The revelations that the NSA is spying on Americans — with the help of tech and broadband companies — should frighten anyone fighting for racial justice. After all, our nation has a long and shameful history of using surveillance to disrupt racial and social justice movements.
"There is one number that simply haunts me—perhaps because I am a parent. Across the country, 2.7 million children have at least one parent in prison. That is 2.7 million children who do not know what it means to talk regularly with their mother or father."
Post-racial is just an Orwellian remix of the age-old settler narrative that continues to drive culture and policy in the United States. And this nation building and power keeping story carries new weight and meaning amidst a deep demographic shift to a browner, younger country.
Discriminatory surveillance programs are hardly new. But our communities know "surveillance" does not lead to security, in fact it’s the opposite.
Like anything ideological in nature, narratives about people, places, and events can mutate and thrive from generation to generation, often contrary to actual experiences and interactions and even contradicting simultaneous narratives.
May 1st is a national holiday in more than 80 countries and celebrated unofficially in many other countries. The U.S. government however doesn’t acknowledge this as a holiday and has tried to suppress the bloody repression of workers by the state and private businesses.
VisionTalk is a multi-media series brought to you by Center for Media Justice designed to spark a dialog about social movement culture, strategy, and vision.
This spring we launched a new communications resource for community organizing with our allies and partners the Praxis Project, Center for Story-based Strategy (CSS), Movement Strategy Center, Community Media Workshop and the Progressive Communicator’s Network, “Echoing Justice: Communications Strategies for Community Organizing in the 21st Century.” For release, we engaged a our partners and the Read more
I had the pleasure of interviewing Shanelle Matthews, Communications Manager at Forward Together about the organization, the Strong Families movement and the amazing communications work they do to reframe and engage communities around reproductive justice.
"I consider it part of my job and role as a movement leader to know what people are thinking, to build national community with those in my networks, and support the members of the Media Action Grassroots Network." - learn more from Malkia Cyril and Rinku Sen of Applied Research Center about the social media secrets of movement leaders.