Following the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of the police, I have seen Philly (and many other places) mobilize to fight against racism and a justice system that is not doing its job.
TL;DR - Here is a link to some resources I’ve been compiling
Since the pandemic started I’ve been thinking a lot more about my personal impact in the world - how I contribute to capitalism and how detrimental that can be. I think about how I’ve always thought of Amazon as a necessary evil. And then seeing how one person can gain so much wealth when the bulk of the world is struggling - makes you realize it’s not a necessary evil. I can find other ways. But I can find other ways because I now have the time to do so. Working less has provided me the time to invest in my community, to grow vegetables in my garden, and make hundreds of masks to give away to the community.
Now I consider this in light of the protests. I also find myself going to far more protests than I have in the past. I think this has two reasons - because at some point you just get so fed up that you cannot stand it any longer, and because I have the time and energy to devote to it. I get the impression that both of these things are true for many people.
Lately social media has been a weird space. My experience has been of a a lot of white people trying to yell the loudest about being an ally, and how to do better. It’s inspiring to see folks use social media to talk about important issues. It’s not inspiring to feel like everyone is yelling at everyone else. I have been trying to figure out what that means for me - how do I occupy those platforms, learn from them, access resources, support my friends, etc? I feel a pressure to be more actively anti-racist and using social media is certainly one way to do that. But I’m not quite sure what I want to be adding to the pot. So far I have mostly shared information about events, and facts about political stuff happening in Philly. (The mayor was trying to cut ALL funding to the arts in Philly!) I made a list of links of places to donate and put it on facebook. Mostly what I do is “save” stuff on both instagram and facebook, and sometimes text myself links. But it’s harder to take the time to read through those resources.
So now I’ve been thinking about wanting to share more resources on instagram but that is most easily done with links, which are hard to share. So here we are, back on the bloggy blog, where I would like to share some links to resources. In putting all this stuff together, I also figured out how to add more links to instagram via linktree, so now I have that too! But I’ll keep a much more comprehensive list on the ol’ blog.
You can see these links on my blog post or on their own page.