Must-Reads and Thoughts On Building Ecosystems of Care

Your weekly curated list of must-reads is here. From shrapnel injuries in Gaza to what the right-wing war on porn really means, here are some important stories you may have missed this week.

The Real Targets of Project 2025’s War on Porn by Melissa Gira Grant. “The attack on porn is inseparable from the attacks on abortion and contraception, on marriage equality and trans rights, and of course on drag queens and library books—all of which, they believe, threaten the straight, married family as the natural bedrock of society.”

Republicans Just Handed Down a Death Sentence to the Nation's Coal Miners by Kim Kelly. “The appropriations bill is nightmarish for labor for a variety of reasons, and Republican committee members seemed hellbent on trampling all over workers’ rights, safety, and overall well-being whenever they could find the opportunity.”

We Must Fight Repression With Solidarity — Not by Replicating Carceral Logic by Dean Spade. “Using terms like ‘peaceful’ and ‘nonviolent’ to describe protests perpetuates the fiction that following restrictive rules and norms laid out by the very systems we seek to dismantle could ever be the correct way to resist.”

Unsettled People by Stevie Wilson. “Routine transfers, whether intrastate, interstate, or federal, are a form of active retaliation. Family, friends, and comrades of imprisoned people have to work to stay connected to us. The prison works to alienate us, to isolate us. They know that alone we cannot win.”

Accusing Israel of genocide cost me a job — just another example of a university failing Jews by Raz Segal. “This kind of political rigidity within the Jewish world, in the past and today, reflects an ideological fixation that, as with all ideological fixations, disregards the truth and resorts to unashamed lies.”

‘Like an oven’: death at US women’s prison amid heatwave sparks cries for help by Sam Levin. “An incarcerated person at California’s largest women’s prison has died amid a brutal heatwave that has left prison occupants without air conditioning begging for relief and warning of dire consequences for their health.”

Fossil Fuel Plants Belched Toxic Pollution as Hurricane Beryl Hit Gulf Coast by Mike Ludwig. “The hurricane season is just getting started, but a powerful storm has already brought a round of toxic releases from a cluster of fossil fuel plants on the Gulf Coast. Multiple refineries and petrochemical plants reported losing power as Hurricane Beryl slammed into Texas as a Category 1 storm on Tuesday.”

Israeli weapons packed with shrapnel causing devastating injuries to children in Gaza, doctors say by Chris McGreal. “Israeli-made weapons designed to spray high levels of shrapnel are causing horrific injuries to civilians in Gaza and disproportionately harming children, foreign surgeons who worked in the territory in recent months have told the Guardian.”

From Regional Uprisings to Reactionary Regimes: How Sudan Relates to Palestine by Shireen Akram-Boshar. “These two seemingly disparate crises, in Sudan and Palestine, are in fact deeply connected.”

Chicago Taxpayers Have Paid $35.7M to Defend Disgraced Detective Reynaldo Guevara, With No End in Sight by Heather Cherone. “Since 2008, city officials have paid a premium to hire private attorneys to defend Guevara, despite his well-documented misconduct that sent 41 now-exonerated Chicagoans to prison for decades, including one woman who was sentenced to death before her conviction was overturned.”

Final Thoughts

Last week, I encouraged everyone to get organized. Yesterday, I was reminded that “organized” means different things to different people. I am using the term broadly to describe the many ways we build relationships and collectivize our power toward some necessary end. Organizing is a craft that challenges us to overcome our alienation and work constructively with others. Whether we are organizing our workplaces, our buildings, our blocks, our churches, or our schools, we are pooling our capacities with the understanding that we are more powerful together than we are on our own. Different forms of organizing involve different strategies, traditions, and formations, but any space where we are learning together and acting in concert together in pursuit of a common goal is important right now. Organized groups can pivot as conditions shift and take on new concerns, the way many groups pivoted toward mutual aid for the first time in 2020. If people have each other, and if they are building skills together, they are more prepared to face the future. 

Organized groups can also map their place within larger ecosystems of care. Interrupting Criminalization has a toolkit called “Mapping Community Ecosystems of Collective Care” that is an essential resource in that regard. As the toolkit explains:“As communities face increased policing, criminalization, and organized abandonment; mounting state violence, repression, and authoritarianism; escalating white supremacist, homophobic, and transphobic violence; and climate collapse, building skilled, coordinated, expansive, and robust ecosystems of collective care is only becoming more and more essential to our collective survival.”

I spend a lot of time thinking about collective survival and what it requires of us. I also spend a lot of time thinking about how desperately people in the United States cling to normalcy. People want to live like the world isn’t simultaneously burning and drowning, but hell and high water are here. They have been for some time. In the U.S., many of us have the ability to retreat from the realities of this era until collapse knocks down our door. We can turn on our air conditioning to escape deadly heat waves and lose ourselves in escapism rather than reckon with disaster. We can cling to whatever version of normalcy emerges from each successive catastrophe. This is what denial looks like in the United States, but the end result of denial is a lack of preparedness. We need to build power and collective strength like the world is on fire. So, if recent events have shocked you, let that shock enliven you. Let it move you toward other people and essential work. As Mariame would say, “Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.”

Much love,

Kelly

P.S.

Let This Radicalize You is an important resource that Mariame Kaba and I wrote to help people get organized in disastrous times. The book is currently available at a 40% discount from Haymarket Books.

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