In their day, strong men in spandex were celebrated for bringing justice to their cities. But today, our concept of justice is markedly different than it was in the 1960s: beating up or caging enough “bad guys” will never eliminate society’s scourges. The real options are harder and do not work 100 percent of the time. We cannot count on cheap, flawless, always reliable alternatives to prison and policing any more than we can count on Spiderman to stop a robbery.
Welcome to This Week in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. This week, Breonna Taylor’s grand jury recordings were released. Trump
The 11th Circuit’s recent decision serves as a reminder that institutions of racial domination do not simply die, but rather evolve over time. We must work to undo the myriad ways in which our democracy systematically favors White voices over Black.
Welcome to This Week in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. This week, Amy Coney Barrett was selected to replace Justice
The message of our federal and state governments failing to protect (and sometimes actively harming) Black trans women is terrifying: if the government doesn’t care about Black trans women, then citizens don’t have to care either. In other words, because the law treats Black trans women with disregard and violence, it gives individuals a free pass to do the same.
By a 6-3 majority, the Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County held that Title VII protects employees from discrimination
This week, the Department of Homeland Security investigates allegations of unwanted hysterectomies at an immigration detention center, postal workers face mounting COVID-19 risks as the election approaches, and the Education Department withholds millions of dollars in desegregation grant money from Connecticut schools.
Welcome to This Week in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. SCOTUS will consider access to medical abortions, while the 11th
The recent uprisings in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black people by police have amplified decades-long efforts by Black students and activists to abolish school police. We must collectively follow these Black leaders to ensure that schools are redesigned to nurture their most vulnerable students.
The criminalization of welfare, then, is a reminder that calls to divest from police and reinvest in social services must also be accompanied by calls to address the surveillance and stigma that currently comes with receiving assistance. Welfare programs often mirror many of the tactics and organizing principles of policing. Through surveillance and an onslaught of bureaucratic hoops to jump through, one feels “the psychic weight of living their lives under the watchful eye of the state.”
If you are new to abolition, I do not expect you to fully embrace these values. Rather, I again ask you to be courageously curious. When presented with new ideas, people project their own wants and needs onto them to make them familiar. Because abolition is borne from Black radical imagination, most people’s projections evoke fear. Black radical imagination is completely counter to the standard we are told to orient towards. Even with more people discussing race issues, we as a collective are still taught to fear and criminalize Blackness, especially in law school where the golden standard is white male “objectivity.”
