Confront White Supremacy

(The title of this post is heavily inspired by/taken from Anti-Racism Daily's 1/7 newsletter.)

This past week, we saw white supremacy on display once again, namely through an attempted coup in the US Capitol on January 6th. As has been made abundantly obvious, this is who America is and has always been - a country founded upon racism, slavery, and colonization. Just saying that is less than the bare minimum though: we need to take both immediate and sustained action to dismantle this system. Below are some action items that you, your friends/family/acquaintances, and your organizations can take, broken down roughly by category:

DC Mutual Aid

In terms of immediate action, the most pressing thing to do is to help the residents of Washington DC (mostly Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) harmed by Wednesday's coup. The following are some organizations and groups to donate to as soon as possible:

• Kyanite Kitchen: @kyanite.kitchen on Instagram, @/Kya-Parker on Venmo, $Kyism on Cash App
• DC Fridge Collective: @dcfridgecollective on Instagram, $DCFRIDGECOLLECTIVE on Cash App
• FFDC Mutual Aid: @ffdcmutualaid on Instagram
• Until Freedom DC: @untilfreedomorganizing on Instagram, @UntilFreedomUnited on Venmo
• Fuel the People: @fueltheppl on Instagram
• Theythem Collective: @theythemcollective on Instagram
• Occupy DC: @occupydc202 on Instagram
• Piscataway Conoy Tribe (the coup took place on land stolen from the Piscataway and Anacostan tribes)
  

If you're in DC and need help, 202-399-7093 is the Shelter Hotline, and 202-596-4122 is Casa Ruby (additional shelter).
Some other notes:

• In addition to donating if able, share these links on your social media and within your circles. Go beyond sharing the same three quotes stating that storming the capitol is not ok - at this point, that's saying 1 + 1 = 2.
• Avoid comparing this white rage to legitimate social movements such as Black Lives Matter - even if it's to highlight the disparities in how police treat people along racialized lines. Compare white rage to white rage. See this post for an in-depth explanation and historical examples of white rage that you can compare to.
• If you are white and non-Jewish, tread carefully with jokes and memes about the coup. Many of the jokes that have been posted on social media about the coup may seem funny, but they are often antiSemitic, ableist, and simply traumatizing to BIPOC directly affected by the event and making light of a situation that is very much not light. Though the "don't be antiSemitic or ableist" part of that sentence applies to everyone, we'd like to emphasize that the general point about making jokes about the incident applies particularly to white and non-Jewish people - humor can absolutely be a wonderful mechanism of coping with trauma, and it is not our place to police that in this case, as this was a traumatic event for BIPOC and Jewish people.
• Take care to use the right terminology surrounding this event. It was not a "protest" but rather a coup and a riot. It was not anti-American or traitorous but rather the epitome of America's founding principles.
• Acknowledge the blatant antiSemitism of this coup. Do not compare antiSemitism to anti-Blackness or anti-Indigenousness or pit these three forms of white supremacy against each other, but do acknowledge all three in their own right - white supremacy works in large part by dividing and conquering oppressed groups. See this post for photographic evidence of outright antiSemitism at the coup, and work to dismantle antiSemitism in your everyday life - this is a good place to start.
• Call for Donald Tru*p to be impeached (action items here). Even though he only has less than two weeks left in office, it is still important to hold him accountable for his racist, antiSemitic, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, anti-environmental, ableist, and just plain dangerous actions.
• If you run an organization (e.g. a hackathon, a nonprofit, a media outlet, a campaign, etc. - especially if you run a US-based organization and are not Black, Jewish, or Indigenous), make a statement calling out the white supremacy of the coup and share action items. Your work was not finished in June of 2020. It is not just irresponsible, but outright violent, for you pretend you exist outside of the national political reality and carry on with your everyday programming as if the United States isn't collapsing in on itself while killing BIPOC. By staying silent under a system in which oppression is the default, you are complicit in state-sanctioned racism.

Abolish the Death Penalty

There are people in federal prison right now who do not deserve to die. You can make a difference, both by trying to save them and by working to abolish the cruel and unjust death penalty for good:

• This spreadsheet has a list of immediate action items.
• Save Dustin Higgs.
• Save Billie Allen.
• Save Kenneth Reams.
• ​Save Lisa Montgomery.
• Learn about alternatives to prisons and capital punishment at this link and this link. 

Long-Term Activism

Racism is a national and international problem that will not be solved overnight. Below are some organizations you can get involved with to make long-term sustainable contributions towards dismantling white supremacy:

• Grassroots Law Project (sign petitions, donate, volunteer, organize locally)
• Native Land (learn whose land you're on, volunteer, and research the history of the tribes whose land you're on)
• Anti-Racism Daily (subscribe to and read their daily emails, follow them @antiracismdaily on Instagram, and take the action items that they suggest)
• Elizabeth's Books & Writing Center (buy books from there and read them)

Other Important Notes

Lastly, we have some updates about our donation match campaigns and about one of our previous posts.

• We have just over $250 left in match dollars for donations to Indigenous organizations and mutual aid funds. See this post for a list of organizations to donate to, and email us receipts at team@linghacks.tech.
• In one of our earlier posts, we wrote about the Chinese government's treatment of Uyghur Muslims and listed some action items without full information on the situation. Based on recent research, we realize that there has been a lot of misinformation surrounding this issue. In summary, the intense Western media coverage on this issue appears to be due to a US government-initiated attempt to undermine and colonize China by training Uyghur Muslims in methods of violence (the US government bombs MENA countries and systemically surveils and murders Muslims both domestically and abroad, so the scrutiny and right-wing fixation on this particular situation is questionable). We still may not have all of the facts at this time, but this document and this account have quite a comprehensive breakdown of the facts of the situation, which we recommend checking out before you share short tweets about the issue on social media. We apologize for spreading misinformation with our earlier post and have corrected the post.

That's all for this post - as always, we are open to feedback at team@linghacks.tech.