Non-support of the Gender Employment Non-Discrimination Act

My dear friend Lex sent this to me - a coalition of New York organizations came together to issue a statement of "Non-support of the Gender Employment Non-Discrimination Act." It gave me a lot to think about because it reminded me how much we have to re-train our minds to imagine a world beyond the institutions upon which we are so dependent. The full thing can be read here but I liked the parts that Lex picked out:

The hate crimes portion of this law may expose our communities to more danger—from prejudiced institutions far more powerful and pervasive than individual bigots.
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By supporting longer periods of incarceration and putting a more threatening weapon in the state’s hands, this kind of legislation places an enormous amount of faith in our deeply flawed, transphobic, and racist criminal legal system.
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Hate crime laws are an easy way for the government to act like it is on our communities’ side while continuing to discriminate against us....Hate crime laws foreground a single accused individual as the “cause” of racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or any number of other oppressive prejudices. They encourage us to lay blame and focus our vengeful hostility on one person instead of paying attention to institutional prejudice that fuels police violence, encourages bureaucratic systems to ignore trans people’s needs or actively discriminate against us, and denies our communities health care, identification, and so much more.
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These [most marginalized members of our community who are most likely to end up in prison] are the same people our community must mourn every year at the Trans Day of Remembrance. Can we really continue to shed tears and flowers for the dead if we eagerly hand the state more power to crush the same people?
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When thinking about responding to hate violence, we believe the most important question is not “who is the perpetrator and how can we punish them?” Rather, we want to ask “how can we help the survivor(s) and the community heal from this violence? How can we prevent it from happening again?”

Paradigm Shifts: Are they possible?

From Bobby Byrd's "The Border as a Looking Glass"

"'The drug war,' he announced, 'began the minute the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock. Same thing with Columbus. The English and the Spaniards believed that God sits on a throne somewhere in the sky. In their worldview, God is an abstract and rational being. He goerns from on high. Like a king. Not so with Indians. They believed that the people came up out fo the earth and the gods came along with them, showing them the way. They believed that the rocks and the river and the sky are holy. They believe this because they are pagans and pagans take drugs. Christians read about God. Christians are told about God and talk about God. Christians don't take drugs... The War on Drugs is really about two different world views. It's a war between those world views. That's why the government will never legalize drugs. It's impossible."
(135)

So Eudellian. And so right on. But I believe we can bring about a paradigm shift and abolish these hierarchical systems of knowledge that hold the power...