Our September funding drive continues with Reason to Give #4: Social Justice and Social Change.
Michael Brown. John Crawford. Eric Garner: black men killed in the street by cops that spawned the #blacklivesmatter movement. Since then many more names have been added to the list of those indiscriminately killed, or forcibly arrested without cause.
We have marched and protested. We have seen the #SayHerName movement bloom to acknowledge the violence committed against women of color. Officers have been indicted in Baltimore. Confederate flags have been pulled down from government buildings. So too has there been a backlash against the #blacklivesmatter movement: churches have been burned; politicians have capitalized on white American fear. Police camera vests (for good or for bad) have been purchased by countless police departments. The gains and losses in the past two years have functioned to bring this subject to the forefront of American minds.
On August 19, 2014, Apogee penned “We stand with Ferguson,” in order to show our solidarity with the black and brown bodies under attack from an oppressive and indifferent government (and its proxies, the police). We offered our journal, and blog, Perigree, as a platform for discussing the contentious subject of race in America:
Our very own poetry editor Joey De Jesus’s “Goldsmith, Conceptualism & the Half-baked Rationalism of White Idiocy” takes down Kenneth’s Goldsmith’s misguided attempt to “shed” white privilege and appropriate the body of Michael Brown as an “art object” rather than a human being;
Camille Rankine’s “Survival Guide for Animals Born in Captivity” questions the limits (and constraints) of the world black and brown bodies are born into;
Jamaal May’s “The Gun Joke” examines a word where words, symbols, and (frighteningly) people aren’t seen for what they are, with often fatal results;
Elizabeth’s Wright’s “Who Deserves to Die: On Rationalizing Murder” elucidates the ways in which authority creates its own logic and reasoning, and allows those in power to literally get away with murder; and
And Apogee events manager Joseph Ponce’s “The Use of Force Continuum: Police, Power and Prejudice” pours over the data on how police training (and lack of training) has contributed to a disproportionate amount of black and brown bodies being assaulted by police.
These represent the stories, the essays, the poems, that we offer in defiance of a world where our voices and bodies do not matter. Consider giving so we may continue this important work.
Make a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, using this link: https://www.fracturedatlas.
