EID IS ACROSS THE RIVER (II)

by Jie Wu

Photo by Jie Wu

2.

After three months of soul-searching, I gathered all my hope and energy to return again to India, to visit Ramaswamy, Amina baji and all the dear teachers and students at the school. The school director, Ramaswamy, supported my decision and generously offered me a place to stay in his family house in Kolkata. On a sunny afternoon, Ramaswamy and I sat conversing in the wide-view veranda on the first floor of his family house in Kolkata. As he smoked a cigarette, he calmly said, “India is like an apartheid society.” He gently asked, “Do you know what apartheid is?” I nodded my head and replied that I had read some things about it.

A long silence followed and then Ramaswamy began puffing out some words. “Similar to the separation of ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’ in South Africa, Indian society too is divided along lines of class, caste, religion, gender… The Muslim basti-dwellers in Priya Manna Basti in Howrah are like the ‘blacks’ of apartheid-India.” Another long silence followed as he smoked and I continued meditating on the stream of words that had escaped from his mouth. His mouth now slowly puffed out cigarette smoke, enveloping both of us, as I tried to understand his life’s journey.

It can be said that it is quite a rare occurrence for a person of Ramaswamy’s background to start a grassroots organization in a Muslim basti in Howrah. An “outlier” if you put it in literal terms. Born and raised in an educated middle-class South Indian Brahmin family, Ramaswamy used to work as a consultant to the government in the field of environment and urban poverty in Calcutta. After several life-changing experiences, like the Hindu-Muslim riots in 1992, a long-term study on Islam and Sufism, and working in an environmental improvement project in Priya Manna Basti in Howrah, Ramaswamy entered into an existential struggle that eventually led him to establishing Howrah Pilot Project in 1997.

Howrah Pilot Project or HPP works towards the goal of “building awareness, capabilities and leadership for community uplift among disadvantaged youth in Howrah.” It is through HPP that Talimi Haq School provides non-formal and empowering education in Priya Manna Basti. One might ask, why should an upper-class Brahmin start a school in a Muslim basti? This might be the reason why Ramaswamy assigned the local teacher-coordinators, Amina baji and Binod bhai, to assume leadership of Talimi Haq School. Being conscious of his position of power and privilege, Ramaswamy patiently waited for Amina baji and Binod bhai’s leadership skills to emerge and gradually removed himself from dictating the course of the school. Most matters with regard to running the center are currently managed by Amina baji and Binod bhai. If necessary Ramaswamy steps in and backs them up, but he now devotes most of his time to performing the roles of director of a family-business and translator of the Bengali writer, Subimal Misra. Ramaswamy continued puffing out spirals of smoke as we both sat in his veranda. Quiet and pensive, I looked at all the people of different castes and classes walking past the three-way intersection in front of his house. Ramaswamy puffed out some words again: “The Indian social structure has been designed and functions in such a way that there is no intercourse between the upper-class Hindu Brahmins and the below-the-poverty-line Muslim basti dwellers.” Confused yet awed, I meditated on his words.

There must be some kind of implicit social contract imposed by the upper classes upon the lowly basti dwellers. An oppressive, silent contract, marked by blood and birth. Yes, birth – that was it. Since birth … no from even before being born, the basti dwellers were conditioned into lives of servitude in which they are expected to blindly serve their privileged ‘superior’ masters. If I follow along Paulo Freire’s thinking: poverty, illiteracy and structural oppression would be the major forces conditioning the basti dwellers to cycles of silent servitude to the people from upper classes and castes.

Let’s say a female child is born in the basti. Her mother is an exploited maidservant in an upper-class man’s house and her father is an exploited factory labourer. The child grows in the slum among her many siblings, helps in family chores and goes to poorly-funded, overcrowded government schools. Due to family financial distress, she quits school sometime during middle school and goes on to take up exploitative work continuing their parents’ work-cycle, until her marriage, has her own children, by chance she falls sick (due to poverty, malnutrition and inadequacy of healthcare) which leads to an eventual early death.

Of course, women do have the agency to take control of their lives, but that means they have to fight head-on against structural forces such as poverty, illiteracy and gender discrimination. Yes Amina baji, she is a living example of a brave woman who is battling the oppressive forces consigning women to tragic cycles of life and death in the bastis. And Amina’s teacher and guide was Ramaswamy, this man sitting and smoking in front of me, the man who had seen through these cycles of life and death in Howrah’s bastis and decided to dedicate himself to founding Howrah Pilot Project.

While staying at Ramaswamy’s family house in Kolkata, I was once again confronted by those innermost questions that I had left unanswered during my earlier stint as an English teacher and researcher at Talimi Haq School. Why can’t I fully connect to the teachers and students at the school? What is it that separates me from them?

From March through August 2015, instead of working hard to answer these innermost questions, I spent most of my time trying to develop a children’s dance-drama with this centre. Once again, I encountered major difficulties in trying to work together with the teachers and students at the school. First, I couldn’t inspire people to fully dedicate themselves to this dance-drama project. It might have been that this project wasn’t able to appeal to the teachers’ needs and aspirations for the school. Amina baji, Binod bhai and most teachers wanted to start sewing classes and a women’s health programme, but I had come to offer a children’s dance-drama project. Our goals and aspirations did not match, hence the dance-drama venture came into a halt. Later, conditions arose for me to go to work with Indian Chinese youth to start a Dragon Boat Festival, as a means towards initiating revitalization of the old Chinatown of Kolkata. This new project took up almost all my time and effort until the end of my second trip to India. My existential questions were again neglected and left unanswered. In September 2015, I returned to Lisbon to visit family and start on the path of a writer.

Read from Part 1 here.

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Jie Wu

THE DECOLONIZER
February 2016

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NATIVE WOMEN ARE IN DANGER: INDIGENOUS WOMEN AND THE SEX TRADE

By Dubian Ade

Misty Upham, Native Actress (Illustration by Vin Ganapathy for The Guardian)

Native women are in danger. Around the country, Native woman are disappearing from their communities at an alarming rate. Three Indigenous women have been found dead in northern Minnesota since May of 2015. 52 year-old Lisa Isham, 31 year-old Rose Downwind, and 44 year-old Dawn Reynolds were all killed in between the months of May and December. Two more have disappeared. In Canada. Tina Fontaine was found dead in the Red River August of 2014. Her death sparked a national inquiry.

Media coverage of these deaths and disappearances have been sparse and inadequate. Police and local authorities have shown no interest in investigating. Low-income Native women and two-spirit people live in a constant state of fear.

Five hours from Minnesota in the oil-rich fields of North Dakota, scores of men toil working the oil boom that recently swept the area of the Bakken. The discovery of the Parshall Oil Field in 2006 prompted the creation of thousands of jobs and nearly doubled the population from 20,000 to 40,000 people. It also prompted the emergence of sex-trafficking rings, which formed around the worker markets. Servicing the violent sexual appetites of oil workers, low-income Native women are often abducted from surrounding reservations.

Oil companies are absolutely complicit in the sexual violence and commercial human trafficking occurring in the Bakken. Some of those companies include Exxon Mobil, Hess, US Energy, Marathon Oil, and Conoco Phillips.

The abduction and sex-trafficking of Indigenous women is not limited to Bakken. In Montana, the trafficking of Native women has increased 15% within the last year according to the Montana Native Women's Coalition. Although trafficking statistics of Native women remain scarce, according to Indian Country Today journalist Victoria Sweet research from related studies suggest that Native women and girls are disproportionately affected by the human trafficking industry.

According to the Justice Department at least 61% of Native woman have been assaulted in their lifetimes. Native women are twice as likely to be sexually assaulted then women from other ethnic groups. 1 in 3 Native women are likely to be raped in their lifetime. In Minnesota 25% of women arrested for sex-work identified as Native American but Natives represent only 2.2% of the total population. In Anchorage, Alaska 33% of women arrested for sex-work identified as Alaskan Native but Natives represent only 7.9% of the total population. In Vancouver, Canada, 52% of sex-workers identified as Native when only 7% of the total population is Indigenous.

The Save Wiyabi Project, an advocacy group dedicated to addressing violence against Native women, has tracked more than 1000 death and disappearance cases of Indigenous women in the United States. In Canada, more than 1200 unsolved murder and missing cases of Indigenous women have been reported.

Many more go unreported.

Oil fields, forestry projects, fracking operations, trucking and shipping routes, lumber yards, shipping ports, construction sites, are all hotbeds for sex trafficking.Traffickers will target young low-income Native women, many of whom are abducted, abandoned, or are runways between the ages of 15 and 20. Often times traffickers will befriend these women, give them nice things, and get them use to a life on the run. Then they will "groom" them for the markets in the cities or in places like the Bakken.

32.4% of Native children live in poverty. 50 to 80 percent of trafficking victims have been involved in the foster care system at some point in their lives. From the 1940s to the 1960s at least one third of Native children were placed in the foster care system. In foster care, Native girls in particular are vulnerable to sex-traffickers who will often use drugs and other means to indoctrinate commercial sex-workers. Many young girls involved in the sex trade were either abandoned or choose to run away from the conditions on the reservation. Many suffer from inter-generational trauma.

Sexual violence against Indigenous women in this country dates all the way back to Columbus. Native women were sold as slaves to European colonizers. Columbus himself condoned the gang rape of Indigenous women. The state sponsored forced relocations of Native tribes destroyed Indigenous families. Native children were forced to go to the Christian boarding schools where they were sexually abused and beaten.

The exotized and eroticized images of Native women make them even more desirable for trafficking markets. The hyper sexual images of the "Pocahontas" pervade mainstream media and pop-culture. White women want to wear headdresses with dream-catcher earrings and be sexy native princesses for Halloween. Everywhere the Native woman's body is rendered disposable, objectified and dehumanized.

Native actress Misty Upham went missing on October 5, 2014 in Auburn, Washington. She was best known for her role in the award-winning 2008 film Frozen River, in which she was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female.

Upham was last seen leaving her family's home on the Muckleshoot Reservation after going through emotional distress. Misty Upham body was found a week later at the bottom of a ravine. According to the medical examiner, Upham died of blunt-force injuries. Police refused to help with the investigation. They did not send a search party when Upham went missing. Local authorities claimed that her disappearance did not fit the criteria for a full-fledged investigation. Volunteers made up of family and fiends had to find Misty's body on their own.

Charles Upham, Misty's father, was told that a witness saw two men beat his daughter and throw her down the ravine. No arrests have been made.

Native women are in danger.

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Dubian Ade

THE DECOLONIZER
February 2016

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EID IS ACROSS THE RIVER

by Jie Wu

"Boatman Crossing the River" by Jie Wu

1.

It’s almost Eid, I thought to myself: I need to go across the river and visit the teachers and students at Talimi Haq School. The school is a non-formal educational center run by Howrah Pilot Project in an industrial workers’ settlement, populated mostly by Muslim households, in the city of Howrah, India. Here, students and volunteer teachers address each other as sister and brother, using the Urdu terms “baji”(sister) and “bhai”(brother).

A few days ago, Amina baji had invited me to school for the upcoming Eid-al Fitr festival. Eid, also known as the "Feast of Breaking the Fast,” celebrates the completion of – the twenty-nine or thirty-day period of fasting from dawn to sunset undertaken by many Muslim residents in Priya Manna Basti, where Talimi Haq School is located. During Eid celebrations, people eat special foods, wear new clothes, offer prayers, share gifts between friends and family and go to attend Eid fairs.

In 2014, I had the chance to celebrate Eid with the students and teachers at Talimi Haq School. For more than six months, I had been working as a volunteer English teacher and researcher there. As a researcher, I looked into how residents from Howrah and Kolkata (cities on opposite sides of a river) related to the river Hooghly (also known as the Ganga, or Ganges) that flows in between. I had hoped to be able to grasp the complex relationships between people and the Hooghly river in the contemporary context of globalization. I alternated my time between the roles of researcher and English teacher in the school.

After three months of difficult research work, I had hit a major wall. I started questioning myself and the motivations behind my research. Would my work at all benefit the students and teachers of Talimi Haq School? Sometimes the answer seemed to be no, and so I dedicated more time and effort towards my other role as an English teacher in the school. I thought that perhaps I could contribute more to the students by teaching them English rather than selfishly collecting data for my personal study and possible publication.

It was during my short stint as an English teacher in Talimi Haq School that I came to realize that I was infected with a dangerous syndrome – the White Man’s burden. This syndrome can be described as a seemingly selfless desire (in reality being selfish because it is a personal desire) to "civilize" and save the non-white peoples from their perceived savagery and ignorance.

The British novelist and poet, Rudyard Kipling, popularized this term after writing the poem "White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands”. In this poem, Kipling called upon the U.S. to take on the burden of empire, similar to what Britain and other European nations had done, in order to civilize and save the non-white peoples, whom he referred as "your new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child.” Although I am not "white", I could see that my privileges as a Chinese American, brought up and educated in Portugal and later in the U.S., led me to becoming infected with the White Man’s burden syndrome.

I arrived in India proudly armed with a Cambridge TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificate. I thought that this English teaching certificate and my previous experience as an English tutor for a literacy NGO made me more than qualified for the new teaching assignment at Talimi Haq School. I saw myself as the foreign teacher who would "save" the students from their chronic English learning problems. Direct in-field experience quickly proved to me how unqualified and untrained I was to teach the students at the school. For instance, my inability to speak Hindi or Urdu, communication failures and cultural differences made it very difficult for me to teach the students at this center. I also saw how local teachers could teach the students in a much more efficient, sustainable and culturally specific way than I could. I was humbled and thus began my ongoing effort to cleanse myself of the disease of the White Man’s burden.

My teaching experience at Talimi Haq School taught me about how there was nobody and nothing at all within my sense of ‘I’ – the egotistical teacher, to "save."

It was only my mind that urgently needed to be saved from its teacher-and-savior complex, something ingrained in the global system of neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism. English teaching, if not carefully and consciously undertaken, is a powerful tool of submission, domination and colonization of non-English speaking peoples, which in most cases also means non-White people. After slowly discerning the imperialism of English teaching, I took up the role of an assistant to the local teachers and helped them in whichever ways I could. I observed that the change in my attitude made it easier for me to get along with the other teachers, but I could still sense there was some kind of gap or invisible barrier that prevented me from fully understanding and connecting with the teachers and students of the school. I thought about this often. I would ask myself: What it is that separates me from the students and teachers at Talimi Haq School? Is it language, culture, class, caste, gender, privilege or religion that pushes us away from each other?

As time flowed by like the river Hooghly these existential questions lay unanswered in my consciousness. After a nine-month stay in India, doing research and English teaching, I returned in December 2014 to visit my family in Lisbon, Portugal. Back in Lisbon, the memories of India being with the teachers and students of Talimi Haq School kept returning to me. I tried suppressing them but all my efforts were in vain. What it is that separates me from the students and teachers at Talimi Haq School? Is it language, culture, class, caste, gender, privilege or religion that pushes us away from each other?

Continue to Part 2 here.

To support the project that Talimi Haq School is currently undertaking led by the local teachers, please visit their Indiegogo page here.

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Jie Wu

THE DECOLONIZER
January 2016

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TO THE OFFICERS

by Leah Grady Sayvetz

On a Tuesday morning in early November, on my way driving to work, I was stopped at the bottom of Elm street by a traffic jam, not atypical for 8am on a week day. Thinking nothing of it, I patiently waited for vehicles to move on so that I could pull out onto Floral Ave. The car ahead of me seemed somewhat thoughtless in how they had stopped across a lane of traffic on Floral and did not appear to be moving.

An elderly black man turned up Elm, having just come from the Martin Luther King Blvd bridge, and stopped his car next to mine to let out his passenger, a middle-aged black man. As I saw these two men say good bye, I realized that the driver of the car ahead of me, a white man, had just jumped out of his vehicle and was now pointing a gun at the younger of the two black men. It suddenly became clear that we were surrounded by undercover police.

Dear Officers,

That Tuesday, did you feel like you did your job well, pursued justice, kept our community safe, by staging this surprise arrest of my neighbor, a black man? Had you been told- perhaps you yourselves had even collected evidence to suggest or confirm- that this individual was committing crimes? Did these supposed crimes have anything to do with illegal drugs? Were they violent or nonviolent crimes? I want us to stop and think, first, before even answering these questions. Before even asking them, really.

For here we are on a Tuesday morning in rush hour traffic and here is the scene you have staged for everyone to watch and learn: You are armed white men pointing guns at a black man. What message does this send to those of us who happen to drive by? To those of us who are white, does it perhaps reinforce the myth that blackness is criminal? To those of us who are white does it perhaps reinforce the myth that black lives don’t matter? I would claim yes. To anyone driving by who is a person of color, does this scene perhaps reinforce the very real fear that they or their loved ones could be stopped by the police at any time for little or no reason at all, to have guns pointed at them, to be interrogated, dehumanized, shot, killed? 

What about black and brown children in the car being driven to school, who see you with your guns pointed at a black man this morning? You know that these children hear the news so often of yet another black body slain by police or security guards with no criminal prosecution of the murderer. What kind of fear do you think your show of force this morning instills in these beautiful children? A real and founded fear.

Ok, now if you’ve thought about that, but you still feel justified because you were doing your job to “fight crime,” I want us to have this conversation: How can you call ANYTHING that my neighbor may be accused of a CRIME, when the real and monstrously enormous crimes of our governments and corporations go unchecked and unaddressed?

The real crime is every single mother, father, and child without adequate housing. The real crime is every child not fed good healthy food. The real crime is every youth, every adult, not employed, not employed meaningfully, not paid a living wage. The real crimes is mass incarceration of people of color, of poor folks. The real crime is the theft of trillions of dollars from US tax payers to build weapons, to invade other countries, to torture. The real crime is our governments’ complete disregard for Native treaties, leaving our Native brothers and sisters without land, homes, food, work, clean air, clean water, clean soil. The real crime is the imprisonment and forced slave labor of over 2 million people in our country, most for nonviolent offenses, for crimes of poverty, for the crime of being abandoned and targeted by the system, for the crime of being black, for the crime of being poor. The real crime is so many millions of Americans who don’t have access to health care. The real crime is Wall Street making billions of dollars off the whole mess, off of even our visits to the doctor. The real crime is mothers and fathers who fled here for their lives and their children’s lives, who are being deported and taken from their families.

The real crime is our export of violence and poverty to resource-rich countries so that we can enjoy cheap fossil fuels and cheap factory goods. The real crime is our flying drones which kill children, fathers, mothers, blowing up wedding parties, tribal counsel assemblies, assassinating anyone anywhere in the world without due process. The real crime is our rape of the earth, our extraction of fossil fuels, releasing carbon into Earth’s atmosphere in quantities to ensure the planet’s warming and climate catastrophe. The real crime is White Supremacy which built this country by the massacre, enslavement and displacement of its original inhabitants, by the kidnapping and enslavement of 12.5 million Africans (“How Many Slaves Entered The US?” Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jan. 6, 2014. theroot.com). The list of crimes goes on, far beyond the end of this paragraph, beyond the end of this page. When will our law enforcement begin to address these?

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Leah Grady Sayvetz

THE DECOLONIZER
December 2015

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REPORT FROM KOLKATA: BURNING DEVOTIONALS

by Sophia Terazawa

One.

The neighborhood called Jubilee Park in Kolkata is exceptionally quiet at dawn. For the time being, the street dogs have ceased their nightly howling melodrama. There are three patrolling the block below my window—all muscle and limp—that growl and bark and bite at each other for their rightful place as alpha male. The fights erupt from the tiniest infractions. A bump on the shoulder. A look.

The regular brawls are quite exhausting to hear at midnight, as everyone bleeds and nobody sleeps. But like I said, the theatrics inevitably end at dawn, and it is in this moment that one can feel the silence of this city.

I am sometimes awake at this time to write, as I write now, when a dream pries open my eyes and chokes out the sound of what needs to be said. And I think what needs to be said is the smell of holy places―mosques and black churches―burning in America.

Two.

My flat in Jubilee Park is a dusty ten minute walk from the Tollygunge tram depot, and somewhere between the two, the dogs are finally napping. They are a pile of legs and heavy, fresh torn bodies. I imagine each morning that they are finally friends. I also imagine my mother working. She is a refugee in a new country that once bombed her previous country, and I imagine her paycheck in U.S. dollars. I imagine her laugh lines, the ones that deepen around her eyes with every passing year, the ones that fold and break easily into hysterics. She laughs, even when she is hurting, and I think about this before writing, but I cannot write, not yet. I cannot write until the first call to prayer.

Three.

The mosque is so close that I can hear the man clearing his throat before the microphone. It is a soft cough, a gentle cough, and he could shatter the spirit in two if he could—however mournful the previous day, however high the body count rises, however brown and black the faces of his murdered children around the world—yet he does not halve anything but the silence. In this place and in this time, he is the song and glory that pierces the distance between Kolkata and South Carolina. And it is precisely here that I write about devotion in flames.

Four.

Homes of worship are combustible places. The sight is more immediate from a television screen in West Bengal—a grainy video from a cell phone of the fire, the yelling, the grief. A mosque burns, and a young man howls into the shirt of another. One elderly nun is raped in a church. A temple falls. Bangladesh is there. Nepal is there. Pakistan is not too far away either. There are conversations all the time with the people of Kolkata—some hushed at the vegetable stalls of Lake Market and some roaring at the universities, in Esplanade, a blocked intersection of Ballygunge. It is an insistent demand for justice, and though my language fails me in some instances, I am witness to the calls for accountability, peace, and equality for all by any means necessary.

“What in the hell is going on over there?” A Bengali professor had demanded to know, as we sat over tea and politics. I replied that yes, Niladri, it is hell over there. America is hell. In the name of progress and freedom, the country is a falsehood for the hungry, the tired, the poor, and worst of all for the policed. There are images of hate, and then there is the reality of hate. I did not have to leave that place to see the difference.

Five.

There is something peculiar that happens to rage, as the morning light becomes brighter, and the street vendors begin shouting. There will not be another call to prayer until midday. It is more difficult to write poetry at a time like this, but the words come fluidly. It reeks of kerosene and old teakwood, the history still fresh, and there—buried inside the muscle and flesh of such history burning mosques, temples, and churches—is the responsibility to write about the ashes. I do not believe that the dead ask for immortality, as I believe the dead bury no names. And I believe in chaos as much as I believe in grace.

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Sophia Terazawa

THE DECOLONIZER
December 2015

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ON THE FRONT LINES: #RISEUPOCTOBER #WHATSIDEAREYOUON

by Dubian Ade

As I enter the confines of Washington Square Park I am met with busy people hunched over, chalk drawing liberation into the concrete floor. The massive stone arch towers over them, adjourn with colonial European faces that seem to shrink at the sight of the people gathering increasingly at its base. At any second it seemed the masses would rise up in fury to topple the stone landmark. A woman stationed at the edge hands me a copy of The Revolution newspaper.

Another black woman yells "Get your buttons! Black Lives Matter, get your buttons." Another black woman follows alongside her selling black liberation flags. The sound of drums waters the space in rhythms synced with the beautiful chaos of the people organizing at every direction. Filled with sounds, conversation, movement, smells, tastes swirl behind a backdrop of words ferociously spoken from a microphone.

They are the families. Sandra Bland, Micheal Brown, Eric Gardner, Tamir Rice, the kind of testimonies that tear at the insides like swallowed rust nails. "Until you experience this you will never know my pain!" she rages as a loved one concerned, hurt written on his face reaches from behind the stage for her "No, no until they been through what I have experience you will never know!"

The microphone drops. It is a thud felt in the pit of a collective stomach.

REPORT FROM KOLKATA: THE LIBERATION FRONT

by Sophia Terazawa

On May 19th, 1890, Ho Chi Minh was born.

On May 19th, 1925, Malcolm X was born.

Source: Ann Arbor Sun, May 9th, 1975 (p. 8-9)

On May 19th, 1970, a mass of university students and artists marched through Kolkata, India. Under the watchful gaze of a scorching pre-monsoon sun, brown youth raised their fists and with a shout―“Hands off Vietnam!”―they stopped at Harrington Street.

CAMPAIGN ZERO

Black Lives Matter organizers Johnetta Elizie, Brittany Packnett and DeRay McKesson team up with researchers and analysts to launch a comprehensive agenda to end police brutality.

by Dubian Ade

Campaign Zero

As the state-sanctioned murder of black and brown bodies continues to occur in the United States, critics of the Black Lives Matter movement have claimed that no official agenda to stop police violence has been released. In an interview with NPR's Audie Cornish,Brittany Packnett righteously explained "we've had demands for over the last year."

Why these demands, screamed from the top of the lungs of protesters in Baltimore and Ferguson were still unclear remains a mystery. But Black Lives Matter organizers from Ferguson along with researchers and data analysts have put together a comprehensive package of urgent policy solutions to change policing in this country. The agenda has been called Campaign Zero.

DOMINICAN-HAITIANS FACE ETHNIC CLEANSING AND MASS DEPORTATION

Dominican-Haitians flood processing centers as DR prepares for mass deportation.

by Dubian Ade

via Al Jazeera

You are an undocumented Haitian who has lived in the Dominican Republic for generations. Your family has made a home here, your children born onto this soil. You moved here for work; in fact you were recruited here by the Dominican government under its bilateral agreements of 1959 and 1966. You and your relatives have worked on Dominican plantations cutting sugar cane for more that thirty years.

June 17th was the deadline declared by the Dominican government for you to register for a two-year visa. After this date you face mass deportation. The lines stretch around the corners of buildings with people who had camped outside of the registering offices since 3 AM in the morning. People are confused and pleading. Some whisper the need for special documentation from Haiti. You have no documentation from Haiti. You have no connection to Haiti as you have lived in the Dominican Republic for most of your life. You have no place to go back to in Haiti. You and your children will most likely be homeless.

REPORT BACK #M4BLFREE: MOVEMENT FOR BLACK LIVES NATIONAL CONVENING

by Nicole LaFave

On July 24,2015 the Movement for Black Lives Convening took in Cleveland, Ohio. Approximately 1,500 brown and black bodies flooded the Cleveland State University campus. Black people from across the globe traveled to the Midwest in hopes of garnering the rejuvenation to continue the movement for Black Lives. The purpose of this convening was to empower people of the African Diaspora to lead their own movement to dismantle structural and systemic racism. The very essence of this convening was to create a safe space for black voices and concerns to be heard; a space filled with love, healing and resilience.

via Twitter, Laila Nur

Beautiful afros, dreadlocks, Senegalese twist and other forms of African hairstyles were sported by the beautiful black men, women and children in attendance. "Good morning beautiful black people," was heard by a group of teens from the Greater Ithaca Activities Center summer camp. Huge smiles filled the faces of this group of teens. How often does one hear such a greeting on the streets from a stranger? This greeting set the tone for the rest of the weekend which was filled with black love, hope and strategic planning for the rebirth of what it means to be Black in America.