Recently online activism has become the mean to do any kind of activism, replacing actually doing something with, well, a performance. The need to follow what’s 'trending' in social media plataforms is somewhat counterproductive, because these hollow, worthless gestures become the standard thing to do, and even if people argue it gives 'visibility', what's the use if no work is actually being done in the real world. Seek out a diverse group of friends for you. Practice real friendship and intimacy by listening when POC talk about their experiences and their perspectives. They’re speaking about their pain. Support that new apartment building proposed to be built in your neighborhood. Don’t participate in “ snob zoning,” which is opposing new builds of apartments because wealthy white folks are afraid the apartment building will “change the character of a community.” For more information on this, see #47. White people may find the interrogation of their own race an alien concept but the fact that most have lived their whole life without considering racial identity is a unique advantage, allocated solely to the default. Whiteness is the un-othered. It’s important for that to be investigated by everyone.

T]he sense of superiority encoded into whiteness remains a very effective ruse to distract “white people” from the oppression many of them experience keenly; the pressure of financial precariousness, the unaffordability of a home, the erosion of healthcare and education, or any of the other countless deprivations endured while trying to “make a living” in a world that has become increasingly unlivable.’ In truth, what the year of the pandemic, more so than any other, has taught me is that I have no expectations of any 'racial' group. How could millions of heterogeneous people live up to any one singular expectation of mine?" Don’t buy from companies that use prison labor. Find a good list here. While Whole Foods is on that list, but pledged to stop using prison labor in 2016, they haven’t made amends for that abuse. You can’t pour gas on a burning building, decide to stop pouring the gas, then walk away like everything is fine. Until Whole Foods pays reparations, they stay on the boycott list. conduct a study to review the impact of parental incarceration on minor children. With more data, the Commission could modify the Sentencing Guidelines and allow judges to take this factor into account when sentencing individuals for non-violent crimes.Pull people up on racism - it’s our collective responsibility to challenge racism if we see or hear it anywhere I felt it lent an accessibility to the topics that put the reader somewhat at ease and more open to contemplating the questions she is posing. Call or write to your national legislators, state legislators, and governor in favor of affirmative action. Encourage friends to do the same.

Write to your city or town government representative to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day like these cities did. Illuminative has created a toolkit for this project. Right now it feels like you have to identify yourself before giving your opinion about something, and according to the way you describe yourself you’ll be judged regardless of the actual value of your words. It’s like people don’t care to listen.we should try to understand our lives as a dynamic flowing of positions" as opposed to the rigid identity norms that have been imposed by capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. We all need racism to end, we are not doing people of color a favor. Victimizing them is really dehumanizing, and incredibly damaging. "We need policies, programs, and incentives.". These are the changes we need. Right now, the focus is on microagressions, that, yes, need to be eliminated as well, but the problem is bigger than that. Do deep canvassing about race and racial justice. Many SURJ groups are organizing them, so many people can do it through your local SURJ group. If they’re not already doing it, start it. I recently read 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘞𝘩𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘗𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘊𝘢𝘯 𝘋𝘰 𝘕𝘦𝘹𝘵 by @emmadabiri and felt inspired to share my main takeaways from this insightful, radical essay. Stand outside of the stores from #17 with a sign that reads “[Company] uses prison labor” even if for 30 mins a few times a month.

Not good enough. What we need is coalition. A collective commitment to empathy and change based on the foundations of both self-examination and grounded critical thought, aimed at the mechanisms of exploitation, which is capitalism. One of my hopes with the book is, I want people to join the dots and see connections between things that they might not have seen previously. I want different people experiencing different forms of oppression connecting. All these people joining those dots together and forming a coalition instead of being pitted against one another. That's what excites me and what my work is trying to do.” Frankly, there’s a huge gap in terms of what comes next. While we need to identify what to do, it’s important not to fixate on an endpoint or a final destination; such thinking is part of the problem. Rather we have to understand our lives as a dynamic flowing of positions. " This was a refreshing and necessary book to read. Refreshing because so much of the discourse on race is driven by the USA’s cultural hegemony – whereas this book is rooted firmly in Ireland and the UK. While it does cover some of the US experience, it isn’t exclusively focussed there.Donate to groups that are working to put women of color into elected office, to get out the vote, and to restore voting rights to disenfranchised voters. Attend town halls, candidate meet-and-greets, etc for political candidates and ask about ending mass incarceration, reducing mandatory minimum sentences, reducing or ending solitary confinement, decriminalizing weed, ending cash bail, divesting from private prisons, divesting from banks, divesting from banks that finance the Dakota Access Pipeline, etc. An insider’s account of the rampant misconduct within the Trump administration, including the tumult surrounding the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. Another major aspect of this book is the criticisms of social media and the commercialization of activism. She talks about how so much of social media is just posturing and sharing information but rarely knowledge, while often being more concerned with who is more marketable than who is actually making progress.

History is now. We are living it. If we can’t accept the past and how it affects wealth and opportunity and knowledge production and value systems, we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.” Call or write to your federal legislators in support of The Democracy Restoration Act (s. 481), which would enact a simple rule: Americans who are out of prison and living in the community get to vote in federal elections. If someone has completed their sentence, they should be free to fully participate in elections. Call or write to your state legislators and governor to support state-wide criminal justice reform including reducing mandatory minimum sentences, reducing sentences for non-violent drug crimes, passing “safety valve” law to allow judges to depart below a mandatory minimum sentence under certain conditions, creating alternatives to incarceration, and passing “second look” sentencing (for current legislation by state FAMM created this spreadsheet). Study after study shows that racism fuels racial disparities in imprisonment, and about 90% of the US prison population are at the state and local level.I'm so glad that I requested the book and that I actually got it. I'm especially glad that I didn't leave in on my kindle app forever (like I always do), but that I read it right away.