So I just realized that I made this post a year ago today. Which is kinda, well. A lot has happened in this past year. In some ways it contains the seeds of most of the stuff I’ve been trying to use this space to talk about over the past year—unacknowledged class/racial/gender dynamics that inhabit political formations that are, on the surface, anti-oppression; the importance of building and embracing political spaces that are uncomfortable without trying to make the uncomfortable a new kind of comfortable; looking for places where political solidarities might be able to emerge if we don’t get trapped by some of the ways of forging solidarity that we’ve inherited; struggling with the contradictions that sometimes give me too much authority to speak on some issues (often on the condition ask me, implicitly or explicitly, effectively present myself as a class-interested, respectable, or authentic caricature of myself) and assume that I am in no position to speak on others because of assumptions of what it means to reside in the body in which I reside; trying to acknowledge and account for my own privilege without turning it into pious formalism or an empty gesture; etc.
I was reminded that I made this post a year ago because comrades from Critical Resistance were over my house last night stuffing envelopes and stamping postcards in order to ask for donations. We’re still trying to build an international movement to abolish the prison-industrial complex. So again, please, if you have anything to spare this time of year, it’d be incredibly fabulous if you could donate something.
