[A monthly link list of recommended articles, videos, podcasts, photos, tweets … you name it]
[Videos]
World music: mai 2020
Sascha Baron Cohen trolls a right wing event.
Michael Che’s Civil Rights Update
[Music]
Public Enemy – State Of The Union (STFU)
[Podcasts]
Rassismus made in Germany [deutschlandfunk] – “Zwei Wochen nach dem Tod von George Floyd sind auch in Deutschland Zehntausende auf die Straßen gegangen, um gegen Rassismus und Polizeigewalt zu protestieren. Warum die Debatte über strukturelle Diskriminierung von People of Color in Deutschland noch ganz am Anfang steht.”
Rabbit Hole [nyt] – “What is the internet doing to us? The Times tech columnist Kevin Roose discovers what happens when our lives move online.”
The Lydian Spin – “The Lydian Spin has brought together V.Vale and Marian Wallace of RE/SEARCH Publications, Author & Musician Eugene Robinson of OXBOW, Filmmaker Eva Aridjis, and Weasel Walter in a special podcast to discuss the protests that are raging throughout America.” Some far out things being said in this podcast, but it’s pretty great.
[Articles English]
To Bear Witness: Real Talk about White Supremacy in Art Museums Today [burnaway] – “After six years of working as a museum curator—at a small, a mid-size, and, currently, a very large institution—I’ve learned how nefarious the culture of white supremacy in art museums really is.”
RSS Box – “RSS Box generates the “missing” feeds for Twitter accounts, YouTube channels, Instagram users, and various other sites that fail to offer RSS.”
Facebook Removes Trump Ads Displaying Symbol Used by Nazis [nyt] – “Facebook on Thursday removed advertisements posted on its platform by the Trump campaign that prominently featured a symbol used by Nazis to classify political prisoners during World War II, saying the imagery violated company policy.”
The Police Weren’t Created to ‘Protect and Serve.’ They Were Created to ‘Maintain Order.’ A Brief Look at the History of Police in America [downwithtyranny] – “In the 1800s] the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization, by which they meant bourgeois civilization, from the disorder of the working class.”
Meritocracy Legitimizes, Deepens Inequality [inter press service] – “Progressives inflame middle-class resentment, and trigger elite resistance while demagogues and charlatans monopolize and exploit meritocracy’s discontents. Meritocratic inequality therefore induces not only deep discontent but also widespread pessimism, verging on despair.”
TERF Wars: Why Transphobia Has no Place in Feminism. | Laurie Penny – “Now, more than ever, cis queers and feminists need to stand behind their trans siblings in solidarity. Any other position is intellectually and ethically bankrupt. It is shameful to see feminists fall prey to the same policing of gender and sexuality that patriarchal logic has laid on us for so long. I’m sick and tired of it all, and trans people everywhere are exhausted and scared, and in a terrifying, misogynist, fast-changing world, all of us, trans and cis, could do with a little more sisterhood.”
Cornel West on US protests: The chickens have come home to roost [middle east eye] – “what do you do if you got a system that basically cannot reform itself. All this talk about reform and police training, but all of this sounds empty. We have heard this over and over again. So right now you’re going to see Black neoliberal elite trying to somehow seize this moment and convince folk that they can deliver when more and more people recognise they can’t.”
The Trump Administration’s Hateful Message on Health Care for Transgender Americans | Masha Gessen [the new yorker] – “On Friday, the Trump Administration released a set of guidelines dictating that discrimination against L.G.B.T. people in health care is not forbidden. It was the fourth anniversary of the Pulse massacre, when forty-nine people were murdered in a gay night club in Orlando, Florida. It was three months and one day since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic. It was days, perhaps a week or two, before the Supreme Court is expected to release its ruling on whether discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.”
In New York, Protesters’ Pride Beats Police Brutality | Molly Crabapple [the new york review of books] – “All the polite, incremental reformism—of sensitivity trainings, tweaks to use-of-force rules, and appeals to better nature—was revealed as hollow in the face of the protesters’ justified fury, of their courage, of their pride.”
Global Climate Report – May 2020 | State of the Climate [ncdc.noaa.gov] – “The global land and ocean surface temperature for May 2020 tied with 2016 as the highest in the 141-year record at 0.95°C (1.71°F) above the 20th century average of 14.8°C (58.6°F). The 10 warmest Mays have all occurred since 1998; however, the 2014–2020 Mays are the seven warmest in the 141-year record. ”
stolen | Adrian Brandon – “This series is dedicated to the many black people that were robbed of their lives at the hands of the police. In addition to using markers and pencil, I use time as a medium to define how long each portrait is colored in. 1 year of life = 1 minute of color. Tamir Rice was 12 when he was murdered, so I colored his portrait for 12 minutes.”
American Normal – Laurie Penny – “America is not special. It is not too big to fail. It can fall apart like any other wacked-out rogue state that would rather set fire to its own future than face the moral contradictions of history. White people and anyone else unused to being under siege in their own communities will have to accept that there will be no return to the lives we are used to, and nor should there be. That ending violence in the future involves facing the pain of the present and the past, and that is painful, and necessary, because white America has wallowed in its own slimy self-exoneration for way too long.”
Alex Vitale – The End of Policing [verso] – “The problem is not overpolicing, it is policing itself” available as a free eBook (at least was)
Abolish Policing [critical resistance] – “As an abolitionist organization, Critical Resistance supports abolitionist reforms to dismantle the systems of policing and works to create viable alternatives in our communities.”
Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop – Officer A. Cab – “American policing is a thick blue tumor strangling the life from our communities and if you don’t believe it when the poor and the marginalized say it, if you don’t believe it when you see cops across the country shooting journalists with less-lethal bullets and caustic chemicals, maybe you’ll believe it when you hear it straight from the pig’s mouth.”
Donald Trump’s Fascist Performance | Masha Gessen [the new yorker] – “Whether or not he is capable of grasping the concept, Trump is performing fascism.”
Minneapolis lawmakers vow to disband police department in historic move [the guardian] – “City council members declare intent to ‘abolish’ embattled agency and replace with alternative model in wake of George Floyd’s killing”
Racism in America is not the exception – it’s the norm | Nesrine Malik [the guardian] – “Those clutching their pearls at police brutality think the US’s inherent virtue will prevail. But it was never there to begin with”
Thousands Who Got COVID-19 in March Are Still Sick [atlantic] – “The disease’s “long-haulers” have endured relentless waves of debilitating symptoms—and disbelief from doctors and friends.”
Black Squares Don’t Save Black Lives [hyperallergic] – “If you consider yourself an ally to Black people, it shouldn’t just be about you or how you feel; it should be about how you can help.”
Teargas and pepper spray will accelerate spread of Covid-19, doctors warn [the guardian] – “As crowds protest across the US, more than 1,000 medical experts raise fears police tactics could worsen the pandemic”
We can’t be 100% sure face masks work – but that shouldn’t stop us wearing them [the guardian] – “Public health experts like me know the only conclusive trial of masks will come from them being rolled out in the real world”
Militarizing the Minds of Police Officers [the new yorker] – “Three years ago, amid the protests erupting in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, President Barack Obama ordered a review of a federal program allowing military equipment to be transferred from the armed forces to state and local police departments.”
BLM Protests 2020 – Avi Schiffmann brought us the first great Covid19 data tracking site, he now built one to track the George Floyd protests.
Riot Medicine [pdf] – by Håkan Geijer
Mapping Police Violence – “Police killed 1,099 people in 2019.”
Why So Many Police Are Handling the Protests Wrong [the marshall project] – “Disproportionate use of force can turn a peaceful protest violent, research shows. ”
Who Exactly Is Doing the Looting, and Who’s Being Looted? [jacobin] – “We live in an Orwellian era, in which working-class people pilfering convenience store goods is called “looting.” Rich people stealing hundreds of billions of dollars, on the other hand, is just well-functioning “public policy.””
[Articles German/French]
„Es gibt eben Dinge, an die man sich nicht zwingend kollektiv erinnern möchte“ [daslamm] – “Ein Beispiel für die Stadt Zürich wäre etwa die Bank Leu: Die gehörte mal zur Hälfte der Stadt Zürich und investierten in die Compagnie des Indes, die unter anderem Sklavenhandel betrieben hat. Gerade hier ist die Kontinuität spannend. Denn diese Bank wurde Anfang der 00er Jahre von der CS übernommen, die sich mit Berufung auf das Schweizer Bankgeheimnis bis 2010 weigerte, die entsprechenden Archive zu öffnen.”
Anti-Rassismus-Aktionen: Gemeinsam runter vom Sockel [der spiegel] – “Wir sollten unsere rassistische Geschichte kennen und aus ihr lernen – darin sind sich die meisten einig. Aber warum meinen manche, dass gerade deshalb alles beim Alten und jede Kolonialstatue stehen bleiben sollte?”
Rassismus [woz] – “Liebes «Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz»! Wir haben gesehen, dass dir ein Eintrag zum Stichwort «Rassismus» fehlt. Wir haben deshalb einen Vorschlag formuliert. Gern geschehen!”
«Die Einvernahme war für mich so schlimm wie die Vergewaltigung selbst» [republik] – “Sie werden nicht ernst genommen, müssen ihre Unschuld beweisen, werden schlecht informiert: Viele Opfer von sexualisierter Gewalt erleben die Befragung durch die Polizei als traumatisierend. Die Geschichten von fünf Frauen.”
Der Superschläfer [republik] – “Wie der Schweizer Nachrichtendienst einen islamistischen Gefährder konstruierte. Und wie die Schweizer Regierung damit die schärferen Antiterrorgesetze rechtfertigte, die derzeit im Parlament debattiert werden. Was genau geht hier vor? Ein Behördenskandal im Zeitalter des «War on Terror».”
Wie sähe eine Welt ohne Polizei aus? [woz] – “Der Soziologieprofessor Alex Vitale ist der Vordenker einer Idee, die in den USA rapide an Popularität gewinnt: die der Abschaffung der Polizei. So hat die Stadt Minneapolis nach dem Mord an George Floyd und den darauffolgenden Protesten beschlossen, ihren Polizeiapparat aufzulösen.”
Reconquista Internet – Neue Studie zeigt Wirksamkeit von Gegenrede im Netz [netzpolitik.org] – “Forschende haben an einem Institut in den USA erstmals in großem Umfang untersucht, wie sich Gegenrede im Netz auf Hassrede auswirkt.”
siamo tutti antifascisti? [das lamm] – “Denn wenn plötzlich alle antifaschistisch sind, dann werden tatsächlich aktive Antifaschist*innen zum Sonderbaren. Dann wird die schwarz-rote Flagge zum ominösen Symbol, das verboten gehört.”
“Lettre adressée à mes amis blancs qui ne voient pas où est le problème…” – Virginie Despentes [france inter] – “La foule scande : Justice pour Adama. Ces jeunes savent ce qu’ils disent quand ils disent si tu es noir ou arabe la police te fait peur : ils disent la vérité. Ils disent la vérité et ils demandent la justice.”
[Older articles, still great]
A siege. A bomb. 48 dogs. And the black commune that would not surrender [the guardian] – “Forty years ago, Philadelphia erupted in one of the most dramatic shoot-outs of the black liberation struggle. The surreal story of the Move 9 – and what happened to them next”
The story of a proletarian life – Bartolomeo Vanzetti [libcom] – “A short autobiography by famous Italian-American anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti, half of Sacco and Vanzetti, who were framed and sent to the electric chair because of their beliefs in 1927.”
Emory Douglas: The Art of The Black Panthers
R.I.P.
Delbert Africa (see above for a background article on the Move 9)
Sarah Hegazy
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Header Photo: Black Lives Matter Banner on a bridge near Bern, Switzerland