The perfect pair from the same book store, although I had to hunt to find this match.
“The Abolition of Prison” by Jacques Lesage de La Haye (translated by Scott Branson)
Again I know very little about this book other than it’s a French piece from a well known intellectual. The abolition of the prison system would be extraordinarily profound.
As of a couple of years ago I read in the book “The New Jim Crow” that while the United States made up less than FIVE percent of the world’s overall population, we accounted for well OVER a whopping TWENTY-FIVE percent of the world’s entire prison population. It never sat right with me. I think about that statistic every day and wonder how it’s changed in recent years.
“The problem is not police training, police diversity, or police methods. The problem is the dramatic and unprecedented expansion and intensity of policing in the last forty years, a fundamental shift in the role of police in society. The problem is policing itself.”
Again, hand in hand with a lot of the other books currently added to my bookshelves. The need to study intersectionality and how it affects all aspects of our lives from the way we conduct business, to the way we socialize, to the way we’ve allowed the police to evolve into a borderline military industrial complex. We border on living in a police run state.
The problem with that is the origins on the police force and basically how it never really evolved, it just learned to cover its tracks. And boy did it cover its tracks POORLY.
Only a couple books left from “Independent Bookstore Day”!!
“So you want to talk about race” by Ijeoma Oluo
I have yet to crack this one but I’ve considered buying it for a while. Pair this with some of the other books I’ve reviewed and posted about here and you’ll be on your way to a more diverse perspective.
As a white ally I know I can always be better. A big part of that is listening to, and uplifting, those around me, and those who are oppressed. This book helps open the door to that conversation.
Freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate are fundamental rights. Throughout the Netherlands the safety of activists could not be guaranteed and they were restricted in their freedom of speech. Some protestors were physically attacked and the police let their assailants go. Other protestors were bombarded with fireworks, apples, eggs and beer as the police stood by and watched.
The Dutch House Representatives refuses to collectively acknowledge the racism of the counterprotestors, denounce their actions and actively make sure activists can safely practise their freedom of speech and right to demonstrate. Please sign this petition if you believe that they should!
Freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate are fundamental rights. Throughout the Netherlands the safety of activists could not be guaranteed and they were restricted in their freedom of speech. Some protestors were physically attacked and the police let their assailants go. Other protestors were bombarded with fireworks, apples, eggs and beer as the police stood by and watched.
The Dutch House Representatives refuses to collectively acknowledge the racism of the counterprotestors, denounce their actions and actively make sure activists can safely practise their freedom of speech and right to demonstrate. Please sign this petition if you believe that they should!
There’s a particular attitude I often see on the internet that goes something like “If you aren’t part of a particular marginalized group, then you could never understand their experience, so don’t pretend to relate.” And while obviously you’re never going to relate to every aspect of that identity unless you are also of that identity, I feel like this attitude really diminishes opportunities for finding kinship and bonding in similar experiences even if those experiences aren’t exactly the same and/or are the result of different identities.
For example, I’m white and neurodivergent, and I was talking to a Black neurotypical friend about masking, and how I feel like I have to change the entire way I present myself in order to not be considered weird in public. She responded with “Oh, some of that sounds kind of like code-switching— how I have to switch away from using AAVE in white-dominated settings in order to be accepted.” And then we bonded over how frustrating and ridiculousit is that AAVE and stimming are both considered unacceptable in “professional” settings.
Another time, a straight Jewish friend was telling me about a book she had just finished reading, which was written by a Jewish author and had a Jewish main character. She was saying that it was really nice to read a book written by a Jewish author, because even when gentile authors do their research and write a pretty accurate Jewish character, they never quite feel Jewish— you can always tell the author was a gentile. And I said “Oh that sounds kind of like when I read queer characters written by straight authors— you can always tell the author was straight even if they do their research and get things fairly right. So even though I’m happy when any book features queer characters, it’s really especially nice to read queer characters written by queer authors.” And we bonded over this similar experience, and we were both excited that the other understood even if we were coming to this experience from different angles, and then we swapped book recommendations. This conversation is also a great example of when that internet attitude DOES apply— when someone outside of a particular group is trying to understand that group’s entire experience well enough to accurately write the world as seen through their eyes. They’re never quite going to get it right, and that’s ok! It just means it’s important to also have Own Voices authors writing those types of stories also.
Sometimes it seems like people who have been in internet circles exhibiting this attitude for too long are afraid to ever try to relate to the experiences of anyone in any groups other than their own for fear of causing offense, which is honestly pretty counterproductive. Understanding each other and bonding across groups should be the goal! Relating to each other is not a bad thing!
i’d add that these points of what COULD be solidarity are also used AGAINST others by malevolent anti-worker racist forces, and you hate to see it. see: some thumbfaced cop yutz whining about how the irish were slaves* but you don’t see THEM complaining, THEY pulled themselves up and never asked for handouts. :( they could instead be going “hey wow we both got screwed over, and we could have banded together as workers, and yet”
*they weren’t but they were discriminated against in other ways i guess
They certainly were, and that actually adds to the point of this post-
When the Irish were suffering through the potato famine(the English being a major facet to how badly they suffered), the Choctaw sent what they could to help, $170, because they empathized with their plight.
There is a sculpture in Ireland commemorating this, called Kindred Spirits.
And recently Irish donors cited that gesture as they raised $2 million in aid for the Navajo and Hopi tribes for the fight against COVID.
This post is great because goddamn is this a problem in internet social justice stuff, and I wanted to add one of the best takedowns of it that I’ve encountered. It’s from an anthropology paper from the 80s where the author is working through four “pitfalls” of performing materials from a culture other than your own, mostly with an eye to white anthropologists performing materials from nonwhite cultures. One of the “pitfalls” he lays out is exactly this – the refusal to even try and engage with another culture, because you believe you couldn’t possibly understand or relate and so therefore you shouldn’t bother:
Instead of facing up to and struggling with the ethical tensions and moral ambiguities of performing culturally sensitive materials, the skeptic, with chilling aloofness, flatly declares, “I am neither black nor female: I will not perform from The Colour Purple.”
When this strange coupling of naive empiricism and sociobiology – only blacks can understand and perform black literature, only while males John Cheever’s short stories – is deconstructed to expose the absurdity of the major premise, then the “No Trespassing” disclaimer is unmasked as cowardice or imperialism of the worst kind.
[…]
In my view, the “Skeptic’s Cop-Out is the most morally reprehensible corner of the map because it forecloses dialogue. […] The skeptic, however, shuts down the very idea of entering into conversation with the other before the attempt, however problematic, begins.
[…]
The skeptic, detached and estranged, with no sense of the other, sits alone in an echo chamber of his own making, with only the sound of his own scoffing laughter ringing in his ears.
– Dwight Conquergood, Performance As A Moral Act (1985)
(I would also generally recommend this paper for anyone who’s trying to talk to anxious white liberals, because I think the framework is really useful for people who’ve never had to think about intercultural communication before and are worried about fucking up. Showing them the major ways of fucking up, including that refusing to try is fucking up, means that they can direct that anxiety to looking for whether they’re falling into the pitfalls.)
