As folks begin to mobilize around this, and there needs to be mobilization around this, please study and connect to the prison abolitionist work @prisonculture and others have been doing. This is both a carceral state issue and an immigration one.
Organizing, like any creative endeavor, is a journey of finding your voice. It is intensely personal. It is a marathon not a sprint. It requires both being quiet and being loud. It is what this moment asks of us. Find your voice, and then lift it.
which is to say, there isn't ONE THING organizing is or isn't. It's what you do and the intentionality you bring to how you do it. It's your analysis but also how you walk with that analysis, how you carry it. What it means to you. How you place yourself and move.
These detention centers are obviously a malignant growth of Trumpism but they are also very much a function of Americanism. And people have been organizing against the US carceral state for a very long time. Study that work, be in conversation with it.
Organizing doesn't happen in a vacuum. It can't, because oppression certainly doesn't. That's why intersectionality matters and why it's so convenient to the powerful when they're able to play the disempowered off each other.
Also, organizing, like writing, begins with forgiveness. Self-forgiveness. You weren't there yesterday, perhaps, lifting your voice. Fine. Look that in the face and understand why, forgive yourself and show up today.
And by show up I don't necessarily mean attend a rally. That's one method but again, there is no ONE AND ONLY, no matter how hard they'll try to convince you there is. There are as many methods as there are people. More really, because we change and grow.
Find yours, but even more: keep finding yours. Mine has changed a few times already. Take moments to self-reflect amidst the storm.
Also: a reminder that organizing works. It is how we will survive and more than that, how we will win.
And that means creativity is needed. Thats in part why when Ursula Le Guin said we will need writers who remember what freedom tastes like (paraphrase) --- it rung so true. Art is organizing is art.
If we do this work right and are interconnected in it, the organizing won't just shut down these new detention centers but reach both back and forward into the heart of the prison state and break it. I believe it's possible even if I don't know how we get there
Yet.
The School to Prison Pipeline must fall.
The prison industrial complex must fall.
ICE must fall.
The detention centers must fall.
The prison industrial complex must fall.
ICE must fall.
The detention centers must fall.
