Resources for support, safety, care, resistance, and more.
November 11, 2016
For this week’s Keeping Tabs, we’d like to share the resources that we’ve come across thus far, which span readings that may allow spaces for deliberation, preparatory guides for the coming weeks, and approaches to supporting each other and our communities. Please scroll through and bookmark the following links as ongoing references, as many continue to be built upon.
Resistance Information by Jessica Colbert
Arranged by Jessica Colbert, this Zotero-based collective archive adds to current movements for critical librarianship with documents, books, and toolkits for resistance.
https://t.co/i9y094hVNF #critlib Share to LIS and non-LIS! Add resources!
— Jessica Colbert (@JessicaLColbert) November 10, 2016
Yes, I’ll accompany my neighbor. by Kayla Santosuosso
Contributing to the need for community-sourced support with spikes in threats and violence, this Google form can be used particularly for New Yorkers at risk to accompany each other on commutes.
This form is for New Yorkers who are willing to accompany their neighbors on their commute in light of recent harassment and threats toward people of color, LGBTQ folks, and Muslims. Your information will not be shared publicly. If someone requests accompaniment, your email may be shared with the requester should the needs and your offer align.
Work opportunities by Cassandra Khaw
This Google spreadsheet compiles editors and publishers who are currently open for pitches, especially by marginalized writers.
Hi. I'm keeping tabs on who is looking for pitches and offering work opportunities to marginalized folks here. https://t.co/AQDYGy8V2d
— Cassandra Khaw (@casskhaw) November 11, 2016
Advice regarding DACA & what’s next from two national immigration law centers by Carolina Valdivia
On My (Un)Documented Life, Carolina Valdivia shares information on DACA from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC) and the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), in addition to further advice from the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project as well as advice on advance parole.
The Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC) and the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) have also released helpful information surrounding the election results and DACA. Here is their advice regarding the risks associated with applying for DACA during this time, as well as what the future holds.
Things to Know About Web Security Before Trump’s Inauguration: A Harm Reductionist Guide by H Kapp-Klote
This harm-reduction guide outlines steps to take in the coming months for how to maximize your web privacy.
There are definitely steps [and] guides to take you even further?—?figuring out what to do with data, encrypting your email w PGP, etc. but this is for my friends who I love so much and are overwhelmed/new to all of this. The most important thing to keep in mind is that NOTHING IS SECURE?—?your task is remember that and do everything within your power to make things hard for people to see your private information.
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While this changes little for many people who are already doing this organizing work and know how to use these tools*, this is a *harm reduction* guide and checklist for people who are freaked.
The “Oh Shit! What Should I Do Before January?” Guide v2.0 by Ariel Speedwagon
This Google doc can serve as a comprehensive guide of things to take care of before Trump takes office in January, including health care, safety, immigration concerns, and more.
Bureaucracy and paperwork are not necessarily radical acts; this is more on the side of the “cover your ass as much as possible” spectrum of responses. Interacting with these structures requires making choices that may not feel good but result in bureaucratic coherency that will protect you later. Please maintain the focus on concrete acts of preservation and planning. You are encouraged to find other ways of supporting broader struggles for justice. There will be many.
The basic idea is this: you have to cover your ass with regards to the federal government. You want to go into this as tidily as possible and assess the risks of leaving things legally unclear. Do your gender markers agree as much as possible? If not, think about whether or not it makes sense to reconcile them. Do you have a clear plan for preventing pregnancy if you might get pregnant somehow? If not, think about what you might do if that happened. Do you have a clear sense of how you will ensure your family structure and safety? If not, you should talk together about how to speed that process up. What is your immigration status and is there anything you can do to push it forward towards your ultimate goal?
Writings by AAWW Friends
Surveying our larger community’s responses to the ascendancy of President-elect Donald Trump, some friends of the Workshop have written on witnessing the crumbling of U.S. imperialism, approaching our children, and listening to music in the face of calamity.
The End of the Empire by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Here’s What I’m Telling My Brown Son About Trump’s America by Mira Jacob
Muslims are terrified, but we won’t be intimidated by Trump by Moustafa Bayoumi
”The Brave and Strong Survive, Child” by Hua Hsu
Belabored Podcast #116: Facing Labor and Politics Under Trump by Sarah Jaffe and Michelle Chen
In a podcast on Dissent Magazine, Sarah Jaffe and Michelle Chen make a case for hope after the election, in light of voting trends and state ballot wins in favor of the left and labor. (Also, be sure to read Michelle Chen’s recent article on Pearl River Mart 2.0, now in the Margins.)
As we end a week of horrible news, we’ve managed to unearth some bright spots from Election Day: two stories that may not be able to offset our collective despair, but at least help steel us with a little more courage and optimism as activists and organizers seek to move on after November 8.
We talk with CUNY professor Stephanie Luce about voting trends that are actually good for the left and labor, and how state ballot initiatives delivered wins to working people even when the presidential race didn’t. And immigrant rights activist and AFL-CIO organizer Neidi Dominguez, and AFGE organizer Joe Diggs, take us behind the scenes of the Bazta Arpaio campaign, a unique labor-community coalition that helped defeat the reelection bid of the infamous anti-immigrant bigot Sheriff Joe Arpaio, aka mini Trump. And we discuss a post-Trump autopsy for the labor movement, and a union’s last stand at Standing Rock.
On the Violent Language of the Refugee Crisis by Christina Sharpe
On Literary Hub, an excerpt from Christina Sharpe’s new book of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being illustrates the language of cruelty structuring contemporary refugee crises, and its echoes to the horrors of the African slave trade. (Also, find the first chapter now available on Duke University Press’s website.)
The first language the keepers of the hold use on the captives is the language of violence: the language of thirst and hunger and sore and heat, the language of the gun and the gun butt, the foot and the fist, the knife and the throwing overboard. And in the hold, mouths open, say, thirsty.
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We understand the compulsions of capital in our always-possible deaths. But those bodies nevertheless try to exceed those compulsions of capital. They, we, inhabit knowledge that the Black body is the sign of immi/a/nent death. These are accounts of the hold in the contemporary.
base #30.1 by the base collective
Formerly publishing under the Occupied Times, the London-based base collective’s first issue as base organizes approaches to anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, and resistance.
We hope to continue to provide information framed around issues we think are important to those challenging today’s dominant power relations. We also think it remains valuable to make this information more tactile and tangible via a physical print publication. Seeking to stray from some of the conventions we had fallen into, we hope that creating a new space will better re?ect our political intentions. Of course, with such a format change for the print publication, we’ve also updated the layout of our website, to re?ect the new name and how we want to share our articles, imagery and propaganda online — basepublication.org
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In order to put together and produce all of our desires for this publication, we focused this around the name and conception of base — it’s a simple launching o? point, a prop for political resistance and struggle, a foundation from which to build, and a root from which to grow.
The Work Continues: Hannah Black Interviews Mariame Kaba by Hannah Black
Hannah Black and Mariame Kaba engage in conversation on DIS Magazine about the election as a white family argument, Kaba’s work as an organizer against prisons and incarceration, and transformative justice for marginalized groups in America.
And you have to also think about creating: what do you build up while you are tearing down and dismantling? So, the interpersonal work that people are doing is very important work, figuring out how we’re going to reshape and restructure our individual relationships with each other as human beings in order to support a larger transformation and shift that needs to happen. It’s incredibly important to figure out how you’re going to handle conflicts in your community in a way that is not focused on punishment and is still providing people with accountability and is still making sure that people get what they need in terms of feeling as though if they were hurt and harmed that these were considered and addressed. People need and want to feel safe. That’s important. It’s a fallacy to think that there won’t be violence as we are building for abolition. Of course there will be. The point is that the current systems set up to deal with various harms are themselves incredibly violent, inhumane and ineffective. So we need something else. We need a just system to evaluate and adjudicate harm. We don’t currently have that.