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Keeping Tabs: Direction

Additional resources for community protection, healing, security, action, and more.

By AAWW

Crossing over last week’s collection of references, this Keeping Tabs holds another set of resources that range from de-escalation guides to digital security how-tos to reading lists. With tweets, poems, and essays, we’ve also taken multiple trajectories to processing and approaching our current moment. Please scroll down to follow our routes this week.

 

Post-Election 2016: Resources by Make the Road New York

Make the Road New York has put together a wide-spanning list of resources from trauma care to pedagogy.

Compiled these from a variety of different sources–resources that serve educators, youth, parents, organizers, community members, and all peoples. Please Share.

 

Resources for Intervention & Deescalation

This collection of resources (readable, printable, watchable, and actionable) shares ways that we can look after and protect each other.

Editing this collection of bystander intervention and deescalation resources is a challenge, because so many resources advise contacting law enforcement, when we know that the presence of law enforcement too often increases harm to targeted populations. Please be aware that while some resources here might advise “delegating” to law enforcement, readers would do well to consider the consequences, given what we know about state sanctioned violence and its escalation.

 

Digital Security Tips for Protesters by Bill Budington

On EFF, Bill Budington addresses digital security concerns that could impact protesters.

After the election, individuals took to the streets across the country to express their outrage and disappointment at the result of the U.S. presidential election. Many protesters may not be aware of the unfortunate fact that exercising their First Amendment rights may open themselves up to certain risks. Those engaging in peaceful protest may be subject to search or arrest, have their movements and associations mapped, or otherwise become targets of surveillance and repression. It is important that in a democracy citizens exercise their right to peaceably assemble, and demonstrators should be aware of a few precautions they can take to keep themselves and their data safe. Here we present 10 security tips for protesting in the digital age.

 

Introduction to Digital Security for Journalists Handout for MozFest 2016 by Martin Shelton, Matthew Mitchell, Mike Tigas, and Sequoia McDowell

Martin Shelton, Matthew Mitchell, Mike Tigas, and Sequoia McDowell share steps journalists can take to bolster their digital safety, from more secure passwords to data encryption.

Need to do research anonymously? … log into websites safely? … protect your personal data? … talk to colleagues and sources securely? … learn more about encrypted communications?

 

Scholarships Open to Undocumented Students by My (Un)Documented Life

My (Un)Documented Life’s recently updated list of scholarships open to undocumented students includes applications for fee waivers, leadership conferences, and other opportunities.

We are continually expanding this list and featuring scholarships with approaching deadlines so be sure to return to this page periodically.We are continually expanding this list and featuring scholarships with approaching deadlines so be sure to return to this page periodically.

 

A Reading List for Undoing Amerika

Currently open for contribution, this collaborative doc is open for suggestions for a collection of readings spanning various fields including critical theory, history, and cultural studies as tools for resistance.

A Note from the “Admin” : Please add as many works or none at all from whatever subjects you deem necessary – legal theory, first aid, poetry, art monographs, films, etc. Understand that this is a primary gathering. We are working on organizing and tagging entries with subject headers, alphabetizing, etc to make this list easier to use and access and to build reading lists from. For now, feel free to use this, of course, and if you have an extra minute, alphabetize some of the sources already here!

 

Twitter Threads

These Twitter threads from Arnessa (@Rrrrnessa), Mariame Kaba (@prisonculture), and @FuckTheory provide responses to the proposed U.S. Muslim registry, to those beginning to organize, and to the necessity of wonder in learning and resistance.

Arnessa (@Rrrrnessa) traces through a history of the Bosnian genocide and its relation to what Muslim registries could be (and already are).
With suggestions for how to pull together friends and loved ones to organizing, Mariame Kaba (@prisonculture) emphasizes the need to protect each other.
@FuckTheory urges a resistance to nihilism and an excitement for knowledge building especially for those most vulnerable in the academy (content notes for psychiatry and alcohol mentions in thread).

 
 

 

Love Poems for Harrowing Times by Oki Sogumi

In Guts Magazine, Oki Sogumi pens a series of poems on love, possession, and grappling with collective liberation in the present.

death is political but our politics are not adequate
tonite all the ugly feelings
previously memorialized
return
like the earth is cut up
like fuck this migration of fear across and out from woundedness
like fuck state and capital and how nothing is for us
except this love, is something, and i don’t want that to be about containment
i want this too to be in excess, if the air is gonna bleed like this
let go, hold tight

 
Content warning in the following piece for anxiety and dissociation.

From ‘Notes for an Opening’ by Wendy Xu

Featured in The Lifted Brow’s 29th issue, Workshop friend Wendy Xu splices together verses on confiscated lemon trees, unbound clouds, and waiting at the airport.

They ask me how deeply do you abide by your imperfect alliances
Well, the trouble with my desire is that I approach it infinitely
I’m waiting on the train
I’m waiting on my paycheck
I’m waiting on my itinerary, my package, my money, my tax return, my status to be overturned, my appeal, the rest of my money, my period, my friends to show up, my rejection letter, my test results
When the doors open I’ll be alone with my thoughts of you

 
Content warning in the following piece for murder.

Resisting Trump’s Islamophobic Promise for America by Muna Mire

On the New Inquiry, Muna Mire details the ongoing hardships faced by Muslim American communities, in light of but not exclusive to new threats of a Muslim registry. (Also, be sure to watch Verso’s anti-fascist organizing panel including Muna Mire and AAWW Executive Director Ken Chen.)

As we move forward into the Trump regime, I am most afraid for my Muslim sisters and brothers. So many of us Muslims no longer have homelands to return to: Somalis are targeted by drones, fighting off slaughter in the form of Al Shabaab’s brutality, dying of thirst by the hundreds of thousands, and killed in the diaspora from gun violence, gangs, and broken hearts. I wonder how much more we will be asked to endure. I suppress the bitterness, the rising nihilism. I think of my own brother, no longer with us, and the sacrifices my parents made seemingly in vain, to leave their homeland and bring us here, where we will die anyways.

 

For Millions, the Election was Always Lost by Michelle Chen

For Dissent, Michelle Chen reminds of those who have only conditionally or never had access to the American political system, and how ongoing movements for livelihood and liberation will continue past the election. (Read more on a specific resistance and solidarity movement in Chen’s newest piece in the Margins, on the 1960s Asian American Movement and where Asian America is now!)

[F]or people who were never enfranchised, or who always existed in a state of liminal second-class citizenship, November 9 was just another day. They didn’t have the privilege of feeling like their voice at the ballot box had been silenced. For many, their very humanity had been denied the minute they set foot on American soil. A sense of profound alienation was familiar territory those who by law never had the vote, who didn’t awake to a nation they “no longer recognized,” so much as to a country that never recognized them.

 
Content warning in the following piece for mention of slurs.

Love Notes From the Margins: How We’ll Survive These Times by Kelly Hayes

On Truthout, Kelly Hayes alongside Ejeris Dixon, Hoda Katebi, Victoria Moore, William C. Anderson, HL, and Benji Hart mend together messages of support for each other and our communities — in fear, fatigue, resistance, and care.

The day after the election, I put out a call to a few of my friends to ask what they might say to other marginalized people, in this moment, to express their love and solidarity. These words are not about the horrifying man who is about to assume so much power over the world we live in, but about us. They are about how we, as marginalized people — Native people, Black people, queer people, Muslims, sex workers and survivors — can come together now, and hold each other up. These words are about our love for each other, and our will to survive. This work is by no means representative of every demographic that will be harmed by this administration, but it is a chorus from the margins, offering what we can in this difficult moment. We hope that it brings some comfort to those in need of solace, here and now, and that it creates a space we can all return to in the days ahead, to be reminded of our strength and love for one another.

Even those of us with a disciplined sense of hope sometimes need to be held close and reminded of our strength, and that justice is possible. In spite of everything that’s happening, I believe in us. I hope you do too.