To add to this week’s discussion of LBBTQ+ rights and their denial in this country, I included two pieces I’ve read in another class regarding trans politics. The first is Dean Spade’s piece on the limits of the law in relation to trans rights and how this is a product of a neoliberal caste society. The second is Nat Raha’s emotional piece on…[Read more]

I feel like this past week’s discussion of illegality and civil rights falls perfectly in with Thanksgiving, or as many Native people call it, Mourning Day. There is an interesting story going around about an American missionary who was killed with bows and arrows while approaching an island off of India known as North Sentinel Island. He intended…[Read more]

Week 7 brought us to a discussion of illegal immigration, its discourses and language, and how it is constructed in order to facilitate real-life POC genocides as well as capitalist economic slavery. To bring some media context to this issue, I wanted to share with the class a new rapper I have come across. I don’t know how popular he is, but he…[Read more]

This week’s focus on Islamophobia reminded me of the discussion we had surrounding internment camps and how modern day genocides are masked as being not as monumental as events such as the Holocaust. This topic, for me, tied into how humanitarian crises in the East, particularly in Muslim-majority countries, are oftentimes overlooked by Western…[Read more]

This week’s discussions about Japanese internment camps left me thinking deeply about how sad it is that children as young as toddlers were being held in concentration camps not too far from here. And to see this image being paraded across the news really rubbed me the wrong way. Teachers (mostly white or white-passing) put on a shitshow of a…[Read more]

Reading “The Ballot of the Bullet” really made me understand how easy it must have been for anti-progressives to use this speech to portray Malcolm X as violent and uncompromising. Not to say that he comes off this way at all, rather I respect how directly he makes the demand for black self-determination. His references actual mirrored the Black…[Read more]

This week’s readings and class discussions, in my mind, really emphasized how the civil rights movement of our history and the one of our present are one in the same. Both movements and movement leaders are portrayed in the same manner, monstracized until their existence serves any type of value to the rich white upper class. In that circumstance,…[Read more]

The image I chose to embody this week’s discussions and our New Jim Crow reading is very simple: two men, one white, one black, protesting for equal rights. Both men are holding either side of their banner, but only the black man is being questioned by police about having a permit. To me, this image represents Michelle Alexander’s point regarding…[Read more]