THREE HALF EATEN CORNEAS

alice's disability advocacy naturally led her to palestine solidarity as the quote from the blog post announcing 'crips for esims' illustrates:

We also recognize that everyone in Gaza is now disabled due to the massive number of deaths, new disabilities, life-threatening illnesses and destruction of medical facilities going on. Such destruction also debilitates the land, water, and air, which will impact Palestinians and all surrounding life for generations to come. We owe our kin in Palestine to throw sand on the gears of genocide with our every breath. [source: the disability visibility project]

since december 2023, crips for esims for gaza has raised well over $3.1M and bought and maintained over 5,000 esims, undoubtedly saving lives.

in the past few days there has been intense winter flooding in gaza. donate to honor alice wong's memory–to keep people connected, to give disabled people the tools to advocate for themselves, to refuse to let palestine be silenced.

a mosque in scotland had to be put into lockdown. they are going door-to-door with hit lists and addresses in northern ireland, setting houses alight. they firebombed an imam's house in manchester. people of colour are being targeted and attacked by racist mobs in the street in broad daylight.

Even if they weren't organized as such the settlers still would continue their genocidal campaign, but it also further shows that at its core the United States, and the west as a whole, does not care about the sovereignty of *any nation* that isn't white, no matter their organization or level of wealth or literacy, or even if the United States Constitution was directly ripped from their own.

are you defending (in this instance) Irish Catholics as a proxy to give yourself grace, to lump yourself in with "the good ones?"

what you're actually doing is absolving yourself of action and self-reflection. that discomfort you feel about white people perpetrating racism is asking you to do something to bring your actions into alignment with your values. instead, you're discarding this feeling by doing some feel-good mental gymnastics to ensure that there is a narrative that gives you an escape hatch, an assurance that there are good white people in the world (ones with whom you identify).

instead, let your discomfort guide you to do something real because if you're not actively standing up against fascism and its children, you're laying down to get stepped on. here are some real things to do:

donate to support the people who have been attacked, displaced and traumatized in racist attacks in Belfast:

don't have money to spare? find local organizers, join them, triage immediate needs in your community, then play the long game to move the Overton Window towards inclusive values. i do not want to hear any wailing about how nothing you do matters, no one will do anything, etcetera, etcetera; these are more mental gymnastics that allow you to give yourself permission to to do nothing

don't have time, money, or energy to spare? go to your local library and pick up a book to educate yourself and build empathy:

no access to a library? do the internal work and pick apart your own internal biases about race (i'll give a starter question for reflection: why did you feel compelled to respond to a post about violence against Black people and immigrant communities by centering white people?)

1. makes your hands hurt

2. makes your head hurt

3. makes you really tired