News from our partners working on criminalization, plus our walking tour featured in Fodor’s
Update: We shared details on a workshop on prison abolition organized by Critical Resistance, but the event was already sold out. We apologize for the confusion. For details on upcoming gatherings to support incarcerated survivors and the movement to abolish prisons, visit the Survived and Punished events page.
Radical Black Women of Harlem Walking Tour featured in Fodor’s
Asha Futterman BC ‘21 and Mariame Kaba, BCRW Researcher-in-Residence, collaborated last spring to develop the Radical Black Women of Harlem Walking Tour with a guide researched by Futterman with support from Kaba. Together they’ve led several tours, and several other groups have used the guide to go on tours on their own.
This month, Fodor’s featured Futterman and Kaba’s collaboration in “This Walking Tour Highlights Billie Holiday, Audre Lorde, and the Radical Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance,” an article on New York City trip ideas by Bani Amor.
“I noticed that tours [in Harlem] focused mostly on men and very well-known figures,” Futterman said. “I think [this tour] is a subversion of a tourist’s experience of Harlem because of our focus on relatively unknown Black women, many of whom were queer, communist, subversive people,” like Lorde, she continued.
Download the walking tour guide here and read the post from Fodor’s here.
Unraveling Criminalizing Webs: Building Police Free Futures
In October, BCRW launched a new issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online, “Unraveling Criminalizing Webs: Building Police Free Futures” co-edited by BCRW Researcher-in-Residence Andrea J. Ritchie and Levi Craske BC ’18.
This issue brings together contributions from speakers at BCRW’s 2017 Invisible No More: Resisting Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color in Troubled Times conference, which explored and built on themes from BCRW Researcher in Residence Andrea J. Ritchie’s book Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color.
Tackling “broken windows” policing, the war on drugs, immigration enforcement, policing of gender, sexuality, pregnancy and parenthood, and police responses to gender-based violence through the lens of women, trans and gender nonconforming people’s experiences, through first person narratives, poetry, essays, and video clips from the conference, contributors come together to issue a clarion call for dismantling criminalizing webs and working toward police free futures where ongoing police killings and violence targeting Black women, trans and gender nonconforming people and women, trans and gender nonconforming people of color would not be possible.
In October, the BCRW community gathered for an event to launch this important issue. The event began with a commemoration of Atatiana Jefferson, a young Black woman recently killed in her own home by Ft. Worth police officer conducting a “welfare check,” and video performances of poetry by Simone Johns, author of TESTIFY, whose poems Elegy for Dead Black Women #1, On [Not] Watching the Video and Questions are featured in the issue, and of an excerpt of Cara Page’s choreopoem Psalms for the Mismeasured and Unfit, also excerpted in the issue. Contributors Ejeris Dixon, Victoria Law, Dinah Ortiz, Erin Miles Cloud, Mizue Aizeki, Chaumtoli Huq, and Meryleen Mena, offered updates and calls to action on the issues addressed in their contributions to the issue, and shared what gives them hope as we continue to build toward police free futures. They were joined by Adama Bah, who was targeted by law enforcement as a teenager in a baseless and Islamophobic “war on terror” investigation. Bah’s story is featured in Invisible No More and Chaumtoli Huq’s essay, as well as in the documentary Adama. Please continue to read and share the issue far and wide!
Interrupting Medical Criminalization
Building on a series of convenings over the past year exploring sites, forms, and drivers of criminalization of women, trans and gender nonconforming people of color, last month the Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action initiative at BCRW joined with Sistersong: Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective to host a one day gathering at the Let’s Talk about Sex conference in Atlanta. Organizers and advocates across reproductive justice, child welfare, disability justice, drug policy, immigrant justice, and HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ movements came together to discuss the role of medical providers in criminalization of pregnant people, parents, drug users, people with disabilities and unmet mental health needs, migrants, people living with HIV, and trans and gender nonconforming people. Participants explored opportunities to interrupt criminalization through access to medical care, and envisioned cross-movement strategies to build support for best practices among medical providers and anti-criminalization movements. Stay tuned for resources for providers and advocates!
Learn more about Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action.
Changing Frequencies
In October, Cara Page embarked on the #TransformtheMIC road tour, sharing her medical industrial complex timeline (an interactive project that you can preview here) and collaborating with organizers and healthcare practitioners. In Atlanta, Georgia, Page met with a group of Black community midwives working to end the regulation of midwifery and birthing, and fighting against Black infant and maternal mortality. Stay tuned to hear more about this campaign!
This month, November, Page is traveling to Mexico City as a guest of Urgent Action Fund to meet with Latin American healers and human rights defenders who are building a deeper understanding of the role of collective care, safety, and healing justice for the spiritual, emotional, physical, psychic, and environmental wellbeing of communities in a global context. http://www.tb-credit.ru/dengi-v-dolg.html http://www.tb-credit.ru/zaimy-online.html