FRIDAY, JUNE 19th, 2020

PAY YOUR REPARATIONS NOW - If you don’t have a personal reparations plan, start to think about it. We are still thinking about ours but it’s currently to give 50% of our June sales to five different Black trans owned organizations (with their approval), and 10% every month following . We’re open to suggestions and conversations around improving our plan as well! Your plan can look different from ours -- buying from Black owned businesses, contributing to mutual aid funds, signing petitions, making payments to individuals, and so on.

Small history lesson - and please delve much deeper into this than what you’re getting on Instagram, either on our page or anyone else’s. Political scientist Thomas Craemer calculated the hours worked by enslaved Black people between 1776 and the signing of the emancipation proclamation, and found the total salary owed to be between $5.9 and 14.2 trillion. Keep in mind enslaved Africans were brought here in 1619, so this number is not accounting for those 157 previous years, as well as the systemic ways in which we have enslaved Black people, profited off of their suffering, and worked tirelessly to keep structural racial inequality in place. 

It’s Juneteenth -- so many feeds are being inundated with graphics and great information about this date, when all enslaved people were freed under the Emancipation Proclamation. However, we just want to be crystal clear. The United States still systemically enslaves Black people and profits off of this to maintain white supremacy. We must consider the purposeful and insidious lingering of policies and systems created to keep Black people unequal. 

After slavery was abolished, we still had ninety years of Jim Crow laws. Separate but equal policies. Racist housing policies. Over-policing of neighborhoods. White-washed history classes. We’ll talk about one example here -- housing equity. Home equity is a huge source of wealth and generational wealth for many white Americans. Due to redlining, Black people were not able to secure loans from banks to buy homes, therefore creating poor, segregated communities and leaving these neighborhoods underfunded. As these neighborhoods suffered, white families fled to the suburbs and where they were able to take out secure, low interest loans. 

It’s not a coincidence that now these “bad neighborhoods” with “high crime rates” that are over-policed are areas that were formerly redlined and house many Black Americans. It doesn’t take a genius to see that poor, over-policed neighborhoods of course have the most “criminals” who end up in a broken prison system. 

In our stories today, we’re putting some posts and articles with more information and encourage you to take today, especially if you’re a white person with the day off, to research and make a plan for reparations. 

Swipe up links for further reading:

Articles: 

The Case for Reparations

Why We Need Reparations for Black Americans

What is the Prison Industrial Complex? 

The Racist Roots of American Policing

The Criminalization of Gentrifying Neighborhoods

A Forgotten History of How the U.S. Government Segregated America

The Barriers that Keep Black and Hispanic People from Voting

Lessons from McGraw Hill: History Class and the Fictions About Race in America

How the School-to-Prison Pipeline Works

What Stop and Frisk Really Means

Books:

The New Jim Crow

Stamped from the Beginning

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Organizations you can donate to: 

For The Gworls

The Okra Project

Princess Janae Place

Black Trans Travel Fund

NY Trans Advocacy Group

Snap 4 Freedom

House of GG

TGI Justice Project

G.L.I.T.S.

Trans Tech Social

Trans Women of Color Collective

Black Trans TV

Marsha P. Johnson Institute

Black Trans Femmes in the Arts

Trans Justice Funding Project