Here are ways to support the movement for Black lives here in SATX—including taking the streets, organizing around local demands, and pressing forward toward prison abolition and alternatives to policing.
Immediate-Term: Upcoming Calendar of Protests
Here are all #BLACKLIVESMATTER protests we can identify in SATX over the next couple of weeks (at least, according to Facebook). As much as possible, we want to promote direct actions that are community-based, autonomous, and Black-led. If you see any events below which don’t fit the bill OR if you know of other important upcoming actions that do which are missing, please let us know! If you’re an organizer, please add us to your press list when sending out event info: editor@deceleration.news
Drive for Black Lives (Local Caravan in Solidarity with National Day of Action for Black Lives)
Oh, and don’t forget there’s still a pandemic raging, which is also a racial justice issue. If you can’t be out in the streets, consider supporting the following local groups:
Black Futures Collective: Venmo @BlackFuturesCollective-SA OR CashApp: $BlackFuturesSATX
Medium-Term: Local Organizing around Specific Demands
1. Demand DA Joe Gonzales reopen cases of Marquise Jones and Charles “Chop” Roundtree:
2. Petition drive to repeal chapters 174 and 143 of the state government code, which allows the San Antonio Police Association to evade efforts at holding them accountable for police violence.
3. Support local efforts to defund SAPD. Watch this panel discussion via @blackfuturescollective:
4. Support Black Future Collective’s rest campaign:
5. Support individual Black organizers in San Antonio. Via migrant rights coalition SA Stands: “We are encouraging our network to make financial donations to two anti-racist, abolitionist, Black organizers who deserve to be compensated for the work they are doing in San Antonio: Kimiya Factory and Ki’amber Thompson”. Kimiya co-founded #ChangeRapeCulture at UTSA and helped organize and lead the #JusticeForFloyd Black Lives Matter Protest in San Antonio,Texas. She is a member of the Black Futures Collective and the President of the Black Freedom Factory. Her work is centered in Black Liberation and movement towards structural change.
Ki’Amber Thompson founded the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project (crbloomproject.org) in her hometown of San Antonio to provide local youth impacted by incarceration with opportunities to find healing and a sense of purpose. Ki’Amber named the program in honor of her cousin, Charles Davonte Roundtree, Jr., whose life was lost due to the state-sanctioned violence of the San Antonio Police Department. Ki’Amber is currently leading many of the organizing efforts for Black lives with the Black Futures Collective and Defund SAPD Coalition.
The Long Game: Police, Prison, ICE Abolition
1. Video panel – “The Politics of Prisons: Women’s Critiques and Alternatives”
“Around the world, prison systems rely on systems and structures that oppress and subjugate groups of people for the purpose of exploitation and social control. Prisons are a site of struggle for many social movements, which believe in approaches to justice and social peace beyond authoritarianism, surveillance and violence. Why do prison struggles matter to women? What could prison abolition look like from a feminist perspective? The panel is organized by Cenî Kurdish Women’s Office for Peace as part of the ‘Solidarity Keeps Us Alive’ campaign.”
2. Autostraddle’s “Guide to Guides” on Abolition 101
“This week has been a greater flashpoint for discussion about abolition of police & prisons in mainstream (white) discourse than perhaps ever before; there have been several public wishes for an explainer or 101 on abolition and decarceration for people who are approaching it for perhaps the first time. The good news is that explainer (and much more!) has absolutely been written, dozens of times over; the work around decarceration has been some of the most successfully documented, accessible, and digitally interactive of any movement. This is a guide to guides, organized loosely by some of the main questions and thought processes that often come up around entry into abolitionist thinking …”
3. Angela Y. Davis’s foundational Are Prisons Obsolete?
4. “The Case for Abolition” by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and James Kilgore
5. Critical Resistance’s Reformist vs Abolitionist Chart:
