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listening to @prisonculture give the MLK dream week keynote @NorthwesternU. we're like 2 minutes in and i already feel like this is a gift
"Mutual aid is cooperation for the sake of the common good. That's something all of us understand. & bc we are human, & know that we are interdependent with each other, we understand that our survival is tied to other people's survival" @prisonculture
"Mutual aid empowers communities to meet their own material needs like housing and health care and food and transportation. It is premised on solidarity, not charity. It rejects saviorism, it rejects hierarchy and authoritarianism" @prisonculture
"Mutual aid marries community service with political education, political activism focused on challenging power and oppressive systems" @prisonculture
"Mutual aid projects are a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable" @prisonculture
. @prisonculture challenging us to 9 solidarity commitments to & with incarcerated people (1)writing at least 6 letters to an incarcerated person (2) making at least four donations to incarcerated people's commissary accts (3) joining at least 4 phone zaps for improved conditions
some other solidarity commitments @prisonculture mentioned: (4) sending books to incarcerated person at least once a yr (5) visiting incarcerated person at least once per yr (6) reading at least two books about criminalization
"If King were alive today at 91, soon to be 92, I have no doubt that what he would be addressing in our current historical moment is the violence and destruction of the prison industrial complex" @prisonculture
"Incarceration and mass criminalization impacts every single person in some way. And if you're not directly experiencing it, you have the indirect experiences and the collateral consequences of this epidemic that we're dealing with in this country" @prisonculture
. @prisonculture quotes King from 1967 at Riverside Church "I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government"
"The movement that we build and our resistance will need to be truly intersection if we are to be successful in abolishing the PIC to abolish capitalism patriarchy heterosexism transphobia and white supremacy" @prisonculture
"we must work to end, to end the PIC we must get at the roots of the PIC. we must take on the broader system that produces the logic that keeps millions of people in cages and of the police state itself" @prisonculture
"Today we aren't sure how much universities actually spend on policing because they're so opaque and they refuse to make information easily available but estimates are that it is as much as $3 billion a year spent on campus police on campuses around the country" @prisonculture
"Violence is central to police work. Police are violence workers. What marginalized people experience is not bad policing. It's simply policing" @prisonculture
"Too many people continue to see police as a resource to end violence, rather than as a significant purveyor of violence in our communities, and as escalators of violence" @prisonculture
"We have to actively help people divest from the idea that policing keeps us safe and that policing was developed to address public safety in the first place" @prisonculture
About universities @prisonculture asks: "What can education for liberation actually look like in the shadow of policing?"
"If universities are to take harm seriously, it means that they have to then divest from policing because policing is so harmful. For those currently organizing on campus under the banner of @copsoutofNU, you are doing essential work at this time" @prisonculture
. @prisonculture says more about @copsoutofNU movement @NorthwesternU : "Those of you who haven't joined the struggle, what the hell are you waiting for?"
More from @prisonculture about @copsoutofNU: "The only way to live on this planet with any human dignity at this moment is to struggle, keep struggling, you are on the right side. of history"....wonder if morty heard that 
"We cannot call for reformist civilian review boards that actually serve to entrench police power. Similarly, we can't call for social workers to replace police, if they are imbued with the same mandates of surveillance and coercion" @prisonculture
"We have to abolish capitalism if we are to successfully end police and prisons as institutions since police and prisons and capitalism are in a dialectical relationship" @prisonculture
"Another world is absolutely possible. We don't have to live like this" @prisonculture
I love that @prisonculture is saying mutual aid "breaks down the notion that you have to be eligible for services...you don't have to prove that you're struggling in order to be able to get access to resources...this is the world we want to live in as abolitionists"
