#PettyPendergrass

They beat a blind refugee who speaks no English for failing to obey police commands he could not understand. Then instead of apologizing, they charged him with possession of a “weapon”—HIS WALKING STICK. Then they dumped him miles from home without notifying anyone, after which he was found dead.

If your ticked off about corporate homeownership, wait til I tell you about the impact of restrictive zoning and building codes on reducing housing supply and driving up costs in a manner than makes housing a lucrative investment.

Opposition to Mega Prison Project Shapes a Local Election in Rural Arkansas - Bolts Incarceration has become a central issue in Western Arkansas, where the governor wants to build a new prison that has angered and mobilized residents.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders' plan to build a huge mega-prison in rural Arkansas has drawn major opposition, with some residents saying it's made them think differently about incarceration in the face of organizing.

Now that's bleeding into a local election, as candidates vow to fight the governor.

NEW:

Jesse Jackson: Well, first of all, we had been freed without being made equal. There’s historical continuity between blacks being amassed in prison after 246 years of legal slavery. When there was a contest about it [in Dred Scott v. Sandford], the Supreme Court ruled that blacks had no rights. [After emancipation and the Civil War] those who had been slave masters became segregation masters. They took our freedom away from us; they began to lock up blacks by the thousands to do prison labor, farm labor—the whole range. They just put us back in slavery. We finally, in 1954, broke the backbone—legally—of that system [with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision], but we were never—there was never repair for damage done. Two hundred and forty-six years of slavery, then legal Jim Crow and [nearly] 5,000 lynchings without a conviction. And even today, discrimination by extension of that system has not completely ended. So we had been fighting for repair. We fought against the barbarism for our freedom; now we’re fighting for our equality. We are the foundation of American society—not the bottom, the foundation. When the Declaration of Independence came, we had been enslaved for 157 years. We made cotton king. We are due a different kind of recognition.

Harris: Do you personally have hope that there will be payment for that legacy of slavery? Jackson: The truth of slavery—that Africans subsidized America’s wealth—that truth will not go away. It’s buried right now, but as each generation becomes much more serious, it will be grappled with.

thinking about the conversation I had with Jesse Jackson in 2019:

"The truth of slavery—that Africans subsidized America’s wealth—that truth will not go away. It’s buried right now, but as each generation becomes much more serious, it will be grappled with." www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

i just showed my students some of The Apostle two weeks ago. so so so good. RIP.

FROM INFINITE WORLD: The Sound of the Hammond Organ and the Tragedy of AIDS in the Black Church — description

a facebook post from Ashon Crawley on February 13, 2021. It reads: i am sympathetic to folks that say *the* reason why the black panther party of self defense was a threat was because of the breakfast program. i am also sympathetic to the folks that say that is too reductive, that they were more than a breakfast progrum.* i think it’s in the middle: the BPP was a threat because they practiced care. and care showed up *as* a breakfast program, yes, but also as health clinics, as armed defense, as reading groups. care work as political organizing. care as the grounds for its emergence. care. one reason i’ve focused on care in my own work for years now is because black feminist thought informs my own, and black queer critique. and because care is often considered the antithesis of “serious things” and i’m just fundamentally against this. if care is soft or frilly or whatever, we need to have a preferential option for softness. care is something white supremacist capitalist patriarchy cannot give nor withhold, even when it tries to privatize care as an industry that is primarily about making money and exploiting workers. care is not private property, it only exists when it is shared. care is the antithesis and alternative to white supremacy, to riff on cedric robinson, because it must be. but it is so much more. it exceeds the logic of reactive response to practices of violence. it precedes the violence and political economy of extraction and exploitation. care, even if soft, ain’t easy. it takes courage. and conviction. and clarity. (i’m a former preacher, so the alliteration is a throwback lol.) you only have care when you share it. and sharing it is difficult precisely because the political economy of racial capitalism wants us to privatize and hoard what we consider it to be. care. let it flower and bloom. selah. 🌸💕

Five years ago @ashoncrawley.bsky.social posted a thing about care that feels really timely again. www.facebook.com/ashon/posts/...

"owners of residential buildings pay most of their rent earnings not on maintenance or operations, but to service their debts to their creditors...they borrowed too much to buy...based on an expectation that rents would rise faster than they actually did." www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/aft...

This is indeed broadly true of rent-stabilized landlords in NYC when they lobby against things like rent freezes or low proposed annual increases. “Rising costs” in general audience stories about this almost always describe those as, like, maintenance or wages. But it’s mostly debt-servicing.

screenshot of the uncle bobbie’s page for the book.

*coughs. loudly.* 🤧

preorder (if you feel so moved) from your favorite local bookstore. i don’t live in philly but i do uncle bobbie’s for my books … ! (bookshop.org/p/books/from...)

cover reveal soon. 🤭

Nice, the amazing @ashoncrawley.bsky.social's upcoming book, "From Infinite World: The Sound of the Hammond Organ and the Tragedy of AIDS in the Black Church" is up for preorder. bookshop.org/p/books/from...

yes.

Trump Drops Demand for Cash From Harvard After Stiff Resistance

I wonder if Columbia & all the rest have regrets? 🎁

they are so close to figuring out the normies hate them, so incredibly close

imagine if all that money had gone to teachers instead

They don't care what you believe. They are about imposing dominance and control over everything including you.

I don’t want to hear anything from an elected official unless it’s a plan to defund the DHS and impeach Noem, Bovino, etc. No texts. No emails. No talk about the economy. Step up or step off.

Part of the issue is that those most actively protesting and leading mutual aid are women and gender non-conforming people. Both groups are illegible to many as protesters. This helps explain the invisibilization of current protests and resistance.

This is insane not just the explicit "go break the 4A" substance but how they knew how bad it was, acting in guilty paranoia to cover it up and suppress the written evidence.

This isn't how running a government agency works. This is what a criminal conspiracy looks like, because that's what it is.

When people say genAI is "inevitable" they are literally repeating desperate marketing lies by the people who profit from that lie and that is all they are doing.

the stylist’s

When you focus on the regular people showing up magnificently in all of their flawed beauty, it helps you to keep going.

An image of people in leather pants in a church choir. Slate Outward presents When We all Get to Heaven

I'm re-listening to @thislynne.bsky.social's stunning podcast, *When We All Get to Heaven* to choose an episode for a spring course. A difficult choice!
www.heavenpodcast.org

800 people at Whittier International Elementary right now to coordinate ICE resistance. EIGHT HUNDRED, at one little school.

Recall there are only 2,000 ICE agents in the entire metro. Puny!

the problem with an untrained secret police squad that shoots people in their cars isn’t that they’re untrained

at no point in this headline did i know what would happen next

Silhouette of a dog walking on a beach in front of a brilliantly red orange a pink sky

May we continue to be radicalized by such dehumanization.
Another world is possible. May we reach together for its horizon.
#FuckICE
#FreePalestine
#DogsForPalestine
@dogs.bsky.social

what this should make clear to everyone in this country is that it does not matter who you are, there's no "it could never happen to me"

you can be a white woman who drives around with stuffed animals in her car, and they will still kill you in cold blood and call you a domestic terrorist