The Contrast Between Civil Unrest and Insurrection
In every area of life from personal to organizational, I’m blessed to say that 2020 was extremely fulfilling for myself and SawariMedia. I can’t deny the fact that globally widespread illness and loss have been devastating for many, but with that understanding; What can I say about 2020 that hasn’t already been said? In a way I’ve never experienced in my lifetime, disadvantaged groups were forced to come together across social, racial and economic boundaries in order to address the overflow of crises intersecting within the conditions of the pandemic like massive unemployment, housing insecurity and inadequate healthcare. We saw protests spate across every region of the country, from big city centers to suburban street corners, people were refusing to close their eyes to these mounting injustices. Many of which boil down to the over-incarceration of disadvantaged people and the disabling conditions of imprisonment, a genocidal combination.
Coming into 2020 SawariMedia and its supporters heavily invested into Michigan’s Good Time Campaign to Repeal TIS laws. We sponsored January’s Right2Redemption Ball and collected thousands of signatures prior to March’s statewide lockdowns. While we thought that the conditions of the health crisis would highlight this critical need for change, restrictions on movement made it impossible to collect the hundreds of thousands of signatures needed in order to secure a ballot question. We decided that although securing a spot on the 2020 ballot was slim, we would continue to use the momentum of the petition to educate potential supporters around the needs for change in sentencing laws. We continued to organize online events like the TIS Town Hall hosted in partnership with the University of Michigan Ann Arbor’s School of Social Work featuring Senators Sylvia Santana and Jeff Irwin. Along with online events, SawariMedia continued to publish a bimonthly Motivate Michigan newsletter in order to keep supporters informed about the movement to repeal TIS laws on both sides of the wall.
As Officials Ignored the Issue, We Provided Ongoing Support for Incarcerated Citizens through Pandemic
Even after the deadline for signature collection passed, we used our Motivate Michigan newsletter as a service to incarcerated people impacted by the many legislative changes that were happening as a result of the pandemic from March through October especially as in person visitation was eliminated indefinitely nationwide. The critical and lifesaving information we were able to provide to readers include instructions on how to make a protective mask with limited materials, information for mutual-aid support and contact addresses for relevant elected officials. More recently with updates to the CARES Act that allow people in prison to access stimulus funds, we were also able to send out newsletters to provide incarcerated citizens in Michigan and beyond with instructions on how to fill out their paper copy of the Economic Impact Payment 1040 form.
Though canvassers were urged by our governor not to leave our homes, the internal conflict of watching the covid-19 invade prison after prison, with transfers aiding wider distribution of the spread it baffled me that Gov. Whitmer refused to make any type of direct action to provide some type of relief to people who were not free to protect themselves in MDOC’s overcrowded prison environments. Prisoner rights organizers on the ground did their part to “stay home and stay safe” while in Lansing white supremacist protesters took to our capitol to with guns loaded in protest of being forced to wear masks in public. Little did we know that this local scene foreshadowed for the year to come. Governor Whitmer referred this in her press conference this afternoon saying, “We saw events like this play out months ago in our own state. Some of these people that were in D.C. were the same that were here at our capitol, coming in with weapons to intimidate lawmakers…8 months ago I called on President Trump and spoke with Vice President Pence. I reached out the the Republican leadership at our capitol and asked them to help bring down the heat, none of them did a darn thing.” Whitmer’s plea for help was ignored in the exact way that she responds to the desperate cries for help from our impacted communities.
With the prisoner death toll in MDOC at 121 and rapidly rising and no form of relief in sight, SawariMedia had no human rights actions to attend. With the forced downtime SawariMedia has been able to solidify our organizational structure, anchoring our programs around the Right2Vote Report and its initiatives. As an organization we are committed to supporting Jailhouse Lawyers through the fulfillment of the 10 demands of the 2018 National Prison Strike, particularly the most empowering of these being Demand number 10 which calls for, “The voting rights of all confined citizens serving prison sentences, pretrial detainees, and so-called “ex-felons” must be counted. Representation is demanded. All voices count.” We know that with a complete end to felony disenfranchisement impacted people will have the political capitol necessary in shaping the legislative changes that impact their lives, their families and society. With the right to vote secured, impacted people will obtain all the other demands that have yet been met.
We Knew the Capitol Would Be Targeted for Takeover, but We Did NOT expect by (more) White People.
Now looking into 2021 this first week seems to have been more eventful than the entire year of 2020, with an even more deadly “capitol takeover” than what we saw in Michigan, incited by the president of the United States himself via twitter. White supremacists flooded Washington D.C.’s capitol building resulting in shooting on the congress floor and three deaths. I’m going to call it what it is armed insurrection, not just ‘agitated protesters’, blanket terms like this being used by corporate media would never have been if these protesters were a different shade. PBS news reports on the scene, “What you see now is a massive crowd of Trump supporters that have taken over the steps of the capitol, and it’s unclear what if anything could move them,” but in cases of one on one police encounters with innocent Black people, the decision to use employ violently deadly methods has been consistently clear.
According to PBS news, vehicle barriers set up by police 100ft away from the capitol were breeched and the police retreated as protesting crowds grew towards the capitol. The crowds were able to reach the entrance of the capitol without any police shots being fired, for some (obvious) reason secret service, D.C. service and capitol hill police completely failed to subdue protesters. Growing crowds chanted, “Stop the steal” on the steps of the United States capitol as we all watched of TV screens in awe. For some, because we couldn’t believe that the most privileged sector of our society decided to stage a coup. For others, we couldn’t believe that more oppressed classes didn’t organize to do it first. I’m certainly apart of the latter.
Watching the BBC footage of armed Trump supporters filing through the capitol onto the congress floor, its hard to believe that WE never did as tens of thousands of our people were being genocidally attacked throughout recent history by the still devastating drug war, the many senseless ongoing cases of police brutality or the coronavirus that our health-hurt systems had never been equipped to save us from. We never stormed the capitol, even when we had more than enough reason to, but when the leader of a cohort of white supremacist gangs alleges corruption around the evidential loss of his re-election, hundreds of people risked their lives to take extreme action. Trump lost the election, facilitated the death of over 365,000 of Americans with his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and he continually offended millions of people with his racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamaphobic, elitist rhetoric from the most prestigious stages around the globe and barely escaped impeachment, but ever-so hundreds of people took extreme, dangerous action on his behalf. How is it that when we have just cause to raise hell we choose to continue to lie back (in fear)?
Fear Paralyzes, Passion Persists (even passionate ignorance)
The reason why has nothing to do with the group’s actual cause for doing so, because it’s not as if the state violence targeting disadvantaged minorities for decades isn’t a just cause or that the failed re-election of a white supremacists is. The reason behind why some groups take aggressive action who have little to no reason to do so over other groups who have more than enough reason to do so, has to do with their own sense of belonging. Even after a century, our citizenship in this nation is so fragile that while facing constant injustices we don’t feel we have enough ground to take aggressive action. For example, consider a family that has 10 children, 2 of which are adopted (1:5 is a similar ratio of Black to White people in the U.S.). Within this family dynamic the adopted children are aware of their adoption (just as Africans in the US are fully aware of their enslaved ancestry and emancipation), so though they have the same technical standing as their siblings there’s an implicit sense of inferiority they feel within the family (country). That sense of inferiority, whether internal or enforced, plays a role in their behavior. As a result the adopted children are much less likely to share their complex feelings or express their negative emotions with their parents for fear of being rejected or abandoned and mature stuck in this cycle.
We, Black people in the US, are those adopted children who’ve matured in a country where our fragile status of citizenship is constantly cracked by state violence, but we’ve waited so long to share (what we feel is) the same social standing with our White peers that we aren’t as comfortable to express ourselves in aggressive ways. We are more comfortable doing what we’ve always done: complain internally, rant on social media, boycott for a time period and march on occasion, but even as our peaceful protesters we are labeled as reckless thugs, we still settle into our oppressive covers at night wondering why we didn’t push the envelope more. This ‘incident’ has made the stark contrast of our government’s ‘parenting’ more obvious than ever to not only citizens, themselves but to the entire watching world. BBC critics, “America which likes to lecture the rest of the world on how to be a good democratic society is seeing its own shining beacon looking tattered,” its clear that while 2020 exposed the dysfunctions of our crippled nation, now 2021 has come to shatter what’s been cracked for decades.
