Black Lives Matter

Damn.  Just.

A displaced California tribe reclaims sacred land The Mountain Maidu return to their valley, but the work of reclamation never ends.

“A couple of years earlier, I set out to find stories of people reclaiming nature. It’s a funny word, reclamation, with a definition ripe with contradiction: to take back, to make right, and to make useful. The connotation is both moral and pragmatic, and sometimes the results are disastrous, but reclaiming seems to be an irrepressible human instinct. While some examples bordered on deception — grass seed pressure-sprayed atop flattened former mountaintops to mitigate mining, for example, or new wetlands created in vacant lots to justify development elsewhere — other stories were inspirational and very nearly triumphant. The best of them seemed to be a kind of re-reclaiming — re-taking what had once been taken. Making right what had gone wrong. Re-defining what useful might mean. The Mountain Maidu’s reclamation story — the one we were here to commemorate — was one of the very best.”

aka for every transphobe i had to interact with i found a link to help donate to trans women. you can definitely send me more because i bet im gonna need more.

trans women of color collective

homeless black transwomen (nearly there)

black trans woman transition fund (23k of 50k)

help a trans woman escape yemen (3k of 12k)

save the gully queens of jamaica (45k of 100k)

memorial fund for bree black (3k of 10k)

trans woman of color seeking housing (nearly there)

memorial fund for chyna gibson (4k of 15k donated)

black trans woman gender affirmation fund (20k of 45k)

transition fund (2k of 15k)

medical funds (tw: r*pe) (11k of 20k)

poc trans woman transition fund (5k of 35k)

transition fund (6k of 10k)

support trans asylum seekers (usage of queer) (19k of 25k)

major surgery transitional fund (2k of 95k)

medical support (diabetic coma) (13k of 15k)

transitional funds (10k of 25k)

trans pride march (920 of 1.8k)

hrt fundraiser (445 of 3.6k)

reentry fund (help with housing, clothing, etc) (2k of 4k)

transitional surgery (990 of 5k)

transition fund (2k of 50k)

memorial fund for lisa bryk (tw s*icide mention in description) (7k of 20k)

transitional fund (3k of 20k)

bottom surgery fund (2.5k of 5k)

help two trans women get on their feet (160 of 5k)

supports trans women of color in legal system (and reentry) 

help a trans woman escape a bad household (4.5k of 10k)

support a trans woman after being attacked (810 of 2k)

help for medical treatments + better living (545 of 3.5k)

help trans woman pay for car repairs (19.7k of 25k)

trans woman of color transition fund (3.8k of 20k)

incarcerated trans woman college fund (12k of 20k)

donation to flee an ab*sive house before becoming homeless (1.3k of 6k)

vocal surgery fundraiser (1k of 5k)

support to keep a trans woman off the streets (immediately 150 but anything past that helps as well)

gender conformation surgery donation (77.5k of 100k)

help two trans women get conceal and carry permits (50 of 1.5k)

help a black trans woman fight cancer (3.4k of 5k)

the okra project (donates home cooked meals to black trans people) *

LAST UPDATED: 9/1

The initiative was begun by Ashley Scott and Renee Walters, two Black women who wanted to build a safe space for their own families.

If you’d like to donate to the Freedom Georgia Initiative, CLICK HERE.

Students at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School held a sit-in protest Monday.

The group’s action were in response to a racist video that was filmed three years ago. The video shows students of the Fieldston school chanting racist and homophobic slurs.

Those who took part in the protest say they want to shed light that their school hasn’t done enough to show that intolerance and racism of any kind will not be tolerated.

Students say they’re willing to block administrators from their offices to prompt a discussion about the issue.

Students from Horace Mann School in Riverdale also joined the protest.

“The reasons why we made the walk here because we want to show solidarity for the students at Fieldston,” one protester said. “It’s too late for this, we are getting tired of this. Going forward, we are reunited. We won’t tolerate this.”

They are pushing for bias training for faculty and parents, the hiring of more faculty of color and establishing a new system for reporting bias incidents.

A letter from the private school was sent out to parents regarding the sit-in.

At least one parent says he’s proud that students are standing up for what they believe in.

“I applaud them,” he said. “That is a true sign of bravery. At such a young age, taking a stance and standing up for yourself.”

source

Who are the Uighurs?

The Uighurs are mostly Muslims, and number about 11 million in western China’s Xinjiang region. They see themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations, and their language is similar to Turkish.

But in recent decades, there’s been a mass migration of Han Chinese (China’s ethnic majority) to Xinjiang, and the Uighurs feel their culture and livelihoods are under threat.

Nowhere in the world, not even in North Korea, is the population monitored as strictly as it is in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.  Oppression has been in place for years, but has worsened massively in recent months.

- Uighurs can no longer openly practice Islam

- Men are not allowed to wear beards. Exception only for old people

- They can no longer learn their native language at school

- They cannot move freely around the country and cannot leave it

- All mosques have been turned into shops and office centers

Beijing has also turned Xinjiang into a security state that is extreme even by China’s standards, being a police state itself. The provincial government has recruited over 90,000 police officers in the last two years alone - twice as many as it recruited in the previous seven years. 

At the same time, Beijing is equipping the far-western region with state-of-the-art surveillance technology, with cameras illuminating every street all over the region, from the capital Urumqi to the most remote mountain village. Iris scanners and WiFi sniffers are in use in stations, airports and at the ubiquitous checkpoints - tools and programs that allow data traffic from wireless networks to be monitored.

Checkpoints are installed in every district of the city. In simple terms, you can not get from one area of the city to another without passing the checkpoint and the police.

The data is then collated by an “integrated joint operations platform” that also stores further data on the populace – from consumer habits to banking activity, health status and indeed the DNA profile of every single inhabitant of Xinjiang.

Anyone with a potentially suspicious data trail can be detained. The government has built up a grid of hundreds of re-education camps. Tens of thousands of people have disappeared into them in recent months.

“Qu xuexi,” meaning to go or be sent to study, is one of the most common expressions in Xinjiang these days. It is a euphemism for having been taken away and not having been seen or heard from since. The “schools” are re-education centers in which the detainees are being forced to take courses in Chinese and patriotism, without any indictment, due process or a fair hearing.

Xinjiang, one of the most remote and backward regions in booming China, has become a real-life dystopia. It provides a glimpse of what an authoritarian regime armed with 21st century technology is capable of.

Uighurs are very intimidated and refuse to talk to the press, even if they miraculously escaped the country. 

What’s happening in China is terrible. Maybe some people finally realize that the concentration camps are the reality of our time. There are concentration camps in America too. Don’t forget that. 

source 

If you’d rather listen to a basic outline of the problem, here’s a very well done conversation piece from Chris Hayes’s podcast, Why is This Happening.