A small tale of three protests in Washington, DC, this calendar year, and their sequelae*…
January 20, 2017: Roughly 230 protesters, street medics, legal observers, and journalists, were mass arrested on Inauguration Day in DC during a black bloc anticap/antifa march that broke chain store windows. Police surrounded the march and did not allow anyone […]
Terminology note for this post: When I talk about public defense, I mean the defense, in a criminal case, of someone who can’t afford a lawyer, by a lawyer whose job it is to defend indigent clients. When I talk about indigent defense, I mean both the public defense system, and the common system, used […]
This is the companion to my previous post. There, I focused on my experiences of the protest, and explaining the concepts behind it (e.g. “What is pinkwashing?”). This time, I address why I was motivated to participate, why I don’t think groups that engage even in relatively mild forms of pinkwashing belong in the programming […]
As some of you are probably aware by now, Creating Change, the big annual LGBTQ+ activism conference, had a higher-than-usual controversy quotient this year. There were a bunch of reasons for this, but probably the one that received the most publicity centered around a Friday night reception given by an organization called A Wider Bridge, […]
This is the third of my response posts to Katha Pollitt’s essay criticizing TGNC*-inclusive language in feminist and specifically abortion funding discourse. You can read the first here and the second here.
In Pollit’s essay, she frames abortion access and other issues around pregnancy as feminist issues, as women’s issues. Which they are – they […]
In the wake of the DOJ’s report on Ferguson, there’s been a lot of people talking, correctly, about the terribleness of the Ferguson police report. There’s also been people complaining that the DOJ’s finding Darren Wilson’s story credible enough not to prosecute means that Mike Brown wasn’t a good case to focus on, “Hands up, […]
There was a session I went to at Creating Change on how to mobilize against unfair treatment of LGBTQ people interacting with the criminal justice system. The panelists came from a variety of organizations in Southern California, many of which mostly serve LGBTQ people of color, and indeed many of the panelists were themselves people […]
By now I’m guessing most of my local readers and some of the others are aware of the I-93 shutdown action on Thursday, during which I was arrested. This isn’t so much an essay as a series of points – and the legal case is ongoing – but I wanted to get something up, especially […]
|
|