So much of life is being able to hold seemingly contradictory thoughts that, together, make up a fuller truth. A short thread:

I’ll begin by saying: I don’t yearn for a world with more women judges, I yearn for a world without judges
(paraphrasing the anarchx-feminist manifesto here, via Anarcho-Blackness by Marquis Bey, which I highly recommend reading!)

Having said that, the various facets that make up “the system” (including the courts) represent impactful boundary conditions on organizing/activism/possibilities in general (paraphrasing @IBJIYONGI here). I don’t have to like or respect them to think that is true

I can mourn the acceleration towards vastly worse conditions for our work that RBG’s loss represents, while also thinking that the Supreme Court shouldn’t exist

I can acknowledge that RBG made anti-Native decisions while leaving space for people to mourn her loss who maybe are not super familiar with every aspect of her record (I certainly am not a legal scholar either!)

I can see RBG’s passing as an indication that the fight will likely intensify without implying that the fight hasn’t already BEEN a) in progress for eons and b) intensifying already

Attempts to litigate how people react to another human’s death— especially public figures, who are symbols as well as complex, mortal human beings— are born of the same puritanical impulses that our punitive policing/prison system originates in. Abolish the cop in your heart, pls

I strongly recommend checking out Vent Diagrams (which I learned of from @ejeris, thank you ), and perhaps drawing a few of these yourself to process complicated, contradictory thoughts. As they say, we can try to “move in the overlaps” https://www.ventdiagrams.com/inspired-by-ejeris-dixon

Also perennial recommendation to read @alexisshotwell’s Against Purity, which I would buy a pallet of and hand out to people constantly if I could afford to do so: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/against-purity