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A thread for Kinship
CW: anti-Black racism, murder, police violence
For the sake of our Black relatives’ safety & our own, K’é Infoshop implores non-Black native people to think critically about alternatives to current state methods of violence and surveillance.
CW: anti-Black racism, murder, police violence
For the sake of our Black relatives’ safety & our own, K’é Infoshop implores non-Black native people to think critically about alternatives to current state methods of violence and surveillance.
On Monday, May 25, four Minneapolis police officers murdered George Floyd. Like Ferguson (2014) and Baltimore (2015), Black Minneapolis communities are rising up because this murder reflects the pervasive anti-Blackness that dictates US ideology and policy.
Police violence inflicted upon Black people goes beyond the individual “racist cop,” but rather stems from a larger systemic & societal demand for Black death. The US ceaselessly terrorizes Black communities, a politic of abandonment is essential to the fate of the police.
Calls for police reform will not reduce harm, it will only reinscribe it. In the US, where the modern police force was founded to capture fugitive enslaved persons and “off-the-reservation” Indians, the police cannot be “reformed.” The police must be totally abolished.
Anti-Blackness in Native communities, especially within Dinétah, not only harms Black people and the potential for inter-community relations, but strengthens the US colonial project.
Non-Black Native people have a responsibility to fight for the health of Black relatives. Black people, as displaced Indigenous people themselves, share a complex historical relationship with the indigenous people of this continent & it’s BEEN time we nurture those relationships.
While the state uses the COVID-19 crisis to increase policing & surveillance measures in non-white communities; while white people protesting social-distancing orders face little to no opposition from police; while Diné strengthen mutual aid networks to survive; ...
while our Black relatives are murdered by the government through police violence, healthcare inequities, and state reopenings -- more people now realize the government won’t save us. We only have each other.
We support the acts of community self-defense in Minneapolis, anything that undermines capitalism and notions of private property.
Black feminist theorists & prison abolitionists have long produced literature exploring alternative ways of living and relating to one another, ways that do not include police forces or surveillance methods.
They challenge societal notions of “criminality” to illuminate the ways in which “law and order” undermine community simply to protect private property from the “deviant” poor and non-white. Please engage with their thinking.
For future reference, please DO NOT circulate media that depicts the brutalization of Black people, be respectful. And DO NOT circulate media that reveal the identities of Minneapolis protestors.
BLACK PEOPLE ARE NOT SETTLERS
RIP George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, and the countless more whose lives were deemed expendable.
Introductory reading for understanding policing and the need to abolish such methods: http://criticalresistance.org/abolish-policing/">https://criticalresistance.org/abolish-p...
Introductory reading for understanding policing and the need to abolish such methods: http://criticalresistance.org/abolish-policing/">https://criticalresistance.org/abolish-p...
