth Amendment. That applied to localities in the Ninth Circuit’s area of concern and has led to greater legal scrutiny even as cities and counties push for more punitive and restrictive anti-camping laws. In fact, Grants Pass pushed to get the Supreme Court to hear the case, and several nominally liberal cities and states on the West Coast are backing its argument. If the Supreme Court overturns the previous Grants Pass and Boise rulings, it would open the door for cities, states, and counties to essentially criminalize being unhoused on a massive scale.

If it does so, that will have ramifications for all unhoused people, from those who have been chronically homeless for some time to those currently falling into homelessness. And that last category is a large one: In the time since the January 2023 homeless count, there have been at least 1,076,396 evictions across 10 states and 34 cities, according to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab project, which has tracked data related to evictions through the end of 2023. In December alone, there were more than 69,000 evictions in those monitored areas. According to the data, evictions have almost fully returned to pre-Covid pandemic levels, after federal moratoriums and protections expired.

It’s also becoming harder to pay for housing. The housing market remains tight for anyone looking to buy, and renters are losing options. Inflation has eaten into people’s available income, pandemic-era protections have ended, rents are rising, and data from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies that came out last month showed that renters are spending more—even as the amount of affordable housing available is decreasing.

Nearly 22.4 million households—or half of all renters—can’t afford their rent, according to an accepted standard that paying more than 30 percent of one’s income on rent renders it unaffordable. Without immediate assistance to renters, it’s a situation that will only worsen. Back rent due, as well as new rent increases, is likely to magnify the financial strain that’s already being keenly felt by renters, forcing more people out of their homes, either to depend on friends and family or end up on the streets.

If the Supreme Court sides with Grants Pass, it will effectively undo all of the protections created by the Boise case, which means that the thousands of people currently experiencing homelessness as well as those likely to fall into homelessness in 2024 will face additional challenges in an already traumatic situation. Added legal and financial burdens will only make it harder for them to become rehoused, creating a vicious cycle of escalating misery that will do nothing to actually solve the underlying causes of homelessness.

Grants Pass v. Johnson hasn’t received the same fanfare as many of the other cases before the Supreme Court this term, but perhaps no other case has as much at stake for some of the most vulnerable Americans, who now face the prospect of both additional financial burdens and the possibility of being transformed into a new class of criminal, solely because so many states and municipalities have chosen to wash their hands of a crisis their own policies have created.

Jesse Rabinowitz, the campaign and communications director with the National Homelessness Law Center’s “Housing Not Handcuffs” program (which plans to file an amicus brief in the case prior to oral arguments but has not as of press time) told The New Republic that an arrest record only makes it harder to get a job or find a new apartment to rent—and unpaid fines can lower a credit score, causing more financial hardship.

If the highest court sides with lawmakers that have abandoned the homeless to face more punitive measures for their misfortune, anyone left on the streets could be subject to arrest or other criminal penalties simply for having nowhere else to go, even in instances where local government has fallen through on the provision of adequate shelters. They will either be left to rot in jail or be forced out of the communities they call home.

The biggest obstacle to solving homelessness is the lack of affordable housing. That’s it. Either people are being priced out of homes or those on the streets can’t afford to obtain a permanent home. Thousands of units are either in the approval process or being built, but at the moment there is a nationwide deficit in housing, and construction is not matching pace with the growth of the unhoused population.

“Homelessness is increasing in many communities because rents are sky high and there is a severe shortage of affordable rental homes. More people are just one financial shock away from falling behind on rent and facing evictions and, in worst cases, homelessness,” Sarah Saadian, senior vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told The New Republic. “As homelessness has increased, elected officials are under a lot of pressure to take action, but too many of them are turning to misguided, ineffective, and costly approaches, like criminalization, rather than investing in proven solutions.”

This is not some abstract conundrum. In Los Angeles this past month, before and during dangerous storms that found officials urging sheltering in place for safety, police and city agencies were out dismantling encampments. Efforts by local advocates and organizations to help get unhoused people into promised shelters were met with confusion by local government and a lack of actual help, as documented by the group Ktown for All. Prior high-level sweeps, such as at Echo Park Lake in 2020, cleared the park of tents, but despite initial claims by Los Angeles City Council members, only a handful of the nearly 200 people cleared by the lake found temporary shelter, let alone permanent housing. Additionally, representatives with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority said such clearances disrupted outreach attempts intended to get people to shelter and temporary housing, undoing trust-building efforts that took time to develop.

And real solutions to homelessness are up against long timelines and limited political will. There are major efforts to build new housing and fund services—the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced $3.16 billion last month for those very issues—but these resources take time to spin up, and they face political challenges along the way. An ambitious plan by New York City Mayor Eric Adams, announced in 2022, shriveled over a year, with several cuts to social services. It’s an initiative that joins other community programs in facing financing and budget issues, all while the mayor pushes increasing money to the already massively funded NYPD. Los Angeles elected a slew of progressive officials in 2022 and passed a mansion tax to fund housing and services, however it will still be some time before any new housing funded by it opens.

Meanwhile the city’s wealthy interests and corporate donors are funding the campaigns of conservative challengers to several progressives this year. If the Grants Pass case ends up allowing widespread criminalization of homelessness, it could lead to major setbacks that could render these projects far less effective.

Even large cities that have committed significant resources to helping unhoused people can’t adequately shelter people. New York, with a right-to-shelter law, still falls short of helping all of the people in need. Los Angeles has initiated several measures—several very good ones, as a matter of fact—to fund housing and services, but new units take time to actually be built, and more reactionary elements in the city government are pushing anti-homeless ordinances of their own.

And shelter, although helpful, is not housing. People in transitional or bridge housing still struggle to find permanent solutions, mainly because there simply isn’t enough affordable housing available. And it’s worth remembering that tens of thousands of people fall into and out of homelessness a year, including many who might experience homelessness for just a brief period of time before safety programs, family, or good fortune help them regain housing stability. Those who fit into this category could find themselves caught up in the criminal justice system for just a few days’ misfortune.

If the Supreme Court does side with criminalizing homelessness, local and state governments could start punishing people very quickly, according to Rabinowitz. “A lot of states have carve-outs that say this policy of criminalization can’t be enacted unless there is adequate shelter,” Rabinowitz said. “I imagine the ‘adequate shelter’ part will go away very quickly if the court rules that way.”

There are even more hostile proposals being dreamt up. In Florida, the state legislature—with the endorsement of Governor Ron DeSantis, fresh off his failed presidential run—is proposing criminalizing homelessness and putting unhoused Floridians in camps. Donald Trump is running on a nationwide version of this same policy. Under his proposal, unhoused people would be sent to “tent cities” on “inexpensive land” (exactly what that means is unclear, but it’s implied to be outside of cities).

Notably, the proposal is missing any real details on getting people out of those camps into actual permanent supportive housing. Trump hasn’t provided any idea of what his indefinite internment plan will cost or how he will pay for it; it goes without saying that it’s impossible to determine whether it would be more cost-effective than simply building more housing. But the former president appears to have retribution, not solutions, on his mind. In his 2023 video, he accused cities of focusing on “the whims of a deeply unwell few,” outright ignoring the root causes of homelessness and the factors that keep people unhoused.

When one considers the draconian ideas being conceived behind closed doors, the implications of any decision in Grants Pass are very real. The mechanisms and political desire to criminalize the homeless already exists, and lawmakers seem to be racing toward drastic and punitive approaches, instead of solutions that might actually ease the crisis. Should the Supreme Court contribute to the momentum of criminalization, it will likely exacerbate the crisis—it certainly will neither contribute to rehousing the homeless nor alleviate the economic conditions that force people out onto the streets. It’s a recipe for shortsighted, “out of sight” policies that will enable officials to pursue the cruelest possible approaches to a problem they helped create.

#Greetings from America

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Bertrand Cooper

Published: Jun 19, 2023

Most of my colleagues are college-educated. I am often the only product of felons, addicts, and foster care whom my peers have encountered outside of time spent volunteering in homeless shelters and group homes. Over the years, whenever affirmative action in higher education has come under threat, these folks have offered their sympathies. They believe that I—a child of a Black father and white mother who grew up in poverty and instability—feel the attacks more acutely. Most Americans seem to think affirmative action sits at the foundation of some beneficent suite of education policies that do something significant for poor Black kids, and that would disappear without the sanction of affirmative action. But the reality is that for the Black poor, a world without affirmative action is just the world as it is—no different than before.

In 2012, 6 percent of Harvard’s freshmen identified as Black. At the time, Black Americans made up 14 percent of the population and 15 percent of the country’s young adults. Harvard was then a far cry from racial parity. But in just three years, the university increased the number of Black freshmen by 50 percent. By 2020, The Harvard Crimson was reporting that more than 15 percent of incoming freshmen were Black, which meant the university had acquired perfect representation. This progress—Black progress—appears poised to recede with the expected loss of affirmative action due to the Supreme Court’s coming decisions on the Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina cases. But to endure a loss, one must have first enjoyed a gain. Diversity at Harvard was not the result of some intricate system for sourcing talent from the whole of Black America. With the permissions granted in 1978’s Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Harvard used race-conscious admissions to saturate itself with students drawn from the highest-earning segments of Black America.

The same year that Harvard achieved perfect Black representation, a group of celebrated economists published a study examining income segregation across America’s colleges.

From 1999 to 2004, the years examined by the study, about 16 to 18 percent of American children were living below the federal poverty line. Families living below the FPL struggle to afford enough food, clothing, or shelter to stave off biological decline. In the absence of income segregation, children from poverty would make up a proportional 16 to 18 percent of college students. But according to the study, only 3 percent of the students at Harvard in that time period came from families in the bottom 20 percent. (The researchers later found that the percentage had increased to about 5 percent for a cohort of students at Harvard from 2008 to 2013.)

In October of 2020, Harvard reported 154 Black first-year students. Given that the child-poverty rate in Black America hovers north of 30 percent, in an equitable society, some 40 Black freshmen would have come from poor families. The income segregation study did not disaggregate income brackets by race, and neither does Harvard, but the university does disclose that about a quarter of its latest freshman class comes from families with incomes below $85,000, its threshold for full financial aid. This is far above the federal poverty line and therefore not a good indicator of how many poor students attend Harvard. But if we extrapolate the study's findings, only seven or eight of said 154 Black freshmen would have come from poor families. The other 140 or so Black students at Harvard were likely raised outside of poverty and probably as far from the bottom as any Black child can hope to be.

Writing in the American Journal of Education in 2007, the Princeton sociology professor Douglas Massey observed that 40 percent of Black students in the Ivy League were first- or second-generation immigrants. Black immigrants are the highest-earning and best-educated subset of Black America.

The Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., a director of the university’s African American–studies center, once estimated that as many as two-thirds of Harvard’s Black students in the early 2000s were the fortunate sons and daughters of Black immigrants or, to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples. A Black woman who was a Harvard senior at the time told The New York Times in 2004 that there were so few other Black students whose grandparents had been born in the U.S. that they had begun calling themselves “the descendants.”

The Supreme Court affirmed race to be an acceptable criterion within a holistic admissions framework in 1978. The regime described here persisted for 45 years without manifesting any progress of note for the Black poor, and it strains faith to imagine that the trickle-down was on its way in year 46. The coming eulogies for affirmative action should acknowledge this history. No policy that hesitates to say class prioritizes the impoverished, and the people we do nothing for should at least enjoy public acknowledgment of their abandonment.

When I was in elementary school, my grandmother told me that I would go to college for free because I was Native American. I’m not Native. Rather, my father is from a light-skinned Black family, and for a long time, families like these presented sharp cheekbones and aquiline noses as evidence of Native roots. In nearly every case, it was plain white ancestry, but Black folks had been denied the supposed dignity of whiteness for so long that even those who had it did not want it. My dad told the Native fiction to my mom, and she told my grandmother, who was white working poor, and her fictions met with my father’s. Like many in her class, she believed that the government was in the business of giving gifts to everyone but poor whites. In her view, the world worked like this: Asian Americans received loans to start businesses. Hospitals gave free medical care to Hispanic children. Native Americans enjoyed juiced-up welfare and free college. Black Americans received preferential hiring and a free education. Because she believed me to be both Black and Native, college appeared to be a given.

My grandmother’s understanding of how college entry worked for Black Americans was shaped by decades of white-poor hearsay about affirmative action. She had no Black friends; ethnic gossip and popular culture were all she had to go on, and these gave her a wildly inaccurate view of what was to be my college experience. But I have found that even wealthier and more sophisticated Americans have absorbed similar fictions.

According to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, out of 153,000 Black test-takers in 2005, only about 1,200 scored a 700 or above on either section of the SAT. I was among that handful. Unlike the stories my grandmother told me, a red carpet wasn’t rolled out in front of me. The guidance counselor at my New Jersey public high school said nothing about my test scores and was similarly apathetic when I said I was not going to apply to college at all. When I came back a week later to recant after my father threatened to throw me on the streets if I didn’t apply, my counselor—rather than hand me a blank check from the office of affirmative action—handed me a thin packet about the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

Being a former foster youth with a missing mother and a father only just released from prison, I was legally eligible for quite a bit of aid via the FAFSA. But without legal documentation of my situation, which no adult around me had kept, acquiring that aid would require me to obtain signed statements from members of the community testifying to my fractured living conditions. As a transient youth suddenly crashing with a father I had known for barely two years and residing in an entirely new town, there was no community to vouch for me. Unable to meet the federal requirements, I slogged through an associate’s, a bachelor’s, and eventually a master’s degree, accruing substantial loans despite eligibility for grants that could have paid for my entire undergraduate education.

Since 2018, I have used what I learned (albeit too late) to help my foster sister navigate college and the FAFSA, which must be renewed every year (including resubmitting community testimony on official letterhead). On more than one occasion, she has been selected for “additional verification,” one of several variations of bureaucratic rigmarole that can result in the delay of aid long enough to force lower-income students to miss a semester if they cannot afford to pay tuition out of pocket. Even when you’re prepared for this, as she and I were, the delay is demoralizing.

Every poor kid with aspirations of college faces a slightly different constellation of obstacles, but those differences abate beneath a homogenous disappointment. The National Center for Education Statistics found that, in 2012, just 14 percent of low-income high-school students  obtained a bachelor’s or higher degree within eight years of high-school graduation. Rates of college attendance specifically among Black youth and kids below the federal poverty line—the lowest of low-income—are lower still. Given that the rate for foster or homeless youth is a meager 2 to 11 percent, it’s safe to assume that the one for Black fosters is effectively zero. Meanwhile, compiling data scattered across publications, I’ve calculated that 85 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded to Black students go to Black folks raised in the middle and upper classes. For daily life, the result is this: In any office—in any room—where a bachelor’s degree is a prerequisite, the odds that the person next to you has come from poverty, especially Black poverty, are staggeringly low.

Affirmative-action policies are not directly responsible for the impediments that poor Black students face in higher education. Nevertheless, those policies have existed for nearly five decades and have demonstrably not been an obstacle to the formation of a status quo in which so few poor Black Americans obtain a bachelor’s degree. Although that might be viewed as a policy failure, the oral arguments in the Supreme Court cases make this much clear: Affirmative action is not intended to combat the barriers faced by the poor, Black or otherwise. It is meant to achieve racial diversity. Where it finds the bodies does not matter.

In the case of Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, all parties involved—the justices, the petitioners, and the respondents—agree that the intention of affirmative action is to produce the “educational benefits of diversity.” As described by Seth Waxman, the respondent on behalf of Harvard, “a university student body comprising a multiplicity of backgrounds, experiences, and interests vitally benefits our nation. Stereotypes are broken down, prejudice is reduced, and critical thinking and problem-solving skills are improved.” The contention of Students for Fair Admissions is that Harvard could use other metrics, particularly socioeconomic status, to achieve educationally significant diversity without the need for racial considerations.

In response to the SFFA plan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested that weighting factors such as class in admissions amounts to “subterfuges” for reaching some sort of “diversity in race.” She probed the lawyers in oral arguments by saying that she did not “understand why considering race as one factor but not the sole factor is any different than using any of those other metrics.” The view that Sotomayor lays out here asserts that considering income and wealth, or considering them in conjunction with race, is just a tedious path to the same outcome achieved by considering race alone. But of course, an admissions scheme that considers class would not just be a subterfuge. Even if it yielded a student body with the same degree of racial diversity, the students themselves would be very different.

Many Americans retain a certain dissonance about class, believing simultaneously that it does and does not matter. Would a classroom with one Black student who was raised by parents who met while studying business at Yale benefit from the added diversity of a Black student who was raised in the Cuney Homes projects that produced George Floyd? You would be hard-pressed to find someone who answers “no,” and it is doubtful that Sotomayor would either. But the only way to promote the admission of these two hypothetical Black students is with policies that recognize both class and race. Unfortunately, conversations about diversity too often focus solely on the gaps between Black and white Americans, excluding entirely the issue of class divides among Black Americans.

In 2018, William Julius Wilson—a survivor of Jim Crow and a pioneer in the study of urban poverty—reported that Black Americans had the highest degree of residential income segregation of any racial group: Our top and bottom classes were then the least likely to live alongside each other. That same year, Pew Research Center released a study on income inequality within races. From 1970 to 2016, the top 10 percent of Black workers earned nearly 10 times what the bottom 10 percent of black workers did. For nearly 50 years, Black Americans experienced more income disparity than any other racial group in the country. The report received widespread coverage, including in The Atlantic, but mainly for its findings regarding Asian Americans, who had (temporarily) displaced Black Americans as the least equal group.

I can only cheer on, and envy, the speed at which knowledge of class disparities among Asian Americans has permeated popular culture. I hope it continues, because the Asian parity that Harvard has achieved is certainly not the result of admitting impoverished Burmese Americans. In the time since the 2018 Pew study was released, we have seen not just class-focused journalism, but Always Be My Maybe, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Beef. Each pop-cultural work  demonstrates not just that class exists for Asians, but that it drastically alters their lives, their opportunities, and their interactions in ways that—shockingly—mirror how class affects white Americans.

That no similar awareness is burgeoning on behalf of disparities afflicting Black Americans is absurd. The fact that the white upper class had a median wealth more than 20 times that of the white poor helped fuel Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a socialist revival among white youth that continues today. In 2015, the Black upper class had a median wealth 1,382 times greater than the Black poor, along with an incarceration rate nearly 10 times lower than what I inherited. Yet still, some of the best-educated minds in the country claim to not understand how taking this into consideration might yield a qualitatively different student body than what comes from treating Black Americans as a class-free blob.

Powerful as they may be, elite institutions require support from the ground. The social prestige that achieving racial diversity offers and the ability it has to smooth over the appearance of other inequities are too alluring for a university like Harvard to pass up. But, rich as it is, Harvard does not have the capital necessary to employ all of the country’s poor, fix their neighborhoods, and fund their public schools, or the willingness to wait an entire generation for those social changes to generate a cohort of low-income children who are nevertheless academically excellent. It will always be cheaper and more expedient to simply recruit wealthy kids instead. If what comes after affirmative action penalizes the Black middle and upper classes, that is nothing to celebrate. But if we want to erect something that benefits all Black Americans, we cannot expect that to happen without policies that treat class as meaningful.

[ Via: https://archive.is/BimyF ]

==

Affirmative action is a perfect example of a Kendiian "antiracist" policy: instituting racism into the admissions system, while benefiting the elite class.

#Free Black Thought #Bertrand Cooper #affirmative action #racial discrimination #elite class #race based admissions #university admissions #college admissions #antiracism as religion #antiracism #Kendiism #systemic racism #religion is a mental illness

[ausetkmt]

Bamboozled is a 2000 American satirical black comedy-drama film written and directed by Spike Lee about a modern televised minstrel show featuring black actors donning blackface makeup and the resulting violent fallout from the show's success. It features an ensemble cast including Damon Wayans, Jada Pinkett Smith, Savion Glover, Tommy Davidson, and Michael Rapaport.

The film was given a limited release by New Line Cinema during the fall of 2000 and was released on DVD the following year.[2] Critical reception was mixed,[3][4] and the film was unsuccessful financially, becoming a box office bomb.[1] Despite its initial reception, Bamboozled later achieved cult film status for its satirical look at stereotypical depictions of black people in both historical and contemporary American film and television productions.[5][6][7][8][9]

In 2023, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[10]

Pierre Delacroix (real name Peerless Dothan) is an uptight, Harvard-educated African-American man in the employment of television network CNS. At work, he endures torment from his boss Thomas Dunwitty, a tactless, boorish white man. Not only does Dunwitty use African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) and the word "nigger" repeatedly in conversations, he also proudly proclaims that he is more black than Delacroix and that he can use "nigger" since he is married to a black woman and has two mixed-race children. Dunwitty frequently rejects Delacroix's scripts for series that portray black people in positive, intelligent scenarios, dismissing them as "Cosby clones".

In an effort to escape his contract through being fired, Delacroix develops a minstrel show with the help of his personal assistant Sloane Hopkins. Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show features black actors in blackface, extremely racist jokes and puns, and offensively stereotyped CGI-animated cartoons. Delacroix and Hopkins recruit two impoverished homeless street performers, Manray and Womack, to star in the show. While Womack is horrified when Delacroix tells him details about the show, Manray sees it as his big chance to become rich and famous for his tap-dancing skills.

To Delacroix's horror, not only does Dunwitty enthusiastically endorse the show, it also becomes hugely successful. As soon as it premieres, Manray and Womack become big stars, while Delacroix, contrary to his original stated intent, defends the show as satire. Delacroix quickly embraces the fame and recognition he receives while Hopkins becomes ashamed of her association with it. Meanwhile, an underground, militant rap group called the Mau Maus, led by Hopkins' older brother Julius, becomes increasingly angry at the show's content. Though they had earlier unsuccessfully auditioned for the program's live band position, the group plans to end the show using violence.

Womack quits, fed up with the show and Manray's increasing ego. Manray and Hopkins grow closer, despite Delacroix's attempts to sabotage their relationship. Delacroix confronts Hopkins, and when she lashes back at him, he fires her. She then shows him a videotaped montage she created of racist footage culled from assorted media to shame Delacroix into stopping production of the show, but he refuses to watch it. After an argument with Delacroix, Manray realizes he is being exploited and defiantly announces that he will no longer wear blackface. He appears in front of the studio audience, who are all in blackface, and does his dance number in his regular clothing. The network executives immediately turn against Manray, and Dunwitty fires him.

The Mau Maus kidnap Manray and announce his public execution via live webcast. The authorities work feverishly to track down the source of the internet feed, but Manray is nevertheless assassinated while doing his famous tap dancing. At his office, Delacroix (now in blackface himself, mourning Manray's death) fantasizes that the various black-themed antique collectibles in his office are staring him down and coming to life; in a rage, he destroys many of the items. The police kill all the members of the Mau Maus except for One-Sixteenth Blak, a white member who demands to die with the others.

Furious, Hopkins confronts Delacroix at gunpoint and demands that he play her tape. As he does so, Hopkins reminds him of the lives that were ruined because of his actions. During a struggle over the gun, Delacroix is shot in the stomach. Hopkins flees while proclaiming that it was Delacroix's own fault that he got shot. Delacroix, holding the gun in his hands to make his wound appear self-inflicted, watches the tape as he lies dying on the floor. The film concludes with a full reveal of the tape's contents; a long montage of racially insensitive and demeaning clips of African-American characters from Hollywood films of the first half of the 20th century.[11] Afterwards, Manray is shown doing his last Mantan sequence on stage.

Cast

Damon Wayans as Pierre "Peerless Dothan" Delacroix

Savion Glover as Manray "Mantan"

Jada Pinkett Smith as Sloan Hopkins

Tommy Davidson as Womack "Sleep 'n Eat"

Michael Rapaport as Thomas Dunwitty

Mos Def as Julius "Big Blak Afrika" Hopkins

Thomas Jefferson Byrd as Honeycutt

Paul Mooney as Junebug

Craig Grant as Hard Blak

Gano Grills as Double Blak

Canibus as Mo Blak

Charli Baltimore as Smooth Blak

MC Serch as One-Sixteenth Blak

Kim Director as Starlet

The Roots as The Alabama Porch Monkeys

Reverend Al Sharpton as Himself

Critical response

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 53% based on reviews from 106 critics. The site's consensus is: "Bamboozled is too over the top in its satire and comes across as more messy and overwrought than biting."[3] On Metacritic it has a score of 54% based on reviews from 39 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[4]

Among those who gave positive reviews to the film were CNN correspondent Dennis Michael, who compared the film favorably to Mel Brooks' The Producers and praised Glover's performance in the lead role,[14] Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, who described the film as "savage, abrasive, audacious and confrontational" and "the work of a master provocateur",[15] and Stephen Holden of The New York Times, who described the film as "an almost oxymoronic entity, an important Hollywood movie."[16] It was not reviewed as favorably by the Chicago Sun-Times' Roger Ebert, who gave the film 2 stars out of a possible 4, writing that the film was "perplexing," raising important issues but handling them poorly. "The film is a satirical attack on the way TV uses and misuses African-American images, but many viewers will leave the theater thinking Lee has misused them himself."[17]

By the time of its twentieth anniversary, Bamboozled had been reappraised as an underappreciated work of Lee's.[18] Writing for Rolling Stone, David Fear noted that "the really scary thing is that, 20 years on, Bamboozled feels incredibly contemporary. It doesn’t look so extreme after all...and when you consider the content of this film, that’s a very troubling thing

#Bamboozled #spike lee #Black Films #Bamboozled is a 2000 American satirical black comedy-drama film written and directed by Spike Lee #MauMau's #Black Power #Black Film #Black Actors #Wayans Brothers

[rynnaaurelius]

From Sea of Monsters, which I was re-reading for Writing Reasons, and—

"Well," Luke said, spreading his arms proudly. "A little nicer than Cabin Eleven, huh?"

He'd changed since the last summer. Instead of Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, he wore a button-down shirt, khaki pants, and leather loafers. His sandy hair, which used to be so unruly, was now clipped short. He looked like an evil male model, showing off what the fashionable college-age villain was wearing to Harvard this year.

New red-hot take:

Luke's greatest flaw was not his rage, but that the second he gained the ability to wear whatever he wanted after multiple years spent homeless and then at a summer camp, he chose to dress like an Ivy League econ major who thinks his parents' jobs count as a personality trait

#full offense to econ majors #only some offense to luke we all make bad choices when we get money for the first time #pjo #luke castellan #still not the worst choices he could've made at age nineteen #such as say KRONOS #I'll write apologia for war crimes I'm not writing apologia for insufferable fashion choices

[socialismforall]

Free advice to anyone running for POTUS: When they ask you about the $50K you owe in child support & the $500K you owe the IRS, don't dodge the questions. It makes you look ridiculous.

The Green Party US has 10 months to come up w/a better candidate, maybe a labor leader?*

source: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/green-party-candidate-cornel-west-owes-half-million/story?id=102293692

Additionally, West was spotted this week at the sentencing hearing of Mark Ridley-Thomas, convicted of "seven felonies — bribery, conspiracy, four counts of honest services wire fraud, and one count of honest services mail fraud — in a scheme in which he extracted benefits from USC for himself and his son while on L.A. County’s powerful Board of Supervisors," according to the LA Times, as one of Ridley-Thomas's supporters.

source: https://twitter.com/JonnyPeltz/status/1696245729273254380

source: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-08-28/ridley-thomas-sentencing

For background on Mark Ridley-Thomas, see this article from Knock LA, a grassroots homeless advocacy and support organization featured in our most recent reading, "Infrastructures of Community": https://knock-la.com/mark-ridley-thomas-anti-homeless-camping-laws/ Knock LA reports that, "rather than acting as “champion of the homeless population,” [Ridley-Thomas] acted as champion of homeless policy," and that "Ridley-Thomas introduced legislation for LA Municipal Code 41.18 on June 30, 2021, which bans “sitting, lying, or sleeping or storing, using, maintaining, or placing personal property in the public right-of-way” around transportation structures (everything from driveways to freeway underpasses) [...]. So far, the measure has been used to effectively ban homeless people from taking up space at over 140 sites across the city, with $2 million allotted by the council for the signage alone."

After leaving the courthouse, West was asked why he was supporting an LA politics insider convicted of bribery when his companion shooed the interviewer away, saying they were "putting West's life in danger": https://twitter.com/theveganforest/status/1696290380361162759

As one commenter put it, "Starting to think this Harvard professor-turned-TV gadfly might not be on the level regarding his commitment to left-wing politics."

*There are nine other candidates in the GPUS primaries already: https://www.fec.gov/data/candidates/president/?election_year=2024&cycle=2024&election_full=true&party=GRE

#politics #cornel west #green party #green party us #gpus #green #greens #mark ridley-thomas #homeless #homelessness #housing crisis #president #presidential race #green party primaries #irs #child support #tax #taxes #unpaid taxes

[cosmicanger]

By The Anarchothoughtism Collective

There’s a lot wrong with this little rustbelt city. It’s hard to love, almost painful. Yet people here try to do it anyway, often to our own detriment. We critique this city scathingly, but we love Milwaukee too. Black Milwaukeeans work hard to carve out a cultural niche. It’s a city that’s been shit on so much that it’s developed an inferiority complex; it demands recognition, for better or worse. I joke that living here would be funny - if it wasn’t our lives. Oftentimes it is funny, in a sad, nihilistic, and absurdist way. You have to laugh to keep from crying.

The structural issues of Milwaukee are deeply enmeshed, feeding into each other and compounding the struggles its Black underclass must face. The city’s cultural undercurrent is marked by distinct apathy, conservatism, and complacency. Individualist and bourgeois aspirations are rife. Small pockets of resistance bubble up, only to be extinguished by petit-bourgeois endeavors such as the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC), “activist” grifters, or the business class. This allows for highly fascistic elements to develop without resistance. The 2016 Sherman Park uprising is a prime example of such an “extinguishing”.

Milwaukee is known as the worst place for Black people to live, the most segregated city in the United States, and as “Harvard for pimps”. Black people have been locked out of homeownership, with only 25.2% of Black Milwaukeeans actually owning homes. A culture around stolen vehicles (we call them “stolies”) holds fast. “Kia Boys” and “Kia Girls” drive throughout the city recklessly, giving MPD (Milwaukee Police Department) a run for their money. To be fair, most people in Milwaukee drive recklessly. Lives are ended or altered by gun violence. You can’t trust tap water because of the lead pipes. Out-of-state slumlords own too much property, resulting in poorly-kept homes, leading to excessive electrical fires and evictions. The homeless remain mostly unseen, systemically pushed into surrounding forests. Milwaukee Police Department takes up more than half of the city budget, their pensions are bankrupting the city. As a result, libraries will close, fire stations and ambulances will operate at reduced capacities. In two to three years, a youth prison will be built here. Conditions feel overwhelmingly grim.

Following the Murder of Syville Smith by MPD in 2016, Sherman Park erupted in flames and the uprising that ensued lasted for 3 days. Rioters looted and burned down a BP gas station. This was not senseless or random; Black community members had been frequently profiled by owners of this particular BP station, and frequently had Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) called on them. A month before the murder of Smith, an employee fired a gun in the air to intimidate a group of teenagers standing in front of the store, claiming that he feared for his life. As rioting progressed, rocks were hurled at local law enforcement, a bank was set ablaze, and a local liquor store was looted. The city of Milwaukee was transfixed, yet what followed in the wake of that moment seemed a dizzying blur: over 2-3 years, conversations shifted abruptly from police brutality, racism, and state violence to entrepreneurship. Almost as quickly as it happened, outside investors swooped in to develop what is now known as Sherman Phoenix, a collection of 30 Black-owned businesses housed within the former BMO Harris bank that was burned down during the riots.

Before this shift, Sherman Park resident and youth mentor/activist Vaun Mayes was framed by both MPD and federal agents for the attempted firebombing of the District 7 police station at the height of the riots. Though the case against him remains ambiguous in its resolution, Mayes’ case and eventual release from state custody garnered him an abundance of local media attention, alongside undue credit as a reliable community activist. Soon after that ordeal, Mayes began dubbing himself “Milwaukee’s Malcolm X”, though his politics were moderate and inconsistent. His influence would later play a role in stunting Milwaukee’s 2020 protests.

The officer who killed Sylville Smith was acquitted of the murder; however, he was discharged from MPD and spent time in prison for a series of sexual assaults. In 2020 Smith’s family was awarded a $4 million settlement from the City of Milwaukee. Over the past 10 years, Milwaukee has spent $40 million on police misconduct settlements. This is not justice, it never will be. Justice cannot exist for Black folx within this system, our own hands must forge a new path.

Non-profits: The Worst Jobs We’ve Ever Worked (CW: Rape, Sexual Assault)

Milwaukee non-profits are closely linked with MPD. More often than not, they aid in advancing the carceral state through partnerships and broad coalitional work. One member of our collective was introduced to the NPIC when they were 16 years old by members of the ACLU Wisconsin when the latter visited their high school classes to speak with students about their civil rights and electoralism. By the time our comrade hit 19, they had dropped out of college and had their first real experience working in the NPIC through an AmeriCorps program. They were paid $17,000/year and received additional food stamp benefits. For how little was paid, it could be argued that work involving social services and the NPIC is a twisted type of exploitation that normalizes the commoditization of marginalized peoples’ experiences even as it normalizes the extraction of their labor and their harassment/abuse within NPIC structures.

During their stint with this organization, our comrade worked directly with women involved in street-based prostitution. In this supposed “harm reduction-based” approach, our comrade was often forced to work directly with police to maintain the symbiotic relationship their employer held with district attorneys, the House of Correction (a county jail that falls under the Division of Adult Institutions but operates somewhat independently from them), and law enforcement organizations (LEOs) writ large. This placed our comrade and other workers in the impossible position of offering little material or social supports to trafficking victims in exchange for tracking them and discussing their cases regularly with police and community members that viewed the presence of trafficked women as a “blight.”

Our comrade remembers their time with this organization as one of the most traumatic periods of their life. As they worked to provide compassionate and appropriate care to victims of sexual violence, sometimes in emergencies, they were simultaneously experiencing violence within their org that overlapped the violence they were expected to help combat in the streets. Gender-based harassment from supervisors and assault at the hands of a co-worker some months into the job, coupled with the daily trauma absorption of the job, eventually took its toll; our comrade’s mental health declined, as did their performance, and they were let go. They recall there was relief in that moment and remained unemployed for a few months while seeking therapy to heal.

Another comrade never even made it that far. As a transplant, this comrade with years of nonprofit experience working with youth and other marginalized communities, decided to volunteer with various organizations to gain both a better map of the city and to better understand where they could apply their passion effectively. Despite becoming a dues-paying member of at least 2 supposedly radical orgs, the only jobs they were being told about were ones that would exacerbate pre-existing health problems. Through 2 different periods of homelessness, this comrade still managed to show up and organize or lend support wherever they believed good community work was being done. Eventually, our comrade’s persistence and organizing chops developed, and the local NPIC began sniffing around.

Our comrade began being flattered and specifically invited to “brainstorming sessions,” a quirky Milwaukee euphemism that essentially serves 3 functions for nonprofits: the first is crowdsourcing language and popular-if-inconsistent definitions of social problems; the second, to pull in and start cultivating so-called leadership skills in individuals who may be able to be exploited by nonprofits through low-pay positions or as uncompensated volunteers; the third function being pure extraction, wherein community members are invited to rough out projects or initiatives that grassroots formations seldom can bankroll, but pose no financial risk to NPIC orgs that regularly receive millions from the state to water down and scale up.

Catching onto the grift, however, is not always a guarantee that one’s boundaries around labor would be respected. When our comrade began politely declining invitations to these brainstorming sessions, they were eventually lured into applying for part-time positions with the same organizations that would allow them to keep their health benefits while earning an income, which made our comrade eagerly apply to all. Experience notwithstanding, our comrade found that the fishing expeditions of the brainstorming sessions were not yet done with them: though it took the better part of a year, during which our comrade filled out multiple applications, underwent numerous background checks, weirdly intensive demands for outlines of programming they had not yet been hired to facilitate, and oddly probing interviews with the occasional direct questions about their anarchist leanings, our comrade realized that these nonprofits had no intention of hiring them so much as simply extracting their labor - as well as intimate personal information - under the guise of community building. Some years after the compliments stopped, our comrade simply withdrew from the NPIC and organizing publicly, preferring to work only with those who respected their boundaries. For a disabled person who could not leave their home much, severing ties to the NPIC represented an end to the social life they badly needed for their well-being.

Abolish the NPIC, Abolish the Celebrity/Career Activist and Black Misleadership Class

NPIC culture demands much from marginalized workers while offering very little in return. Non-profits market themselves as more “just” or “equitable” workplaces for marginalized peoples, but often, they just offer the same capitalistic shit gilded in the rhetoric of false radicalism. In this way, the NPIC exploits the desires of those who wish to build a better world and change the material conditions of oppression knowing they never will be able - or inclined - to address oppression at its roots. Non-profits that portray themselves as “radical” or “revolutionary” are actively lying. The NPIC is an apparatus of an imperialistic, white supremacist, ableist, capitalistic state. It serves to redirect radical energies into neoliberal, ineffectual organizing methods. Its function is to maintain the status quo; those who disrupt or refuse to sell out are pushed out.

One of the worst byproducts of the NPIC and social media culture is the production of the “celebrity activist” or “career activist”. What we're describing is nothing new - sellouts have existed across generations. It’s become more complicated, nuanced, and insidious with the appropriation of radical aesthetics and language. When we think of this type of sellout, elements of George Jackson’s criticism against Bill Cosby and Black capitalism are applicable nearly 50 years later. “Black capitalism, black against itself. The silliest contradiction in a long train of spineless mindless contradictions…We can never learn to trust as long as we have them. They are as much a part of repression, more even than the real live, rat-informer-pig” (George Jackson, Soledad Brother, p. 237). The Black celebrity/career activists are rooted in the ideology of Black Capitalism, tainted by entrepreneurial (bourgeois) aspiration, and opportunism. Their politics are shallow and unprincipled. Coming out of the George Floyd Rebellion, one of the most prominent and glaring examples of this is Patrisse Cullors and the mishandling of donations made to the BLM (Black Lives Matter) Foundation. Despite being a “trained Marxist”, Patrisse accepted deals with Cadillac and owned several million-dollar homes while chapters of BLM struggled to organize on the ground. Patrisse profited in one of the most direct ways possible from the deaths and oppression of Black people. How many more Patrisse Cullors types do you need to see?

During protests against the police killing of Alvin Cole in Wauwatosa, Jay-Z’s Team Roc took the opportunity to generate positive press for the brand, posting bail and covering legal fees for those arrested, including Alvin Cole’s family. The celebrity also took out a full-page ad in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel calling for Alvin Cole’s murderer, Joseph Mensah, to be prosecuted. Additionally, Tamika Mallory made an appearance, offering a performative press conference. While support from celebrities like Jay-Z may appear beneficial on a surface level, the ultra-wealthy do not and will never sustain social movements or revolutionary activity: Jay-Z has repeatedly shown his allegiance to capital, and his support aims to co-opt the energy of mass movements and encourage the Black masses to buy into myths of Black Capitalism.

In Elite Capture by Olufemi O. Taiwo, the author references the work of Frantz Fanon, Jared A. Ball, and Franklin Frazier to elaborate on myths of the “Black Economy” and Black buying power. In describing African middle classes in post-colonial Algeria, Fanon postulated that this middle class would “capture, dilute and ultimately subvert the energy of anti-imperialist struggle.” Taiwo notes that Fanon’s prediction came to be, “The national independence movements supplanted formal colonial rule only to run headfirst into neocolonialism: a condition in which those young nations’ new ruling elite were either sharply constrained by or actively colluding with the corporations and governments of the former colonial powers - and the international system they dominated.”

Taiwo goes on to analyze Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie and the idea of escaping racial strife through a separate Black economy, citing Booker T. Washington’s National Negro Business League. “The combined net worth of all 115 attendees at the inaugural National Negro Business League did not amount to even $1 million. By the time Fraizer wrote his book, more than six decades later, all eleven Black-owned banks in the nation combined did not represent the amount of capital held in the average local bank in smaller white cities.” Drawing from Ball, Taiwo concludes that investing in the idea of a Black economy is politically naive, a fruitless endeavor that would need to be birthed of our current political and economic reality of white supremacy and racial capitalism. He notes that myths of Black buying power and financial literacy only serve to place the onus on the poor instead of on the exploitative nature of capitalism. We see the myth persist to this day through endeavors such as Killer Mike’s Greenwood “Bank”. “The possibility of an insulated Black economy is the myth, while the immediate interests of a few well-positioned Black Folk provide the true impetus.”

For petty bourgeoise aspirationals and the ultra-wealthy, the NPIC provides the perfect platform for the co-optation of our mass movements. Protests become photo opportunities; elements of resistance and revolution are appropriated to market an individual's brand or NGO to philanthropists, funders, and sponsors. Brand recognition is key. Locally, we’ve witnessed executive directors and NGO boards claim police abolition, only to turn around and hire ex-police officers to perform union busting on their behalf. We’ve seen blatant misogynists and homophobes win the title of “Activist of the Year” throughout a near-endless stream of self-congratulatory awards ceremonies. Milwaukee suffers an ongoing plague of micro-celebrity activists, bolstered by an NPIC culture that actively blocks opportunities for effective, revolutionary organizing. Our point is simplistic, the conclusion feels trite, but it’s a message Milwaukeeans need to hear. If any real work is to get done, the NPIC and career/celebrity activism need to be abandoned or eventually destroyed.

(A mural that recognizes “leaders” involved in Milwaukee’s 2020 protest movement…the mural depicts Frank Nitty, Sam Alford, Khalil Coleman, Jeremiah Thomas, Elle Halo, Tommy Franecki, Markasa Tucker, and Vaun Mayes.)

*Note: Some non-profits do excellent work, and are well respected within the communities in which they operate. The non-profit legal structure can be used as a tool that allows grassroots and anarchist formations to operate more freely. However, within a $2 trillion industry employing 10% of the United States population, we find the types of non-profits mentioned above represent a microcosm within a majority. Members of our collective understand the benefits and contradictions of being involved in the NPIC as we have worked within the field and received services from the NPIC. This is not a judgment of those involved within the NPIC structure, it is a call to think critically about the structure.

How Milwaukee Got a Youth Prison: Past to Present (CW: Sexual abuse, Child abuse)

Milwaukee’s NPIC is deeply connected to the carceral justice system and policing, and many violence prevention programs and non-profits are incentivized to work with the police to receive funding from the city. Unsurprisingly, local non-profits ushered in a new youth prison in Milwaukee. To explain how this all came to fruition, we’ll need to lay some ground and talk about the Lincoln Hills and Copper Lakes crises that occurred over the course of a decade. Tracking everything that occurred at these facilities could amount to a separate book on its own, so we'll only be tackling a tiny fraction of events in this section.

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the problems began in 2010-2011 under Republican Governor Jim Doyle’s administration. The number of youth prisoners had steadily decreased over the years and in 2011, inmate populations dropped to half of what they were in 2004. For the Doyle Administration, it financially did not make sense to continue running three separate facilities (Lincoln Hills located in northern Wisconsin, Ethan Allen School in southeastern Wisconsin, and Southern Oaks Girls School in southeastern Wisconsin): Lincoln Hills operated at a much lower cost than the other two facilities and state law mandated that a juvenile facility must remain open in northern Wisconsin. This law did not apply to southeastern parts of the state, where most of Wisconsin’s Black and incarcerated population stemmed from. By January 2011, Republican Governor Scott Walker was instated; he moved quickly to close Ethan Allen School and Southern Oaks Girls School, consolidating 100 prisoners into Lincoln Hills and doubling the prison population. Lincoln Hills was extremely short-staffed, the sparse population of northern Wisconsin being to blame. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel stated, “...juvenile justice experts around the nation were recommending smaller, more localized facilities, Wisconsin went in the opposite direction, consolidating operations in a remote setting.”

In February 2012, Racine County Circuit Judge Richard Kreul sent a memo to Scott Walker detailing a case of abuse. ”The memo Kreul sent to Walker described an incident in which an inmate from Racine was forced to perform oral sex on his roommate and then beaten unconscious. Workers learned of the assault at 4 p.m. They didn’t get the victim medical treatment for three hours.” [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]. In 2014, when Milwaukee-based Public Defender Robin Dorman learned that one of her clients was not receiving medical treatment or being sent to classes, she quickly learned that her client was not alone. Upon discovering additional allegations of abuse and neglect, Dorman sent a memo to Milwaukee County Chief Deputy District Attorney Kent Lovern, who forwarded it to the Department of Corrections. By January 2015, a criminal probe was launched to investigate Lincoln Hills. What the investigations would unveil was deeply disturbing.

Most of the youth held in the facility were Black children from Milwaukee, though the facility was located in Irma, WI - 215 miles away from Milwaukee (a 3.5-hour drive). Horrendous abuse and corruption plagued these facilities, ranging from physical child abuse to suicide, and sexual abuse and harassment of minors. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel details the conditions inside the facilities, describing a teen who had his foot crushed by a prison guard. “Inside his room, Evans screamed and held up his foot so the staff could see the bleeding. The Milwaukee teen had lost parts of two small toes, but it would take prison officials nearly two hours to take him to a hospital 15 miles away.” Another incident involved a psychologist commenting on a teen girl's breasts, stating that they looked "rode hard and put away wet." The investigation also revealed that the prison’s lead trainer taught staff to pin inmates by putting their knees on inmates' backs - a technique that could cause suffocation and death. This trainer did not contact nurses when inmates were injured. There were 4 incidents where inmates had broken bones. By December 2015, the facility was raided by 50 state agents and the investigation was turned over to the FBI. Over a dozen staff members quit, were fired, or retired. A $25 Million settlement was reached for those who stayed at the facilities.

In 2018, Governor Walker announced a plan to dissolve Lincoln Hills into 5 smaller prisons spread out across the state. In April 2022, Democratic Governor Tony Evers signed a law that would bring a prison to Milwaukee. By January 2023, Milwaukee Common Council approved the zoning for a new youth prison to be built on the predominantly Black northwest side of Milwaukee. The Facility will not be operational until 2026. The decision was made to put the youth prison in a district that completely lacks an alderperson at the time of this writing (the previous alderwoman, Chantia Lewis, was removed from office after pleading guilty to embezzling $20,000 in campaign funds). Residents were taken off guard by the development of the prison and a majority opposed it, citing the potential decrease in property values as their primary concern. Many non-profit leaders spoke out in support of the facility's relocation to Milwaukee’s northwest side, however, framing it as a way to bring the youth inmates from Lincoln Hills “home”. Sharlen Moore, co-founder of the non-profit Urban Underground and youth justice advocate stated, “We have to figure something out. We have to put them somewhere.” Representatives from the non-profit Ex-incarcerated People Organizing (EXPO) echoed Sharlen’s sentiment. There are currently 69 youths that remain at the Lincoln Hills and Copper Lakes facilities. Alternatives to prisons exist, we’re dealing with people, not objects to shuffle around or “put somewhere.”

George Floyd Rebellion of 2020: A Clusterfuck

During the George Floyd Rebellion, the lack of solid organizing and security culture in Milwaukee led to Black misleadership and celebrity/career activists seizing control and altering the trajectory of a radical movement into neoliberalism along a counter-revolutionary line. The People’s Revolution (TPR) was formed in the early days of the George Floyd Rebellion and was initially spearheaded by Frank Nitty, Vaun Mayes, and Khalil Coleman. These “leaders” quickly proved dysfunctional, as accusations of homophobia and misogyny bubbled to the forefront almost immediately. Throughout 2020, we talked with individuals involved in TPR’s protests and though accounts varied from person to person, what we picked up on overall was that TPR’s leadership fostered an environment that made protests feel unsafe for Black women and queer individuals. On June 12, 2020, TPR leadership was called out in a Facebook live stream regarding accusations of misogynistic and derogatory language used toward queer protestors. While Vaun Mayes showed up to the live stream for “accountability”, Frank Nitty and Khalil Coleman did not. There were repeated attempts to reach out to Frank and Khalil, which seemed to be met with hostility. The presence of misogyny and homophobia are major red flags for any group claiming to be revolutionary. The Facebook Live stream did not provide the accountability process needed to change course. In an ideal world Frank, Vaun, and Khalil would have stepped down from their leadership positions within TPR and undergone a serious accountability process that involved their removal from movement and protest work, if only until genuine efforts towards transformation had occurred.

The effects of misogyny and what we’ll call “weak link politics” have been touched on repeatedly in writings such as Why Misogynists Make Great Informants, by Courtney Desiree Morris, and Basic Politics of Movement Security by J. Sakai and Mandy Hiscocks. As Morris succinctly points out, “There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).” In Basic Politics of Movement Security, Sakai details the story of an FBI informant known as “Tom” who played a role in destabilizing the Black Panthers. Tom got in with the Black Panthers by appealing to patriarchal values. Sakai recounts Tom being called out by a group of local women on suspicion of being an informant, “Oh, its politics that’s so hard for me to learn, ‘cause I had no education… I wanna learn, I’m sorry, give me another chance.” Tom rebuffed in a way that is somewhat similar to the accountability dodging Mayes did during the live stream referenced above. “I am ignorant to a lot of shit, you know? …as far as being a straight male versus y’all community (the LGBTQ+ community), there's a lot of shit I don’t understand… I don’t primarily deal with y’all community.”

We don’t draw this comparison to accuse Vaun or the former TPR leadership of being outright informants. Practically speaking, there’s no way for anyone to know unless evidence explicitly demonstrates otherwise. The point is not to badjacket or drum up needless suspicion. However, we draw the comparison to accentuate that an individual's politics, actions, and consistency should be examined with a discerning, critical eye. Trust and access should not be easily given to those who consistently show up with weak link politics. Sakai states, “...Security is not about being macho vigilantes or being super suspicious… Security is about good politics. That's why it's so difficult. And it requires good politics from the movement as a whole. This is demanded of us… Bad politics covered for agents…it’s that bad politics - like opportunism, patriarchy, sexism, and class privilege - rips up the fabric of our terrain, the area of our radical culture, and weaves it instead into that terrain all their old oppressor politics, their values.”

[Defaced mural of Frank Nitty with the words “misogynistic coon” and “sexist” spray painted across it.]

TPR slowly unraveled throughout the rebellion. Despite appointing themselves revolutionaries, TPR operated in multitudes of obvious contradictions. They frequently partnered with local elected officials and pushed electoralism, lobbying, and reform as a method of “revolution”. State representatives such as David Bowen and Jonathan Brostoff publicly aligned themselves with TPR, and attended marches consistently. “They use their resources to help as many people as possible and to push the system to be accountable, especially to Black and Brown people,” said David Bowen to Milwaukee Magazine in September 2020. The excess media attention around the George Floyd Rebellion provided the perfect stage for stooges to bolster their platforms and appeal to potential voters. While electoralism and aligning oneself with the state may seem like a clear pitfall to an experienced organizer or theorist aligned with revolutionary/liberatory movements, it bears explaining to those less familiar. Aligning oneself with politicians, elements of the state, or electoralism is explicitly counter-revolutionary:

“It isn’t revolutionary or materialist to disconnect things. To disconnect revolutionary consciousness from revolutionizing activity, to build consciousness with political agitation and educational issue-making alone is idealistic rather than materialist. The effect has been reformism rather than revolution. When any election is held it will fortify rather than destroy the credibility of power brokers. When we participate in this election to win, instead of disrupt, we’re lending to its credibility, and destroying our own.” (George Jackson, Blood In My Eye, Pg. 26)

TPR’s leadership brought forth a movement of cooptation, empty symbolism, and misdirection. It is no surprise that Vaun Mayes has recently aligned himself with MPD post-rebellion, advocating for increased police surveillance through ShotSpotter technology. According to Sheperd Express, ShotSpotter is an acoustics-based technology that locates potential gunshots via impulsive sound. The contract with ShotSpotter has cost the City of Milwaukee $3.7 million over the past 13 years. “I’d like my ComForce team to get access to ShotSpotter because when we hear shootings in our neighborhoods, it is sometimes difficult to find the location...We are here to help the police and protect the residents, and we are expanding…I think we are setting a standard on how true collaboration and unity is supposed to look. We want to work with the police,” said Mayes, referring to Community Task Force (ComForce), a non-profit he helms which regularly partners with MPD.

[Photo of Frank Nitty next to a billboard advertisement of himself promoting voting, despite not being registered to vote himself.]

From a security culture standpoint, TPR’s practices were negligent and put protestors at risk. TPR’s marches often lacked street medics, leadership constantly live-streamed their whereabouts, and TPR provided little to no recourse, such as bail funds or free legal representation, for those arrested. Leadership also folded in with the likes of fascist groups such as the Bugaloo Boys, posing as street medics for TPR. The effects of this negligence culminated when the rebellion reached Wauwatosa and Kenosha. According to The Daily Montanan, Wauwatosa Police Department (WPD) managed to create a list of over 200 protestors, and a good portion of that list included members of TPR, as well as people who marched in solidarity with them. The list was created by Dominick Ratkowski, a crime analyst for WPD, and was utilized as early as mid-July 2020. The list was circulated amongst MPD, KPD (Kenosha Police Department), and the FBI office in Milwaukee. Up to 12 agencies received the list. Members of TPR were mailed tickets as high as $1300. The Daily Montanan reads, “On Aug. 28, Gibson (Milwaukee DA Investigator) asked for any lists or photographs of protesters to share with Kenosha. On Sept. 15 the list, which had been shared by Ratkowski, was sent to Kenosha PD Detective Pablo Torres, who worked for the department’s Special Investigations Unit at the time. ‘Here is an updated list of the subjects identified as members or associates of The People’s Revolution,’ Gibson’s email reads.” The screenshot below does not prove that Coleman or TPR leadership was feeding members' information to law enforcement agencies; it is mere conjecture, but we cannot dismiss it as a possibility.

[This post was made on September 1, 2020]

Regardless of whether the intent was malicious or not, a lack of security practices essentially had the same effect as an informant or wrecker: TPR members and leadership had been arrested at several points during the rebellion, and during any of these arrests, police could have confiscated their cellphones to collect intelligence on members and associates. This is why maintaining anonymity is key - never bring a cell phone to a protest, and never record yourself or others engaging in protest activity. Your identity should be your most protected asset. Cover tattoos, piercings, or other identifying features and always wear plain, unbranded clothing. Consider utilizing a pseudonym during protests. Always remember your cell phone and other pieces of technology can act as a cop, and avoid the potentiality of surveillance as much as possible.

Our advice for those participating in protests and riots is to return to analog styles of communication (written notes, utilizing walkie-talkies, communicating face-to-face, implementing coded language, etc). Detailed in episode 8 of the Alphabet Boys podcast, an FBI program known as “Social Media Exploitation” was utilized during the George Floyd Rebellion. This program allowed the FBI and local law enforcement agencies to mine social media accounts and create files on individuals without probable cause. The host of Alphabet Boys, Trevor Aaronson, goes on to detail the story of a woman charged with a crime for throwing her bike down near a police officer. She was captured on a police body camera and identified by law enforcement through social media posts, specifically by matching photos of her biking gear with her attire in the video. Police were able to attain a warrant to search her home and she was charged with attempted aggravated assault of a police officer, a second-degree felony. Police reforms, such as body cameras, are weaponized against those who dare to resist the state. If there is a will to charge you with a crime, there is a way. People should always keep in mind that their social media presence is likely being monitored and should try to practice good digital hygiene. Intentional mass arrests are an outdated tactic of the ‘60s and ‘70s; in the present day, arrests should be avoided if possible - you do not want to be logged into any state system as it makes it easier for law enforcement to target and track you for an indeterminate length of time.

Ultimately, TPR’s influence managed to assimilate many young people into their organization, placing youth directly in harm's way. This disillusioned, traumatized, and embittered many young people. Tyrone Randall, a participant in TPR’s protests, was pinned by police, left on the ground, and struck by a car. Tyrone was left with broken ribs, a broken pelvis and thousands of dollars in medical debt. TPR’s failures fostered an environment that made many reluctant to return to grassroots organizing as a whole. Former members and youth of TPR were quickly assimilated into the NPIC once the organization grew stagnant.

Post-George Floyd Rebellion: Where are these niggas?

Post-rebellion TPR quickly dissolved, and few of the former leadership remain active. In April 2022, Khalil Coleman was found guilty in the first degree for a robbery that took place in Kentucky in February of 2021. Coleman attempted to rob a trap house with the coerced aid of a minor and was later sentenced to 10 years in prison. Coleman maintains that he is innocent via Facebook posts, and he has been soliciting support for his appeal through an online petition.

Around August 2020, Frank Nitty led a March from Milwaukee to Washington D.C. In the immediate aftermath of this commemorative journey, several scandals began to surround Nitty. Rumors of Nitty stealing and mishandling donations circulated on social media, which led to some accusing him of using the funds to take white women on dates. Additionally, a Facebook group of “sister-wives,” boasting nearly 200 members at one point, formed around Nitty. All jokes aside, around November 2020, Nitty was accused of sexually assaulting four separate women. He was arrested and held in jail for a short period before his bail was posted, and charges were never brought against him. After 17 months, prosecutors decided that there was not enough evidence against Nitty between the four women who accused him and dropped the charges completely. Based on Nitty’s history of misogyny, we believe the women who accused him. Nitty’s whereabouts and current activity remain unclear, as he has seemingly disappeared from Milwaukee altogether.

Vaun Mayes remains active in Milwaukee’s non-profit and organizing scene: He currently remains a leader of ComForce, engaging in ambulance chasing. Vaun has continuously aligned himself with the police, local politicians and even noted transphobe/huckster Dr. Umar Johnson.

Conclusion: Wrapping this shit up

2020 demonstrated that Milwaukee is not politically prepared to resist the rising tide of fascism. It is a frightening position to be in considering that the RNC (Republican National Convention) is coming to Milwaukee summer of 2024. The fascism Black people in Milwaukee have had to face has primarily been institutionalized, moderated through politicians, policing, prisons and racist state/city policy. The city has rarely had to face off directly against fascist demonstrators. There is no dedicated Black Bloc or anti-fascist presence prepared to push back against the fascists that will come to gather in Milwaukee summer of 2024. The city is seeking to import nearly 4,500 officers to Milwaukee for the convention. Frankly, we wouldn’t recommend an outright counter-demonstration against the 2024 RNC. Marginalized people should stay home the day the RNC comes to town. Those interested in preparation should get street medic training, and learn how to treat gunshot wounds. Black communities situated directly near the RNC should prepare their neighborhood or block in community self-defense tactics. Prepare for violence but do not seek it out.

Strategically there are stronger opportunities for resisting. The youth prison coming to Milwaukee’s northwest side should be resisted, and the youths that remain captive in Lincoln Hills should not be abandoned in cages of the state. A non-carceral solution is desperately needed. We're not sure what the exact solution looks like for Milwaukee, but answers have already been conceptualized in writings such as Instead of Prisons by the Prison Research Education Action Project. The text details an experiment done in Massachusetts in 1972 to decarcerate the state’s juvenile prison system. The majority of youths returned home on parole, some were sent to a local university to work with a student advocate for a month. The text continues, “The administrative system was decentralized, with seven regional offices set up to make all decisions about individual youth placements and needs. Almost all services for the juveniles were contracted from private agencies, resulting in the creation of a wide range of community programs.” It advocates cutting ties with the criminal justice system, including instances of parole and probation, releasing prisoners to community-controlled support and peer groups on a case-by-case basis instead. The writers advocate that instead of serving the rest of their sentences, former prisoners should be involved in restoration processes. The strategies mentioned above are intermediary steps towards prison abolition. The authors note:

“We caution strongly that all interim as well as long-range strategies be considered only after conferring with knowledgeable prisoner and ex-prisoner groups. Interim policies crucially affect the lives of prisoners still inside the system and many ex-prisoners on the streets. What seems a paltry and therefore unacceptable change to those outside the wall, might be a highly significant and desirable change for those who are caged or under control in the streets. If there are differences in strategies between prisoners who have experienced the day to day reality of prisons and prison changers who have not, take the time to hammer out differences and reach agreement. Strategies and tactics that are not in unity weaken the total movement toward systems change.”

People interested in building a truly revolutionary movement should study the principles and histories of anarchism, the Anarkata turn, Black radicals, and anti-state communism within groups. White organizers need to step back and follow the lead of Black radicals or get out of the way. Deprioritize the visibility of individual organizers and the mindset of individualized leadership or hierarchies. The aim should be an anonymous and autonomous mass movement of free association that centers issues of the most oppressed, the most marginalized, the problems of the lumpen/lumpen-proletariat (Black, QTGNC folks, those living with disabilities, the poor, the houseless, etc…). The organizing methodology outlined in Move Like Mycorrhizae from Afrofuturist Abolitionists of America, demonstrates best practices. Organizing in this way provides a layer of security and protection from opportunists, clout chasers, and potential informants or state agents.

We can’t tell you what to study, what to do, or how to organize. We can only suggest that anyone who reads this zine study past and present liberation movements of colonized people, both within and outside of the United States. Learn where others have failed or succeeded. If the conditions are right, repeat what has proven successful and try not to repeat mistakes. It's the principle of Sankofa; meaning “go back and fetch it” - take what is useful, leave behind what is not. Studying, organizing, and remaining principled in the liberation struggle is a lifelong commitment. We’ll never stop learning; movements will change, tactics will change. New theories and organizing methodologies will need to be established from the foundation of what previous Black radicals left behind. Studying and organizing alongside BARs (Black Anarchic Radicals) and the Anarkata turn guided us to our current political trajectory. We don’t believe in authoritarian methodologies, cults of personality, or that Black people need a “leader” to effectively organize and win. There will be no vanguard to lead the masses to revolution, nor is it the role of the political theorist.

Frantz Fanon stated,

“To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.”

As the tide of fascism rises, as climate change accelerates, as technocratic corporations advance, as living conditions under capitalism worsen - political and state repression will become more visceral. We saw it in 2020, with state agents snatching protestors off the streets in unmarked vehicles. We saw it in Kenosha when local law enforcement stood in league with fascist armed militias. We’re seeing it in motion with the development of Cop City in Atlanta, a project with international implications to further militarize the police, preparing them for urban warfare with citizens. If there is any time to gain urgency, to connect and organize within your community, it’s now. The politics of capitalism, of fascism, is ultimately a politic of slow death and suffering for the many in exchange for short-term gain and excess for a few. We hope to see the end of this fetid, vile system in this lifetime or the next.

#black theory #theory #npic #nonprofit #long reads #article #must read #share

[unwounding]

Cherie DeVille, a porn actress, wrote "If Catharine A. MacKinnon didn’t teach at Harvard Law School, I would wonder if she knew how to read." Then confused MacKinnon using grooming as a synonym for normalizing for her meaning grooming in the sense of abuse.

DeVille also wrote "She built her legal career on sex workers’ backs," which is wildly disrespectful bc MacKinnon built her career on advocating (successfully!) for sexual harassment to be viewed as a crime in the workplace.

And I don't include Cherie DeVille's work as an insult; I think it's important to listen to women who work in the industry and who criticize anti-sex scholars. That's why I read the piece in the first place. But literally anyone else would have been better my word.

As for her counterpoint on coercion: if you have to have sex to pay your bills, have sex or be homeless, have sex or go hungry...what is that? Yeah I'd concede the point if you did it for chump change to eat out more often, but I highly highly doubt that's the case for most.

Last point, but it's v insane to think MacKinnon is anti-porn bc she's a prude and not because she's worked with women who have greatly suffered from being prostituted for literal decades at this point. Same with Dworkin.

#i was just gonna leave this on twitter bc i didn't want to preach to the choir on here #but i still think its valuable

[lindsaywesker]

Good morning! I hope you slept well and feel rested? Currently sitting at my desk, in my study, attired only in my blue towelling robe, enjoying my first cuppa of the day. Welcome to Too Much Information Tuesday.

Dog food is tested on humans.

Penis enlargement surgeries are free in Cuba.

2.7 million Americans work for either Walmart or Amazon.

Scientists have discovered a species of algae that tastes like bacon.

1.5 million trolleys are stolen from British supermarkets every year.

If your parents are happily married, your risk of divorce decreases by 14%.

Jack Nicholson once got detention at school every single day for a year.

Walt Disney used to pack his testicles in ice to improve his sperm count.

In 2010, a doctor in Blackpool spent £1,200 trying to win a cuddly toy at a hoopla stall.

The first pornographic film came out in 1895, just a few months after the first regular movie.

Nelson was about 5’ 4". His statue on top of the column in London is about 18ft. That's Horatio of about 3:1

During the 2012 Russian election (when Putin was elected for a third term), one region registered a voting turnout of 146%.

If your name begins with a letter that is towards the end of the alphabet, you are likely to struggle more when getting your first job.

Every year, a village in Montenegro hosts a ‘lying down’ championship. This year's champion spent about 60 hours lying down.

2022 saw the highest number of people ever diagnosed with gamophobia, which is the fear of commitment, relationships and marriage.

Elon Musk and Bill Gates have joined forces to make a penis enhancer. Early reports say they plan to name the product Elongates.

Research at MIT has shown that only half of perceived friendships are mutual. Only half the people you consider friends think of you as a friend and vice versa.

In 2008, a Japanese man found a homeless woman living in the top compartment of his closet after setting up a security camera because his food kept disappearing.

In ancient Greek mythology and folklore, the act of women exposing their genitals was believed to have the power to ward off evil spirits or demons. A practice known as ‘anasyrma’ or ‘ana-suromai’.

In 2019, an accountant in London who’d endured years of being bullied at work decided to ‘go out with a bang’ and stole £170k from his employer. He spent it ALL in one weekend on prostitutes and cocaine.

In the town of Whittier, Alaska, almost everyone lives in one building. 90% of the town's residents live in one 14-storey building that also houses a post office, shop, police station, health clinic and a bed & breakfast.

In 2010, UK retailer GameStation claimed to own 7,500 souls after putting a clause in their online terms that stated, "By placing an order via this website ... you agree to grant us a non-transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul."

In Indiana, a 25-year-old delivery driver, Nick Bostic, risked his own life to save five children trapped in a house fire, running into the burning building and safely escorting four children outside and then leaping from a window with the fifth. He made a full recovery.

In 2010, a Harvard student decided to give up on life and shot himself in the head leaving behind a suicide note, explaining in thorough detail why “life was meaningless”. The suicide note he left behind was 1905 pages long.

On April 28th, 2023, the ground really moved for one woman during the second movement of the LA Philharmonic’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony, when she experienced a “loud and full body orgasm.” Several concertgoers described the woman’s climactic moment from the balcony at the packed Walt Disney Concert Hall. “Everyone kind of turned to see what was happening,” Molly Grant, who was sitting near the overjoyed woman, told the Los Angeles Times on Sunday. “I saw the girl after it had happened, and I assume that she … had an orgasm because she was heavily breathing,” she said. “It was quite beautiful,” Grant added. An audio clip purporting to capture the woman’s moment of ecstasy has gone viral. British composer Magnus Fiennes, brother of actor Ralph Fiennes, also was in attendance. “A woman in the audience had loud and full body orgasm during the 5th’s second movement. Band politely carried on,” he said on Twitter. However, some social media users expressed their doubts about the incident, with one who was present suggesting that the woman had a medical emergency. Fiennes insisted, “It absolutely happened. Was in close proximity and had no less than eight other friends attending. All reached a similar conclusion.” Classical pianist Sharon Su added in a tweet that she “checked with someone who works at the LA Phil and they confirmed” that the incident was real and that the orchestra did not stop playing during Tchaikovsky’s 5th. The LA Times reported that its sources and the audio clip corroborated the accounts that the orchestra did not miss a beat during the explosive moment. Music agent Lukas Burton told the LA Times that the woman’s loud moan was “wonderfully timed” to a “romantic swell” during the performance. “One can’t know exactly what happened, but it seemed very clear from the sound that it was an expression of pure physical joy,” Burton told the paper.

Okay, that’s enough information for one day. Have a tremendous and tumultuous Tuesday! I love you all.

#mixcloud #mi soul #dj #music #new blog #lockdown #coronavirus #books #democracy #brexit #cronyism #election #tuesdaymotivation #radio

[ceruleangold]

Harvard released an academic article in 2002 detailing the impact of contraceptives on women’s career & education trajectories.

It explained that in 1970 women comprised 5% of attorneys and 9% of physicians. By 1980, this number had increased to 13.6% and 14.1% respectively. Today, women comprise 36% of physicians and 37% of attorneys. Women also outnumber men in both law and medical school enrollment.

The academic article focused on the pill, and the pill is a wonderful tool, but let’s be straight up. I’ve heard a million and half stories about contraceptive failure through the years and maybe you have too. I can only imagine the failure rate was much higher in the 70s when it was available to the masses for the first time. Abortion clearly played a critical role in improving these numbers, acknowledged by Harvard or not.

I can’t get past the significance of the impact this will have. Outlawing abortion will derail lives, aspirations and opportunities, as well as the masses’ quality of life. It will also facilitate a drastic increase in poverty. And, you know, exacerbate existing poverty considering 60% of patients getting an abortion already have children.

Then there’s my personal wheelhouse. Better believe this will severely impact the rate of homelessness. Housing is already unaffordable for most and this will be another roadblock towards people achieving self-sufficiency. Households with children under five are the largest demographic in family shelters. They also make up a little more than half of all families experiencing homelessness. That’s not a coincidence.

And all of this for what? This country doesn’t have the infrastructure to outlaw abortion without facilitating a nasty blow to the economy. This would pull a chunk of people out of the workforce — in part because of medical impact of pregnancy on people and time to recover from birth, but also because childcare is a gazillion dollars and those who qualify for state childcare subsidies have to be employed before the state will provide them the subsidy (unless they’re homeless, but then you’re homeless, so.)

Anyways, yeah. This is incredibly bad. Unfathomably bad.

#cerulean talks systemic poverty

[siansfashion]

The 1980s

The first year of the decade was memorable for political drama, cable TV, and games people couldn't keep their hands off of. Arcades were jammed with people playing a new video game called Pac-Man.

By 1981, homes and offices were beginning to adapt to new technologies. If you had cable a TV you probably were watching, MTV after it began broadcasting in August. At work, typewriters began making way for something called a personal computer from IBM.

In 1982, Michael Jackson released his best-selling album “Thriller”. The Walt Disney (1901-1966) Company opens EPCOT Center (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), its second theme park in Florida after Walt Disney Wold.

1983 was the year that saw birth of the Internet also saw volcanic eruptions and aircraft tragedies; the first woman in space and that holiday season craze of the Cabbage Patch Kids.

The Olympics in Sarajevo, the murder of the prime minister in India and Michael Jackson moonwalking for the first time at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium are among the events that happened in 1984.

1985, the R&B single “We Are The World” written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and recorded by more than 45 American singers, will go on to raise $75 million to feed people in Africa. The Coca-Cola Company introduced “New Coke”, a sweeter replacement of the original 99 year-old soda and it proved a popular failure. The Nintendo Entertainment System debuts in the US.

1986, the deadliest nuclear power plant accident to date occurred outside the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl, scattering radioactive material across Europe. Hands across America attempted to form a human chain from New York to California to raise money to fight hunger and homelessness.

1987, British pop singer George Michael released “Faith,” his debut solo studio album. The first episode of “Star Treck: The Next Generation,” the second sequel to the original series, aired on independent stations throughout the U.S.

1988, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” opens on Broadway, with Michael Crawford in the title role.

1989, the Berlin Wall falls, after an announcement by the East German government that the border checkpoints were open. The impromptu celebration was televised around the world.

Harvard Referencing

THOUGHTCO. (N/A) Go Back In Time With This 1980s History Timeline. [Online]. Available from: https://www.thoughtco.com/1980s-timeline-1779955. [Accessed: 12th December 2022].

[unaffordablehousingproject]

Affordable housing has a couple different forms. Affordable Housing sometimes refers to subsidized housing, where individuals pay 1/3 of their income towards rent where a nonprofit organization will pay for the rest of the rent. Affordable Housing can also take the form of having a specific amount due for rent that is based on the a 1/3 of the median income of the area. Affordable Housing is becoming ever more crucial as housing rates increase and employment pay as well as government income (SSI/SSDI/etc.) remain close to the same. Discussing affordable housing involves the benefits of having affordable housing, the barriers to bringing about more affordable housing, and outreach to those experiencing homelessness.

The benefits and necessity of affordable housing can be very intuitive and also backed by studies. Affordable housing is necessary to foster the health and recovery of individuals by creating a stable environment where recovery needs can be met. There are also barriers to both obtaining more affordable housing as well as individuals being able to access affordable housing. One of the primary barriers to building more affordable housing, is zoning laws which restrict the building of affordable housing. One of the barriers to obtaining affordable housing is the scarcity of affordable housing available compared to the number of those who need it. Outreach is also involved in the discussion of affordable housing, as many of those who could most benefit from it, such as those experiencing homelessness. Outreach is essential as it is the way to both let people know about the opportunities available, as well as getting help with service connection. Affordable Housing often involves waitlists, periodically checking up on the waitlists to check spot in the que, complicated paperwork, and even advocacy for appeals for situations such as property debt exceptions. Due to these barriers, outreach becomes an essential tool to be able to connect individuals with the resources they need in order to obtain stability through affordable housing. This outreach can even extend to getting help paying rent, obtaining furniture, or service connections to discounted services such as utilities, and phone bills.

Without affordable housing, those who cannot afford to pay at least $1200 in rent will continue to be forced to live outside or other in inhumane conditions. Shelters are plentiful full of individuals waiting to come up on housing waitlists for affordable housing. By having more availability for affordable housing, it would lead to people getting housed quicker and get them out of any inhumane living situations they are forced to be in while waiting for a spot in affordable housing. Most people waiting for affordable housing are unable to work, and are bound by the amount of government income they receive which is often below $800 a month. The amount of people on SSI/SSDI vastly out ways the amount of affordable housing available in Portland. Thus, leaving people living off of SSI/SSDI no choice but to live in these inhumane conditions prior to finding a spot in an affordable housing facility. This impacts the overall community as it leaves our most vulnerable community to be out in the open, where their struggles are in view of everyone in the community.

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APA Citing:

1. Adams, H., & Adams, H. (n.d.). Addressing Challenges to Affordable Housing in Land Use Law: Recognizing Affordable Housing as a Right. Harvard Law Review. Retrieved October 19, 2022, from https://harvardlawreview.org/2022/02/addressing-challenges-to-affordable-housing-in-land-use-law/

2. Web Login Service. (n.d.). Retrieved October 19, 2022, from https://www-proquest-com.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/idp/profile/cas/login;jsessionid=9CE0DC22778C1C2125EFF5191FC5DD7C?execution=e1s1

3. Just a moment. . . (n.d.). Retrieved October 19, 2022, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1212411718300096

#affordable housing #housing #social change #housing crisis