As Jimmy Boggs used to remind us, revolutions are made out of love for people and for place. He often talked about loving America enough to change it. ‘I love this country,’ he used to say, ‘not only because my ancestors’ blood is in the soil but because of what I believe it can become.’ Love isn’t just something you feel. It’s something you do everyday… Love isn’t about what we did yesterday; it’s about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after.

You Can't Say Black Lives Matter Without Including Black Sex Workers

June 2017

wearyourvoicemag.com

I am a semi-out sex worker. By semi-out I mean I’m internet out: I haven’t announced anything to most of my family and the “in-real-life” people who need to know, know. I have dabbled in a bit of everything, from stripping to prostitution to sugaring to camming. I am also an artist, freelancer and homeschooling mother, so there is a lot of nuance in what I desire out of life for my son and I. My only other avenue would be minimum or below-poverty level wages.

When I write, I focus on sex workers of color. Most of the time I narrow it even further to Black sex workers and Black trans sex workers who face the most ire, discrimination and violence from both the police and within the Black community.

I wrote a series of Twitter threads on sex work that discussed sex worker rights and briefly mentioned our place in Black Lives Matter. Here is one of them.

Let's Not Forget The People Of Color Who Helped Pioneer Marriage Equality

Books and articles have whitewashed the struggle for marriage equality. August 2017

www.huffingtonpost.com

The dominant narrative of marriage equality is overcrowded with stories about white men, which has obscured the pioneering roles played by people of color. Everyone knows about Jim Obergefell, one of the plaintiffs in Obergefell v. Hodges, where the United States Supreme Court said that the Constitution requires marriage equality. After the Supreme Court’s decision, Obergefell got a call from the White House, tremendous celebrity, and a publisher for his memoirs.

Yet almost no media attention was directed to two of the other Ohio plaintiffs, Brittani Henry and Britini Rogers. A simple Google search yields thousands of articles on Obergefell, hundreds on most of the other plaintiff couples, and only a few that even mention Henry and Rogers, two mothers with an infant son. They have a dramatic story of trying to persuade Ohio to recognize their family and are a charismatic couple and mediagenic family. But these plaintiffs, black lesbians, did not garner the significant spotlight lavished on Obergefell.

Their relative obscurity is not unusual. Indeed, it is the norm. Books and articles have whitewashed the struggle for marriage equality.

5 Reasons Why Asian Respectability Will Never Save Us

Our proximity to whiteness doesn’t make us better, it just makes us more complicit in a system that continues to exploit Black and Indigenous (BI) POC.

everydayfeminism.com

It was there that I internalized respectability politics — behaviors that align with mainstream (white, normative) values in order to gain social acceptance — deeply.

In high school, I often gained approval from the white people in my class by maintaining Eurocentric beauty standards and fitting easy stereotypes. This was also my respectability at work.

I wasn’t ready to disrupt any of that, because, at that point in my life, social acceptance was way more important to me than anything else.

And so respectability became a part of me. It’s only this year that I’ve begun to understand that my family’s comfort with this mindset — of trying to keep the ‘peace’ rather than disrupting it for good reason — is part of the Asian model minority concept.

That being said, when I’m writing on this topic, I’m not preaching about something that I’ve fully unlearned. I’m actually just sharing what others have put labor into teaching me either by example or after instances when I’ve reproduced this harmful behavior.  

Jan. 30, 2018

SALVADOR, Brazil — This northeastern Brazilian city is famous for its Afro-Brazilian drumming traditions; the internationally acclaimed bloco-afroband Olodum has broadcast its colorful drums and pounding syncopation internationally for decades through music collaborations including Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Really Care About Us” and Paul Simon’s “The Obvious Child”. To see that band — which is composed almost exclusively of men — or any of the city’s other renowned bloco-afros, like Ilê Aiyê, perform live in the streets of Salvador is a deep dive into the roots of this country’s musical traditions.But traditions change. Or actually, traditions are changed. By women like the ones that make up Banda Didá, a group composed exclusively of black women, pounding out those same Afro-Brazilian rhythms, filling up Salvador’s night with its old sounds, played by new hands.  

Diaspora Blackness in the Caribbean: A Radical Resource

January 2018

medium.com|Shanna Collins

Blackness is often only discussed in an American context, without an understanding of its social, political, economic, and cultural interconnections to the rest of the Afro-Atlantic, Europe, Asia, and the continent of Africa. Far too many Black folks in America remain unconcerned or without knowledge of the African Diaspora worldwide. It is imperative for Blackness to be understood in an international context, as Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael and other Black freedom fighters attempted to do so in the formation of their own radical consciousness and revolutionary politics. The following resources and media are not by any means exhaustive, but an attempt to hold Black millennials in the Western hemisphere accountable for developing a complex, internationalist analysis as Afro-descendants, particularly in respect to the radical history of Black power movements in the Caribbean. Resources will be given on Puerto Rico, Barbados, Martinique, Guyana, Haiti, Suriname, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, the Virgin Islands (U.S.), Jamaica, and Trinidad.

Chart of the Day: Does Your State Allow Police to Have Sex With People They Arrest?

feministing.com

In 35 states, it’s legal for cops to detain and have sex with someone in their custody. Is your state one of them?

Yesterday, Buzzfeed News published an investigative piece about Anna Chambers, a New York teenager pressing rape charges against Eddie Martins and Richard Hall, two members of the New York Police Department. Last fall, Anna was picked up by the two cops who told her two male friends to leave, handcuffed her, and led her into their van. According to Anna’s lawyer, the policemen ordered her to undress — and when they didn’t find drugs, they raped her.

It’s a stunning story of state violence — of cops using their guns, their badges, and their impunity to attack vulnerable women. Anna’s far from alone: sexual assault is the second most commonly reported form of police misconduct and brutality (after excessive force). A 2015 investigation found that over 1,000 officers across America have lost their badges because of sexual assault — and their report noted that number is “unquestionably an undercount” because many states, including New York, don’t keep state records of decertified cops. Further, sexual violence and police violence are highly underreported — meaning these number represent a mere fraction of the actual prevalence of police-perpetrated sexual violence.

You’d think this would have been an open-and-shut case. Anna’s forensic exam (commonly known as a ‘rape kit’) matched Martins’ and Hall’s DNA, and a security camera shows the detectives leaving her on the side of a street a quarter-mile from a police station. Anna says she repeatedly told the detectives no; the detectives say it was consensual.

Opinion | 'Black Panther' Is Ready To Take Dark-Skinned Actresses (And Colorism) Seriously

This is why “Black Panther” is such a head-turner. February 2018.

www.huffingtonpost.com

This is why “Black Panther” is sort of an anomaly. Based on everything we know about colorism, who it affects, and what exactly feeds into it, we wouldn’t expect that many (or really any) dark-skinned and brown-skinned actresses would appear in “Black Panther.”

And yet there are. And here’s why it matters:

‘Black Panther’ goes out of its way to cast dark-skinned women in every single role that calls for a woman — including the love interest.

Dark-skinned and brown-skinned black women are abundant in the movie. You can see it in the background characters, the promotional material and in the much-talked-about Dora Milaje — an elite team of female bodyguards that defer to our good King T’Challa, played by Chadwick Boseman. And every single significant speaking role has been cast with a dark-skinned or brown-skinned actress.

If You're Not Following These Peruvian Femmes, What Are You Really Doing With Your Life

February 10 2018

fierce.wearemitu.com

If the only Peruvian on your social media newsfeed is your ceviche food porn, then, yum!, but you’re seriously missing out. The only thing more poppin’ than Peru’s delicacies — which makes the South American country the top culinary destination in the world, so this is saying a lot — is its people.

Peruvian femmes are out here producing music, cracking jokes, droppin’ knowledge, making art and looking fine as hell. If you’re not following these Inca goddesses yet, you need to get on it.

Our Relationships Keep Us Alive: Let's Prioritize Them in 2018

Let's commit to living our values within our movements.

www.truth-out.org|Ejeris Dixon

In organization after organization, I saw the same pattern. Folks mobilize through an intense period. They do what we've all been taught and save their critique for later discussion. And when there's a break from the external crisis, they tear each other apart. As an organizer, I was taught to recruit people into the movement and to support them to stay involved. But I wasn't taught how to repair relationships or to prevent harm. Many of us aren't taught these skills.

Our campaigns, our base-building and our political analysis cannot and will not save us from this threat. Even worse, our external opponents not only are capitalizing on our fractures, but feeding them. Sometimes, we are our own strongest opposition. Without shifting our focus to repairing our relationships, our movements will rot from the inside out.