Educator (he/him) and artist committed to the lives, love, and liberation of everyday Black people; Director @campusabolition; PI @policefreeworld
Jul 15, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Just got the call from my mother that my 19-year old cousin, Noni Battiste-Kosoko, was recently found dead in her cell at an Atlanta detention center after being detained for misdemeanor charges, without bond, since May 20th.
ajc.com/news/crime/19-…
Her death comes within days of an announced investigation of jails under the supervision of @FultonSheriff following numerous reports of maltreatment, physical abuse by officers, hazardous facilities, and frequent overcrowding.
What will always concern me in the wake of mass shootings in schools and on college campuses is the way, just as it is this week, the incident will be used to expand the police state, heighten surveillance, and subject those vulnerable to state harm to further scrutiny.
The public discourse and our social conditioning immediately revert back to the conflation of policing with safety, yet we disregard how policing has overwhelmingly failed to prevent these incidents from happening.
Apr 14, 2021 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
In a separate, but perhaps related issue, I want us to understand and take seriously this situation with Patrisse Cullors and the general vulnerability to harm Black Queer women leading movement work experience.
To be clear, rightful issues of intra-communal accountability are being blurred with misinformation proliferated by white supremacists on 4chan Reddit, now being legitimized by some Black organizers, and have put the lives of Patrisse and her family directly in harm’s way.
Apr 14, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This piece is reformist police propaganda for improving unions that shouldn’t exist. Policing is not and cannot be made into an ethical institution. What can be done is creating new conditions and investing in resources for everyday people to live a life. nytimes.com/2021/04/14/opi…
It also falsely frames the issue as an “us versus them” confrontation between protestors and police as individuals with opposing views. We, the protestors, are against injustice. The police are an apparatus of injustice incapable of accountability that needs to be abolished.
Jan 20, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
There’s something to be said about all the ways Black people are tied to and centered in the pageantry of this political moment, the Inauguration, and I’m sitting with the complicated discomfort of seeing us but remaining so unseen in this nation as human beings. #InaugurationDay
It’s reminiscent of the Obama years, but different, something more available in representation yet still illegible in terms of its meaning. I’m thinking a lot about @KieseLaymon’s 2016 @TheGardianNews piece about Blackness and our corrupt oligarchy. #InaugurationDay
I take one day off from being #onhere to get ready for the semester and miss almost the entire act of domestic terrorism happening in D.C.
The discourse about this whole thing is something else to say the least. The comparisons to other countries wreaks of unoriginal exceptionalism that ought to be entirely illegitimate by now.
