Voice of Consciousness

“If I didn't  define myself  for  myself , I  would  be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.” -- Audre Lorde Tamika Mallory's speech provides an important lesson and warning about letting other people define what the nationwide #GeorgeFloyd protests means for us and why you should not allow people to write our story of our actions. See my full transcription of the speech below. View this post on Instagram A post shared by matthewacherry (@matthewacherry) on May 29, 2020 at 3:13pm PDT My transcription of Tamika Mallory's Speech on Nationwide #GeorgeFloyd Protests This is a coordinated activity happening across this nation,  And so we  are in  a state of emergency. Black people are dying,  in a state of emergency. We cannot look at this  as an isolated incident. The reason why buildings are burning are n...

People will try to rewrite Atlanta's protest history. When they do so, remember this. This is where it began.   The is Atlanta right now. Worth a million words. #GeorgeFloydprotest pic.twitter.com/O8S5X0nvAD — Joshua Potash (@JoshuaPotash) May 29, 2020

This clip of #DEMSinPHL provides an insight on Hillary Clinton's thinking regarding the #BlackLivesMatter movement. The entire time of the #DNC, Hillary Clinton's connection to people as a mother. This was no exception. Honestly, Sandra Bland's and Jordan Davis's mother said very touching words; my heart was stirred. However, I wondered the entire time as I watched and re-watched this clip if these Mothers really understood what it would take to bring justice to this nation, as this nation condones, invites, rationalizes, and excuses police violence. The difficulty to attaining transformative justice that these Mothers did not address is that police violence is a form of state-sanctioned oppression. Police are protectors of the State. They are gatekeepers of the criminal justice that enforce the laws of the nation-state and its derivatives. Attaining transformative justice in this nation-state will require more than God's favor. It will require more than ...

Wednesday evening I went to visit with a friend in DC, and ended up at a Black Lives Matter  protest . It is not the first time I have ended up at a protest in the name of friendship and love, but this protest I won't forget. It was not just peaceful; It was festive. This is a short unedited video of #BlackLivesMatter protesters dancing as the sun goes down.  #BlackLivesMatter DC occupied the National Fraternal Order of Police (#FOP) for approximately 17 hours, starting about 5am on Thursday and ending around 10pm. I came in around hour 14. The organizers ultimately decided to end the occupation with a party preceded by libations to the victims of (extra)legal brutality, including Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Amadou Diallo, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and many more. Black protesters were asked to stand behind a row of red cups laid out in the street. Each of the cups had a name of a victim written in black permanent ink. Protesters were asked to #SayTheirName af...

Update 2016-07-17 10:49  We are working on making #RxPRL a repository that authors can opt-into to share their manuscripts. For now, we have made the bibliography available via a CSV file, an ENDNOTE library, and a Zotero library. We have also made PDFs of manuscripts available from authors who have opted-into the library (now, repository) that were received in one of the formats approved for self-distribution. What an author can self-distribute varies by journal and publisher. See the guidelines set forth by SHERPA/RoMEO . If you are interested in posting content you created to the Repository (#RxPRR), please post a comment on the "Opt-In-To-Posting.docx" document on the base folder of the library that indicates: 1) the link to where you have self-distributed the document; and 2) whether the publication is a peer-reviewed scholarly article, non-peer-reviewed scholarly article, policy statement, report, or blog post. These represent the only documents we are considering ri...

Thank you for your interest in the Race and Policing Research Library. The link and mechanism to access the Race and Policing Research Library have been updated due to concerns about fair use and copyright infringement. If you are looking for immediate access to the library, see this post at Voice of Consciousness . [ View the story "Publicly-Accessible Race and Policing Research Library" on Storify ] [ View the story "Updated Link to Race and Policing Research Library" on Storify ] Update 2016-07-13 08:27 You may also leave a comment on this blog post with a hyperlink to your email address, so that I can send you the password. My apologies, and definitely the Editorial Board would agree, for the inconvenience this has caused. Best, Abigail A. Sewell, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Sociology Emory University Update 2016-07-13 12:33 Due to concerns regarding the legality of posting ready-access PDFs of scholarship, the original ...