There are some incredible community bail funds working to free people in jail who can’t afford to pay bail & who are working to end the unjust practice of money bail at large. You should consider donating to them today. Here’s a thread with their information:
Consider donating to the Chicago Bond Fund (@ChiBondFund):
Feel free to add others to the thread that you know of!
As a reminder, 70% of people in jail haven’t been convicted of any crime & a huge amount of people are there because they can’t afford bail to be released. Please consider these organizations for #GivingTuesday
Consider donating to the Immigrant Bail Fund (@migrantbailfund) in Connecticut:
What remains abundantly clear is that there are millions of ppl in this country born w/ a set of systemic advantages that afford them wealth, power, & opportunity that they misunderstand as being the result of nothing but their own hard work. This is the myth America is built on.
I’ve said this before, but reading that NYT article about Trump’s money & listening to Kavanaugh’s story of himself are reminders that what ppl are able to accomplish largely results from the arbitrary nature of birth & circumstance. None of us inherently *deserve* what we have.
What happens when you begin to believe that you inherently deserve what you have is that you then begin to believe others inherently deserve what they *don’t* have.
The result is decades of public policy that often punish ppl in poverty instead of assisting them in escaping it.
In the final episode of our first season of @Justice_Podcast we sit down for an extended conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates on race & the politics of mass incarceration. Take a listen! theappeal.org/justice-in-ame…
I also just want to take a second to shout out @jduffyrice who is truly the intellectual backbone of this project while I am largely the very enthusiastic hypeman. She is brilliant & tireless & it’s a great feeling when someone who is a great friend also becomes a great colleague
Our goal was to create a podcast that broke down some of the biggest issues in our criminal justice system in ways that felt accessible to those encountering these ideas for the first time while still being thought-provoking to those engaged in this work. I hope we did that.
I have a new poem in the Harvard Kennedy School Journal of African American Public Policy. A different sort of venue for a poem, but appreciate them providing the invitation.
This is for my son & thinking about how quickly the world will see him as something other than a child.
This is part of a series of poems in the second manuscript thinking through what it means to watch my son discover the world for the first time & what it means to watch the world discover him.
How ppl who call him adorable now might very well call him dangerous when he’s older.
Shout out to all the parents figuring out what it means to raise black children in the world.
I highly recommend this essay by Eve Tuck to anyone who researches or writes about marginalized communities.
Sometimes in an effort to illuminate injustice, ppl can unwittingly contribute to the idea tht certain communities are defined by their suffering. pages.ucsd.edu/~rfrank/class_…
Tuck writes about how Native communities worked w/researchers to illuminate the inhumane conditions many of them lived in.
But after a while they realized they were being portrayed w/o contexts & in ways that made it seem like Native communities were nothing but their suffering.
She argues for moving away from “damage-centered” frameworks & instead to “desire-centered” frames.
A desire-centered framework is “concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, & the self-determination” of communities. Oppressed communities are not just their pain.
“If you look at the top 10 blackest states in America, 9 of them don’t let you vote if you’re serving any type of sentence. 5 of the 10 blackest states restrict your right to vote even after you’ve served your sentence.”
A lot of ppl are responding to this saying, “But he was also a Rhodes Scholar & Harvard grad!”
I understand the impulse, this is obviously ungirded w/racism, but also...what if he *was* only a rapper? Why would that automatically make him unqualified?
When ppl respond to the assertion that being a rapper makes someone unqualified to run for office with the defense “But they received a fancy fellowship & went to an Ivy League school!” it almost legitimizes the implication that being a rapper is itself something to be ashamed of
Going to Harvard doesn’t automatically mean you’re smart or ethical.
Being a rapper doesn’t automatically mean you’re not.
We’ve got to move beyond reductive notions that certain affiliations automatically mean something about a person’s intelligence or sense of morality.