Kelly Hayes: Welcome to "Movement Memos," a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I'm your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today we're talking about what it takes to stay human and protect each other in fascistic times - how we build networks of care, defend our neighbors, grieve, and make space for joy. We'll be hearing from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg musician, writer, and academic.
To be clear, you can easily buy a skeleton dressed like a schoolgirl, or a mermaid skeleton (-maid, that means girl, right?), but those, as far as I can tell, are just normal skeletons that have been dressed in schoolgirl drag or had a tail attached to them. And a normal skeleton-the thing most of us picture when we picture a skeleton-is, I'm increasingly convinced, more often than not going to be a male skeleton.
STATEN ISLAND, NY - The Staten Island Branch of the NAACP will mark its 100th anniversary with a Freedom Fund Luncheon on Saturday, Nov. 8 at Nicotra's Ballroom in the Hilton Garden Inn. The milestone event will run from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. and will honor individuals and institutions that have contributed to the borough's legacy of equity and justice over the past century. The celebration aims to recognize a century of service, leadership, and progress while looking ahead to the next 100 years.
The D.I.R.T. Festival (Dance in Revolt(ing) Times), Dance Mission Theater's socio-political dance festival, returns October 25-November 2, continuing its tradition of presenting artists whose work explicitly addresses local and global challenges. This year's theme, "Come Hell or High Water," features dance, music, and visual artists. Three different programs will be performed over two weekends at Dance Mission Theater and outdoors at the 24th Street Bart plaza.
Recently, heavily armed and masked SWAT-like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents rolled up at a Chicago-area elementary school as classes ended for the day. Their target? A mom picking up her child. The footage is heart-wrenching: A woman in a pink sweatshirt, struggling frantically, is pressed into the pavement by armed bodies as she screams, "There is no signed warrant,"while members of an army invade her car.
Nearly two million Black families in the US South have zero or negative net worth. More than half of the nation's Black population ( about 56 percent) lives in the South, including those nearly two million families with no monetary wealth. To compound the issue, this summer saw Black women nationally lose 300,000 jobs even as the US economy continues to grow.
This is more than a legal win, it's a cultural stand. Public schools cannot bully employees into silence because they dare to express their faith or conservative values.
In 2006, as genocidal violence in Sudan's Darfur region spilled into neighbouring Chad, I spent several weeks with an Amnesty International research team travelling along the Chadian side of that troubled border, documenting the impact of a string of brutal attacks against isolated villages that had left a macabre trail of death, destruction, and fear. This part of eastern Chad is arid and barren, with rocky, hard-packed earth, shifting sands, gnarled trees, and scrappy bush.
But this might also be a problem. Not because the marchers aren't sincerethey are. Not because moral clarity doesn't matterit does. But because every protest that doesn't lead to organization might be worse than no protest at all. It gives the feeling of agency without the fact of it. It lets us post, share, and check the box marked I did something, while the machinery of power keeps humming, unbothered.
Researchers have analysed hundreds of thousands of images from places like IMDb and Google Image Search as well as the kinds of online texts used to train large language models. They found a persistent age gap between men and women when it comes to how they are shown and talked about online.
Steven Lacey Steven Lacey had gone his whole life without being the target of hate crime, until this last year, in which he has already been abused four times. The 52-year-old, from London, is physically disabled. He has a cleft hand, a missing fibula and a shortened tibia. Steven says the last 12 months have been the worst he's experienced in terms of discrimination, and he says he thinks it's not going to improve any time soon.
I was first schooled on Itliong ten years ago, at what was then called the J-Town Film Fest, while watching a 30-minute documentary, Delano Manongs. Itliong and a group of Filipino farm workers instigated the legendary Delano Grape Strike of 1965, an event that essentially led to the creation of the United Farm Workers (UFW). The strike went down in history as a Chicano movement under the leadership of Cesar Chavez, but the role Filipinos played in the adventure often gets forgotten.
Restorative justice is a social science practice that focuses less on punitive punishment and more on communal healing. So it is asking questions about who's been harmed, what their needs are, whose responsibility it is to meet those needs, and how can relationships and trust be built and repaired in order to move forward. It also believes that punitive measures actually perpetuate harm rather than resolve the issue at hand.
Schjetnan and GDU have designed some of the most significant parks in Mexico, including Chapultepec Forest and Park, the second-largest city park in Latin America, known colloquially as Mexico's "Central Park." With a focus on equitable access to nature, the application of environmental knowledge, and the potential of postindustrial sites, GDU's work has expanded the notion of what parks can do in Mexico.
The friend, a sex worker herself, told Connie: "That's not a boyfriend, that's sex work. He only comes to have sex with you, bring you food, and pay the rent." Connie tells DW she had tried working in retail, hospitality, and in a call center, but it was never enough to cover her bills. She believed working as a sex worker full-time would mean that she was no longer dependent on her boyfriend; it promised greater financial security and autonomy.
Despite a day of near-constant rain, organizers of Portland's Emergency World Naked Bike Ride went ahead with their plans to protest on Sunday-the clouds miraculously parting just before the meetup time of 2:30 pm. Hundreds showed and rode in the buff or in solidarity with the buff. The ride's summer version is a protest against dependence on oil that celebrates body positivity and alternatives to car transport.
The news was bittersweet. Bitter because Assata will never again walk among us, tell another story, or author another poem; bitter because no longer can we point to her as a living example of she who struggled for Black people with courage and dignity, she who remained steadfast in the face of such fierce opposition. But also, sweet. Sweet because although they hunted her, the forces of U.S. Empire - with all their monstrous technology, were unable to kill her,
Comedians looking to donate their fee from the Riyadh Comedy Festival, look elsewhere. A spokesperson for Human Rights Watch told it "cannot accept" money from comedians who have "generously offered to donate part of their performance fees." According to Arvind Ganesan, Human Rights Watch's head of economic justice and rights division, taking money from people who took money from the government of Saudi Arabia could "create the perception that somehow we compromised our independence after the fact."
