More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 6 - June 9, 2020
What could they be but stardust, these people who refused to die, who refused to accept the idea that their lives did not matter, that their children’s lives did not matter?
Between 1982 and 2000, the number of people locked up in the state of California grows by 500 percent.
License plates are being made in prisons along with 50 percent of all American flags, but the real money in this period of prison expansion in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s is made by Victoria’s Secret, Whole Foods, AT&T and Starbucks.
Gang injunctions make otherwise legal, everyday activities—such as riding the bus with a friend or picking a spouse up from work late at night—illegal for people they target.
There are more people with mental health disorders in prison than in all of the psychiatric hospitals in the United States added up. In 2015, the Washington Post reported that, American prisons and jails housed an estimated 356,268 [people] with severe mental illness.… [a] figure [that] is more than 10 times the number of mentally ill patients in state psychiatric hospitals [in 2012, the last year for reliable data]—about 35,000 people.
Zora Neale Hurston once wrote that there are years that ask questions and years that answer them.
Who has ever been accountable to Black people or to my father, a man the world always presented with limited choices?
But of course Black Los Angeles in 1984, the year of his discharge, is experiencing rates of unemployment that rival those for Black people in apartheid South Africa.
I talk about the politics of personal responsibility, how it’s mostly a lie meant to keep us from challenging real-world legislative decisions that chart people’s paths, that undo people’s lives.
We sit with that for a time. What it means to not have the ability to love yourself. How do you honor something you do not love?
My community of friends, this chosen family of mine, loves in a way that sets an example for love. Their love as a triumph, as a breathing and alive testimony to what we mean when we say another world is possible.
It would be easy to speculate about the impact of years of cocaine use on my father’s heart, but I suspect that it will tell us less than if we could measure the cumulative effects of hatred, racism and indignity.
We learned quickly that intervention was either us alone and without medical professional support, or it was the police.
In California there are more than 4,800 barriers to re-entry, from jobs, housing and food bans, to school financial aid bans and the list goes on. You can have a two-year sentence but it doesn’t mean you’re not doing life.
What kind of society uses medicine as a weapon, keeps it from people needing to heal, all the while continuing to develop the drugs America’s prisons use to execute people?
How is it possible that the only response we have for poor people who are mentally ill is criminalization? How does this align with the notion of a democratic or free society—to not take care of the least of these? More mentally ill people in our nation’s prisons than in all of our psychiatric hospitals—combined?! Human beings charged with all manner of terrible-sounding crimes—terrorism!—like my brother has been. What kind of society do we live in?
Prisoners are literally an enslaved workforce, not only to external companies like Starbucks and Whole Foods, but to the state of California itself.
From my neighborhood in LA to the Bay Area to Brooklyn, Black and Brown people have been moved out as young white people build exciting new lives standing on the bones of ours. The drug war as ethnic cleansing.
Harm to white people, especially resourced white people, and the behaviors they engage in as a result, is framed sympathetically. Harm to us, more widespread, more embedded, more permanent, is framed as our own doing.
We want to build a world in which undeveloped and unrefined emotional instincts—like possessiveness and jealousy—are minimized as much as humanly possible so that all eyes, hearts and spirits are not distracted from the goal.
And because we are in a primarily Queer community, we have few resources for how to handle what really becomes abusive. There are community, non-police-involved interventions for challenges in heteronormative and white intimate partner mistreatment, but not really any for us.
But I make the distinction here in order to explain that while abuse may or may not be intentional, and is often spontaneous, torture is always intentional. It is always premeditated. It is planned out and its purpose is to deliberately and systematically dismantle a person’s identity and humanity. It is designed to destroy a sense of community and eliminate leaders and create a climate of fear.
acquitted. I also think about men like Brock Turner, the Stanford star swimmer, who raped a woman and got six months. Six months because the judge said Turner couldn’t make it in prison, that prison wasn’t for him. But it was made for Richie? For Monte? For my father? My God. Is that not reason enough to shut it down?
And then I start crying. And I feel wrong about crying. My tears make me want to hide. I feel like I have to be the particular kind of strong Black people are always asked to be. The impossible strong. The strong where there’s no space to think about your own vulnerability. The space to cry.
Police, the literal progeny of slave catchers, meant harm to our community, and the race or class of any one officer, nor the good heart of an officer, could change that. No isolated acts of decency could wholly change an organization that became an institution that was created not to protect but to catch, control and kill us.
The media ignores the hundreds of people who are still in pain from the murder of Oscar Grant in 2009 and who are peacefully marching. Instead they focus on one or two who are not peaceful and they wholly ignore law enforcement, who attack everyone.
Asset forfeiture allowed law enforcement to seize property simply if they said that they suspected someone of being involved with the drug trade. They needed no proof or indictment even to seize cash, cars and homes, and police across the nation routinely did, leaving the burden of evidence on the person who was robbed. The victim had to prove that they had never done anything, something almost impossible to do. But even when they managed to fight and win their case, the legal barriers to reclaiming property were and are extraordinary, leaving the police, who were free to keep 80 percent of
...more
Living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to center men and their voices, not women and their work.
