Pearl Friis > Recent Status Updates

Maybe someday…disparate impact alone will be enough to declare a government policy unconstitutional.” Until then we’ll continue working hard “in pursuit of an American dream that was never designed with us in mind.” “A tax credit for all individuals below median wealth would help low-wealth taxpayers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds.”

Hope's an active process that I have to regularly commit to hope not as an emotion but as a discipline. Hope for me is grounded in the reality that wondrous things happen alongside and parallel to the terrible. Every single day. This, for me, is the embodiment of a hope practice. Even if the end times are upon us, we should still plant trees. This is disciplined hope. This is hope in the doing, hope as action.

What if our goalis not to seize the carceral state in an effort to transform it, but to seize power and resources from the police state to create conditions under which new economic systems and forms of governance can emerge? Recapturing the resources the state has extracted is a legitimate, and arguably necessary means of both reducing the misery created by racial capitalism and creating conditions for abolition.

They purposely overlook the fact that defund campaigns call for large-scale investments in programs and infrastructure needed to produce genuine and lasting safety for all. They willfully ignore the fact that defund demands emerged from communities deeply impacted by multiple forms of violence, and from deep study and critical analysis of the long history of policing.

“…abolition is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, po-licing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.”

As Ruth Wilson Gilmore has pointed out, "Abolition is about presence, not absence. It's about building life-affirming
institutions."

Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of “wrong” ideas.

“Not a pathogen, not genocide, not a war; simply human action and inaction, their own action and inaction, killing the most vulnerable. And more would surely follow, because they all were vulnerable in the end. And yet still they burned carbon. They drove cars, ate meat, flew in jets, did all the things that …would cause [their end]”

“Recent extinctions … est 200+ species of mammals, 700 species of birds, 400 species of reptiles, 600 of amphibians, & 400 of plants… compared to geo-norm several 1000x faster, making this the 6th mass extinction.”

“Half that [100 trillion/year] GWP is so-called consumer spending by prosperous people, = non-essential buying of things that degrade the biosphere. Ship going down. Parasite killing host.”

immense expenditures by the federal government…demonstrate the feasibility of funding both an Economic Bill of Rights for the 21st Century & African American reparations. …If the crisis spurs the nation, finally, to embrace bold transformative policies that shape a new future-the Great Republic-then the lessons learned from COVID-19 would’ve proved to be both tragic & hopeful in the fight for equality & equity.

The New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Gl Bill … Southerners lobbied to exclude domestic & farm laborers from receiving benefits (65% of Black workers were domestic or farm laborers at the time) & to designate the management of the newly created benefits programs to state & local administrators. This excluded many Southern Blacks who lived under the state-sanctioned second-class citizenship wrought by Jim Crow laws.

Hyper-incarceration is a signature feature of the American criminal justice system. We lock up 1.4 million Americans in state and federal prisons and 738,000 people in local jails, a demographic which is disproportionately Black. •HEDWIG "HEDy" LEE

… more than two hundred Black people have been killed at the hands of police since the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

Our courage to flick our stones at tech giants comes from an awareness of what happens if we don't. In the absence of our wearied cries, there's nothing. Worse than being ignored are the consequences of silence. We are here for ourselves and the communities we love, & this provides enough strength to keep going— to hit our targets with precision, and watch as the giants fall.

“Heteropatriarchy, which prioritizes dollars over humans, will tell you that if someone isn't responding within a two-day window, they are uninterested; or that if a person is ten minutes late to work, then they deserve to be fired.
… with no regard to the difficulties [Black Queer Creatives] more often have than their White straight counterparts…We don't operate on the same timeline as the heteropatriarchy”

“segregation in the U.S. is as bad today as it has ever been. Poor communities need better housing, jobs, & access to social, health, recreational, & educational services, not more money for police and jails, yet that's what's on offer … politicians continue to hold out more police and new jails as the solution to community problems.
This must stop.
These communities need more political power & resources”

The origins & function of the police are intimately tied to the management of inequalities of race & class. The suppression of workers & the tight surveillance & micromanagement of black and brown lives have always been at the center of policing.
... We need to push back on this dramatic expansion of police power and its role in the mass incarceration at the heart of the “New Jim Crow."

We cannot change the hypocrisy upon which we were founded... We cannot make up for all of the lives lost and dreams snatched, for all the suffering endured. But we can atone for it. We can acknowledge the crime. And we can do something to try to set things right, to ease the hardship and hurt of so many of our fellow Americans. …nationalized amnesia can no longer provide the excuse.

“even as the fed government decided that Black people were undeserving of any restitution, it was bestowing millions of acres in the West on white Americans… 46 mil adults today, are descended from those homesteaders… If that many white Americans can trace their legacy of wealth & property ownership to a single entitlement program, then the perpetuation of Black poverty must also be linked to national policy"

“To this day, the only Americans who have
ever received government restitution for slavery were white enslavers in
Washington, D.C., whom the federal government compensated after the Civil
War for their loss of human property.
… contemplate what it means to achieve freedom without a home to live in, without food to eat, a bed to sleep on, clothes for your children, or money to buy any of it.”

"How can you thank a man for giving you what's already yours?" he asked, speaking of the Civil Rights Act, which was making its way through Congress at the time.
"You haven't even made progress, if what's being given to you, you should have had already. That's not progress" Malcolm X

"The negro has saved himself," Ralph
Waldo Emerson observed, "and the white man very patronizingly says, I have saved you." … Upon this myth, each successive generation of white Americans is let off the hook for the legacy of slavery. … can claim that this sin remains a part of the past, that the country has rid itself of the stain, and that there is no need for antiracist remedies like reparations.

In 2020, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported on the racial implications of Stand Your Ground laws: the criminal justice system is ten times more likely to rule a homicide justifiable if the shooter is white and victim is Black than the other way around. … when a white person kills an African American, it is 281 percent more likely to be ruled a "justifiable homicide" than a white-on-white killing.

America has evolved into one of the world's most inequitable societies… roots back
to slavery and its aftermath. If today America promotes…low-road capitalism--…of poverty wages, gig jobs,
and normalized insecurity…; a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn't just deny Black freedom but
built white fortunes…-one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the
lowest road there is.

the pattern established during slavery has remained... Modern day policing, surveillance, & mass criminalization, as well as white vigilante violence & "know-your-place aggression," have histories rooted in white
fear-not merely of Black crime or Black people but of Black liberation. Nothing has proved more threatening to our democracy, or more devastating to Black communities, than white fear of Black freedom dreams