good night

* Join a group * - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M9Y46lhZSVIRyE1Qh74Tj5uu91VKs5nhFCUudnFOqOg/

A long infographic explaining mutual aid, complete with drawings. 

1. Mutual aid is when we work together to meet all our needs. (Image: Two people working together to hold up a sign that says “Solidarity not charity”) 

2. Mutual aid can be a big act, or a small one. (Image: For the big act, there’s a hand holding a house, with a speech bubble that says, “I can give you a place to stay.” For the small act, there’s a person wearing a shirt that says “Direct action gets the goods.” There is a speech bubble next to them that says, “I can give you directions”) 

3. Mutual aid can be: Emotional, material, informational, or financial. (Image: For “emotional”, there’s a hand holding a phone, with a speech bubble that says, “We’re here if you want to talk.” For “material”, there’s the Food Not Bombs logo, which is a pink fist holding up a carrot. There’s a speech bubble below it that says, “We can give you fresh vegetables.” For informational, there’s a hand holding out a book, with a speech bubble that says “We made a guide to sewing masks.” For “financial,” there’s a hand holding some cash, with a speech bubble that says “We can cover your rent this month.” 

4. Mutual aid can be a way to think about things you already do… (Image: A computer screen with text on it that says, “We’re stronger together”. A speech bubble next to it says, “I’ll lead our virtual writing group next week.) …or a way to dream up new projects. (Image: A person saying, “Our neighborhood needs a way to swap jigsaw puzzles.”) 

5. Mutual aid can be a response to a crisis…and lasting networks that structure our communities. (Image: A person holding up two signs that say, “All we have is each other / All we need is each other”) 

6. Mutual aid is a way to get your needs met…and a way to help others meet theirs. (Image: A hand holding out a roll of toilet paper with text on it that says, “give what you have / get what you need.” Two speech bubbles coming from different directions say: “Does anyone have extra toilet paper? / Does anyone need gloves?”) 

7. Mutual aid is a way to take better care of each other right now…and a way to change the world for good. (Image: A person running to the side, saying “What do you need?” They are wearing a lab coat with text on the end that says, “People over profit” 

8. Mutual aid is something you can get more involved in today! Join a group, start a group, or reach out to your communities! (Image: A group of smiling people. One of them is saying, “I have links to groups and guides!”) 

how to organize a community fridge from iohnyc on instagram

“One topic that almost immediately comes up anytime abolition is under discussion is what will be done about violent or harmful actions, especially people who enact sexual violence or violence against children; there seems to be a common concern that a post-abolition world will have no way of preventing or addressing harm, or that violence against women and children will be accepted as an inevitable price to pay for a world without prisons.

It feels important to me in those conversations to point out that abolitionist movements have and are still heavily led by Black women, a demographic that experiences disproportionately high levels of violence in general and sexualized and gendered violence in particular. It seems at best misguided and at worst undermining to imagine that Black women, of all people, would create a framework that forgets or doesn’t understand such a major element of lived experience.

To that end, two things. First, the prison industrial complex as it stands is a powerful and unchecked site of sexualized violence, not an antidote to it; rarely, if ever, does the justice system actually address rapists or pedophiles, and when it does, they are not prevented from causing harm, but moved into a prison system to cause harm to a caged population of people.

Prevention of sexual violence is one of the most important reasons to dismantle the prison-industrial complex, as sexual violence against incarcerated people is rampant and unmitigated, as is sexual violence enacted by the police; it’s the second most common type of police misconduct reported. Do you know any survivors of sexual harm who have been healed by the prison industrial complex? Is it effectively addressing this harm now? If not, what is actually lost by ending it? What could be gained by imagining understandings of “consequences” that don’t include prisons?

Second, abolitionist thought is not only very aware of the reality of violence and has considered the need to address harm, including gendered and sexualized harm, but has worked hard to imagine meaningful ways of preventing, addressing, and healing harm and violence outside of frameworks of punishment and cages. Living in a carceral culture, it can feel impossible to imagine that there can be meaningful consequences for harm without a criminal justice system; abolition asks you to try.

“Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights” in Women, Race and Class, 1981

“Race and Criminalization; Black Americans and the Punishment Industry” in The House that Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano, 1997

“Political Prisoners, Prisons and Black Liberation”, originally from If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, ed. Angela Davis & Betty Aptheker, 1971

“Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist” in Women, Race and Class, 1981

“I Used to be Your Sweet Mama: Ideology, Sexuality and Domesticity” in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, 1999

“From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick Douglass and the Convict Lease System” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James, 1998

Angela Davis: An Autobiography, 1974 [reprinted in 1988]

“Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James, 1998

“Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves” in The Massachusetts Review , 1972

“Globalism and the Prison-Industrial Complex: An Interview with Angela Davis”, conducted by Avery F. Gordon, 1999

“Class and Race in the Early Women’s Rights Campaign” in Women, Race and Class, 1981

Are Prisons Obsolete, 2003

IT’S THAT TIME AGAIN

That is, your quarterly reminder that I’m still alive! As are the rest of StarBuds, hip hip hooray.

Big gorgeous 35-page chapter this time around, so let’s jump right in!