The past week has just been beyond busy for me. I’ve wanted to participate in several actions that have been taking place across my state of Illinois addressing mass incarceration but have not been able to. However thanks to my friends and to the internet, I have been able to keep up with some of the happenings. It’s not the same as being there by any measure but it allows me to feel connected in some way.

Yesterday, my friends at TAMMS Year Ten organized a powerful and from what I hear poignant direct action to amplify the voices of mothers and family members of men who are currently locked up at TAMMS Supermax prison. This is just part of the many actions that the group has been engaged in for over 10 years now.

The Chicago Tribune covered the Mother’s March:

The group of mothers stood beneath the sun in downtown Chicago on Wednesday, taking turns at a microphone to tell how the state’s controversial super-max prison has changed their sons.

One described her son’s precipitous weight loss since being incarcerated in the facility in Tamms in southern Illinois 21/2 years ago. Another spoke of her son’s slide into depression and hopelessness because of his extreme isolation. And a third detailed a maddening daily routine: In order to stay active, she said her son now spends hours walking in small circles in his windowless concrete cell.

“You did a crime, you need to pay for it,” said Geneva Mullins, whose son was convicted of attempted murder and conspiracy in a murder and is now at the Tamms super-max. “But you wouldn’t treat an animal like this. It is inhumane.”

Read the whole article here. Please also take a moment to visit the TAMMS Year Ten website to find out how you can support efforts to close this torture chamber. We have never been closer to seeing this prison closed. Governor Quinn has recommended its closure. Now it is up to the legislature to make sure that it happens.

My friend Sam took some beautiful photographs at the action and I want to share them with you.

the amazing Grace - photo by Sam Love

photo by Sam Love

photo by Sam Love

photo by Sam Love

Photo by Sam Love

This post is going to be pretty disjointed as I am still trying to formulate my ideas…

I have been in and out of town for the past ten days but have still been hooked to social media intravenously. So I found out via Facebook last week that an unarmed young black woman named Rekia Boyd was shot by an off-duty police officer on the West side of Chicago and subsequently died. The officer claims that another person in her group pulled a gun out and aimed it at him. There was no gun found at the scene however except for the one that the officer used to fire at and (unintentionally) kill Rekia who just happened to be standing with the group. Below is a video that describes the incident.

Today is Rekia Boyd’s funeral. May she rest in power.

In the past few weeks, a number of examples of unarmed people being gunned down by police have come to public attention. The truth is however that there is nothing new about police violence in America. I am currently living, breathing, and reading about the history of policing, violence and resistance as I prepare to release a set of resources that I have been working on for the past year. My work on this project has led me to think quite a bit about how I have personally framed the issue of police violence over the past few years.

I become incredibly exorcised about incidents of stop and frisk, police shootings, and other forms of violence when the targets are young men of color and in particular young black men. As I interrogate the reasons for this, I think that perhaps it is because I have brothers, cousins, nephews, and friends who are black and male. Could it be that simple? The answer has to be “no” because I also have sisters, cousins, nieces, and friends who are black and female but I don’t find myself getting as outraged over their senseless killing and assaults at the hands of law enforcement. Why is this? Is it the result of internalized sexism? Do I think that young women’s lives are less valuable than young men’s? How could that be when I have spent a lifetime fighting for the right of girls and young women to live lives free from violence?

I seem to be a bundle of contradictions on this matter. I know that by virtue of living in this society I am swimming in the waters of sexism and have therefore internalized it. Yet I am also living in a society that is racist too. But I still feel a visceral sense of loss and dread when I hear about another young black man gunned down by the cops. Is it because the numbers are unbalanced? It is true that young men of color do more often find themselves targeted by police in the streets than do young women of color. However that doesn’t explain the depth of the feelings of pain that I experience when I hear that another young black man has been shot or assaulted or killed.

So I am left to attribute my asymetrical response to the killing of Amadou Diallo and the killing of Rekia Boyd to the sad fact that I have indeed internalized the belief that my life is perhaps less valuable than that of my brother. Somehow his survival has come to mean more to me than my own. I partly blame this on the fact that most of the images of public violence that I have been and am bombarded with on a daily basis are distinctly male. When I watch movies about war, the people who are dying on the battlefields are men. When I see photographs of lynchings, those bodies are also male. When I notice incidents of police violence in the media, the victims are overwhelmingly men (and so are the killers). Public violence is male while private violence is colored female. The rampant street harassment that young women are subjected to which is in fact a form of public violence is almost always made invisible by calling it “flirting.” Young women who are raped, abused, etc… are most often harmed in “private” spaces away from the glare of the spotlight. And we are harmed by the millions in this way. I feel this “private” harm in a visceral way yet in terms of the public violence that girls/young women experience, my emotions are duller.

I am not proud of this admission. It proves how much work I still have to do to overcome my internalized sexism. I wonder if others have thoughts about this…

Guarded
(Dropping Daddy Off At Jail)
by Danna Botwick

Good-bye at the gate
We hugged & kissed like families do
He held his youngest daughter,

She wanted to see where he would sleep.

The guard, a black woman
with sunglasses & white uniform,
scooped up his belongings with
long red nails.
It’s just a camp,
no bars, she made light
of our darkness and I hated her
long red nails.

Lucy did not cry
for almost two hours.

When it folded over her,
she was trying to spell
and decided she could not do her work
without him
so she beat the couch
with small angry fists
“I want my daddy, NOW!”
Until she could not breathe,
eyes puffy,
face flushed she raged,

“I wish daddy didn’t do that bad
thing in the first place!”

I paused inside my hurt
and suggested,
“He didn’t know…”

Too smart for me
she smashed her face into a pillow,
“I’ll bet all mothers say that to their children.”