distributed leisure

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered in broad daylight by four Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officers. This gut-wrenching tragedy, in addition to the police murders of Tony McDade, Yassin Mohamed, Sean Reed, Breonna Taylor, Steven Taylor, the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery, and the hate crime murder of Nina Pop, and countless others, has re-sparked collective outrage that is being met with the brute force of state repression — all during a pandemic that is disproportionately claiming Black and Indigenous lives in this country.

We, as Asians4BlackLives (A4BL), join our comrades in denouncing these gross displays of state-sanctioned police violence, and renew our call to all non-Black people of Asian descent to move in solidarity with Black communities for Black liberation and resistance.

We cannot look past the fact that Tou Thao and J. Alexander Kueng, two of the MPD police officers involved in the murder of George Floyd, are Asian American. While we acknowledge the complex and contradictory histories of who make up “Asian Americans,” another instance of the direct involvement of officers of Asian descent in the death of a Black man is not just a damning symbol for Asian American complicity in the death of Black people, but also a direct manifestation of anti-Blackness in our communities.

This history of anti-Blackness runs deep, from the murder of Latasha Harlins by Soon Ja Du to daily practices of racial profiling and cultural appropriation. Non-Black Asians must act swiftly to end all forms of violence against Black people. We call on Asian Americans to reject the model minority myth, which was historically created to delegitimize Black resistance while absolving non-Black Americans from addressing systemic racism. It is our duty to continue the legacy of past and present Black and Asian solidarity — from activists like Yuri Kochiyama, Grace Lee Boggs, and Kartar Dhillon to the Black Buffalo soldiers who defected from the U.S. army in support of Philippine independence. This means organizing our communities in solidarity and protesting using a diversity of tactics, including shutting down business as usual to ensure that each life wrongfully taken by the police does not go in vain.

Abolish the Police

We echo what Black activists have said countless times: the institution of modern-day policing — with its origins in slave-catching — has always served to protect private property and the ruling elite at the expense of Black, Indigenous, and poor and working class communities. Police violence against Black people is not the result of some officers being “a few bad apples.” The trees producing these apples are rotten to the roots. The problem cannot be fixed with simple reform measures — abolition of the police as an institution is necessary to prevent further Black lives from being lost.

Uplift Black Resistance, Help Build Black Power

We uplift the demands from the Movement for Black Lives and amplify the call to divest from police and invest in community. We also join Reclaim the Block, Black Visions Collective, and others who have called on the Minneapolis City Council to defund the Minneapolis Police Department (and all police departments) and invest in resources that actually keep Black communities (and thereby also all communities) safe and healthy by sharing and signing this petition.

We urge our communities to continue to join spaces and groups of people that are on the frontlines of building a society rooted in Black Power and Black Liberation, a world where Black Lives truly matter:

Build strong communities and community safety plans; #DontCalltheCops.

Fight to abolish the prison industrial complex that continuously profits from locking up Black people and perpetuates a never-ending cycle of criminalization and violence. #AbolishPrisons.

Fight to #CancelRent and raise the minimum wage so that Black communities can afford to live in the neighborhoods they are often displaced from.

Fight for a just transition, a #BlackNewDeal, #RedNewDeal and a #GreenNewDeal to counter the greed of corporations that for too long have profited off of the destruction of our Mother Earth and the environmental racism that disproportionately affects Black and Indigenous people.

Fight for #MedicareForAll, so that Black people can have access to quality healthcare that does not lead to catastrophic spending and bankruptcy.

Fight for a society in which wealth is not concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires who utilize the police to violently protect their interests.

Fight against imperialism, which threatens Black communities globally, and support people-led movements worldwide.

Build life together that promotes not just surviving, but thriving: SOLUTIONS not PUNISHMENT.

Research the Black-led groups in your area. Talk to your non-Black friends and family about anti-Blackness. Listen, plug in to action, and donate to Black individuals and organizations.

Donate to vetted, Black-led organizations, bail funds, and allied groups in your area. In Minnesota, we recommend the following, which are currently accepting donations as of June 1, 2020: George Floyd’s family GoFundMe, CTUL, a low-income worker of color-led organization (mostly Latinx) down the block from where George Floyd was killed, who have been offering mutual aid to protesters, and Northstar Health Collective, street medics treating people and training folks how to take care of each other in protests.

In all these struggles, follow the leadership and center the perspectives of those most affected.

All lives do not matter until Black Lives Matter. Asian Americans need to strengthen our solidarity with our Black siblings. We must struggle and fight together for an end to the unjust siege against Black communities everywhere, and put an end to the police state and all forms of state-sanctioned violence.

Together, with our comrades, we demand:

Justice for George Floyd Justice for Tony McDade Justice for Yassin Mohamed Justice for Sean Reed Justice for Breonna Taylor Justice for Steven Taylor Justice for Ahmaud Arbery Justice for Nina Pop Justice for all Black Lives

Black Lives Matter

Anyhow, I was like okay, let’s look up tonic immobility as a general concept and see if there’s anything about why it kicks in in the situations it does. And, I kid you not, this thing with chickens and lines being drawn from their beaks is so common that it’s heavily featured in the tonic immobility Simple English Wikipedia article. (Weirdly enough, nothing about tonic immobility in chickens is in the regular English wikipedia article - or even much detail about tonic immobility in other bird species - even though there turns out to be a lot of research on the topic). What’s more, the Simple English page references a source about that behavior that says the earliest known mention of it is from 1646! (It was in Mirabile Experimentum de Imaginatione Gallinae by Athanasius Kircher). The source for that claim is a peer-reviewed paper about tonic immobility in chickens in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, which is pretty reliable… although I don’t have access to the paper to confirm it. (The paper is here, if someone wants to pull it so we can confirm.)

Some other quick hunting on google scholar resulted in… honestly, quite a lot more studies on tonic immobility in chickens than I expected. While I don’t have access to most of the papers on the topic, here’s what I can find from the abstracts and excerpts that are public access: tonic immobility in chickens can be induced just by holding them face-down while restraining their legs and wings - the line in the sand apparently isn’t necessary; ventral induction of tonic immobility is most successful with very young chicks and not as successful reliably with adults; the hypothesis that tonic immobility is a fear-related state apparently is attributed to a paper from as far back as 1881, but evidence either for or against that cause isn’t conclusive; different strains of chickens have different levels of susceptibility to tonic immobility and a study on that indicated it might be related to different levels of emotionality; repeatedly experiencing tonic immobility over a period of time made some chickens less susceptible to it, as did taming through handling before attempting to induce tonic immobility. 

So. Uh. Here’s the tl;dr of what I’ve got:

We know that holding chickens down and restraining their legs and wings can put them into tonic immobility, and maybe drawing a line has something to do with it. 

Nobody is really sure if tonic immobility in chickens is caused by a fear state or predator avoidance or something else - and it could be that it may be caused by different things for different species and seems similar because of convergent evolution - so we don’t really have any way to know for sure why the chicken is immobilized by the experience. 

We don’t know for sure if it’s stressful or not for the chicken based on extant research, but tonic immobility seems to be a stressful experience in at least two other species known to experience it. (I did find one paper that looked at things like heart rate, respiration rate and body temperature during tonic immobility, but can’t access it). 

It may look funny, but tonic immobility in chickens is apparently really complicated and a major research focus.