STOP MASS INCARCERATION CALLS FOR MONTH OF RESISTANCE
This is Utterly Immoral and Thoroughly Illegitimate
March 24, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
In light of the strategizing that is starting now for the Month of Resistance to Mass Incarceration set for October 2014, we are re-running this excerpt from a recent interview with Carl Dix, from the Revolutionary Communist Party and an initiator of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network.
February 26 day of outrage and remembrance for Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis.
"The Stop Mass Incarceration Network has looked at the situation and seen a need for a major effort to take the level of resistance to mass incarceration to a new level, a new height, involving thousands of people, as a springboard to ultimately enlist millions in this movement, and that we're going to work to do that through this month of resistance in October. And we're taking the responsibility to initiate this and to lead it forward. Cornel West and I issued the call for this Month of Resistance, and we want to bring together people who seriously want to take this movement of resistance to a higher level and be a part of working to do that, fleshing out a vision for it and developing a plan. And there's really a lot of people who need to be involved in this process.
"One, there needs to be young people involved, college students need to be involved in this from the beginning, contributing their understanding, their experience, and then going out on a mission to spread the call for October and to build resistance up to October as part of what's being done in this. High school students should be there with the same thing, bringing their experience into it, and then spreading that in all the ways that they would want to do that—armbands days, hoodie days, days when people do stuff on social media, spreading pictures of themselves wearing armbands and hoodies on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and all like that. Generally people who are catching hell on this front need to be a part of this, and in addition to the young people there needs to be family members of people in prison, who played an important role during the California prison hunger strike. Family members of police murder victims, formerly incarcerated people—all of them need to be bringing their understanding, their experience and being part of hammering out the vision for this and spreading it throughout society. We need to have religious leaders and lay people in this effort bringing their own stance on this, their moral opposition to this, helping to hammer out the vision, and then figuring out the ways that this gets expressed powerfully in religious institutions.
"It's gotta be nationwide right from the beginning, people from different parts of the country involved right at the start so that we have a framework that is in position to operate and spread this nationwide. People who are grappling with the problem of the immigration raids that tear families apart and disappear people—they need to be a part of this. Because this has everything to do with the incarceration that's going down in this society. They need to be in position to spread this and spread it nationwide. Legal people need to be involved, people whose arena is the arts and culture need to be involved. Everybody's bringing their experience, their understanding of this and then being in the position to pivot back and out and spread that throughout society and in the arenas that they function in.
"And in some of these different arenas that I've just talked about: prominent people, people whose voices have impact society-wide. Some of them need to be in the room for this, people who can reach people throughout society when they speak up and stand up around a question, people who can play an important role in raising the kind of funds that's going to be needed. Because it's going to take a lot of money just to get this process started which will then pale the size of the amount of money that will need to be raised to carry it through to the end. And we gotta have from the beginning people who have the connections and the experience in terms of doing that.
"And I guess the other thing I want to say about who needs to be in the room is that Cornel West and I were talking in the last couple of days about this, and we issued a letter. And that letter basically says, 'Look, if you're a young person, Black or Latino, who's tired of wearing a target on your back—you need to be involved in this effort. If you're a parent who is tired of living in fear every time your children leave the house in the morning as to whether they'll make it back safely, if you're somebody who doesn't experience this but you're aware of it going down and you hate it and want to see something done about it, well, you're the kind of person who needs to be involved in this effort. This effort needs to bring together people who are serious about doing something to stop mass incarceration, and see this vision of a month of resistance in October that takes the movement of resistance to a whole new level and that makes this something that millions of people in this society are seeing as a horrific problem and they're seeing determined resistance to it that involves thousands. If you want to bring that vision into being and make it real, you need to be part of making this month of resistance happen.'"
If you want more information on the Month of Resistance to Mass Incarceration or want to be part of making it happen as powerfully as possible, contact the Stop Mass Incarceration Network by writing them at: stopmassincarceration@gmail.com, or by calling: 347-979-SMIN (7646). You can also visit the SMIN web site at stopmassincarceration.net.
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