
The plantation, the prison farm, the police academy: it sounds like a history of America.
The plantation, the prison farm, the police academy: it sounds like a history of America.
The lower courts may ultimately prove a central site of protest in our time.
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October 19, 2023
It’s never been this bad.
July 13, 2023
The politics of law and order feeds on the crisis it claims to solve.
May 9, 2023
At the vigil
Real estate greed, the glutted police budget, ceaseless gentrification, racist journalists, Eric Adams, Kathy Hochul, white people—we cycled through the injustices, against them, resuscitating despair into focused rage.
April 28, 2023
Is it possible for someone named Josh Kline to be Filipino American?
Like many mixed-race/mixed-culture peoples who have emerged, are emerging, or perhaps yearn to emerge from a colonial legacy, most Filipinos see no contradiction in this racial, ethnic, and cultural mix. It is not a problem or a source of confusion to the people in that mix.
Coming of age with Afrobeats
The album gives me space to imagine beautiful places and sappy romantic love. It gives me the space to imagine intentional rest that does not imply lockdown, to imagine interactions with people that don’t signal death, and to imagine a healthy, abundant sex life that I have yet to experience.
March 15, 2023
Our cars, no matter how much we cherish them, hold us in social and economic custody
For most of us, our cars, no matter how much we cherish them, hold us in social and economic custody. As more and more vehicles are financed, and with higher loans and interest rates, creditors exert a carceral pull over our ability to earn a sustainable livelihood. Perhaps the most telling evidence of this servitude is that, in times of financial stress, households will prioritize their monthly car payments over all others, including basic necessities. Surely it is the mark of our perverse civilization when food, medical care, and housing have to take a back seat to our need to keep wheels on the road.
January 25, 2023
“Minorities Unite! Fight for Democratic Rights!”
There is a symmetry between Corky Lee’s passing and the rise of Stop Anti-Asian Hate: the departure of Asian America’s greatest documentarian and its most visible recent efflorescence. Years earlier, the brief window of postwar Asian American radicalism seemed to have already swung shut. Today, our most notable figures are corporate CEOs and conservative politicians, the eponymous Asians rich and crazy, so the artists, revolutionaries, and workers preserved in Lee’s prints can feel as elusive as their author. No matter how distant an Asian American poor people’s movement may seem, his prints still vibrate with radical temporality and potential.
September 2, 2022
I came to see the official indifference to the public’s health as not a bug but a feature of this society.
Prison litigation as a conduit for resistance
On paper, legislators passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act to halt what congresspeople erroneously called an epidemic of “meritless” prisoner-initiated lawsuits clogging court dockets. But the law’s effect — crushing imprisoned people’s access to the courts and limiting the federal courts’ power to remedy heinous prison conditions, especially via population control orders — was to severely narrow a key terrain of struggle for imprisoned people fighting not only for relief from abusive treatment and inhumane conditions, but also against the expansion of an intensifying regime of racialized mass imprisonment.
What is this a description of but free association and fantasy gone wrong?