#and often have limited agency to begin with because it was forcibly taken from us

[swordsonnet]

when talking about topics like maturity and (self-)infantilisation, it's important to remember that there will always be disabled adults for whom the "normal" benchmarks of adulthood are not attainable or even applicable at all. if you want to be an ally to disabled people, you need to support all of us, not just the ones you find palatable - and that includes people who have "childish" interests, who get very emotional about seemingly trivial things, who aren't able to be independent in the way that adults are expected to be. that doesn't mean that we "need to grow up", or that we're reverting to a childlike state to avoid our responsibilities, or whatever op-ed writers think is wrong with gen z these days. it's just the way we are, and liking plushies or struggling with certain tasks doesn't in fact make us children! disabled adults are still adults, and still deserving of dignity, regardless of whether or not we can live up to the rigid societal norms of what it means to be an adult.

[airanke]

Hello it’s me again! I’ve updated Abiteth’s design since I created her, and also... her accompanied by one of her hero friends, Hiro (and also one of Dabi’s friends when Dabi is forced to go undercover as a hero due to story reasons which HOH who knows if I’ll ever post the story it’s only at 150+ pages currently).

BUTTLOAD OF information under the cut!

Abiteth’s Tattoo Map here. Flashfreeze / Hero Dabi here.

Abiteth is currently employed at the Woods Hero Agency as one of Kamui’s sidekicks. She is a rescue specialist, and is well-known for her ability to de-escalate situations due to her gentle demeanor. Abiteth will also actively avoid coming to physical blows whenever possible as she does not believe in physically hurting someone when restraint is possible. Having a high pain tolerance, Abiteth is often unaware of many injuries she may acquire during patrols (or otherwise) until they are either pointed out to her or she notices them when she is finally at home and off-duty.

Her Quirk, Efflorescence, allows her to produce any plant that she has consumed prior (additionally, she may produce plants based off of other factors, usually related to her emotions. As an example, Abiteth can bloom blue hydrangeas in Dabi’s presence, as his blue flames remind her of the flower). She can have multiple plants in her system, and produce those plants, though this amount is limited to 3 maximum (ex. she can form arms of oak, oleander, and sea urchin but once she consumes another plant she loses one of those traits - of course, she can forcibly bloom it but not at the cost of straining her body).

She can also shed her skin similar to how trees shed their bark to minimize damage she has taken (ex. shedding bruises can either completely remove the bruise, or minimize it; she can shed a third degree burn and being it down to second degree, etc).

All overuse of Efflorescence (producing plants OR shedding skin) results in Abiteth’s skin beginning to crack. Further overuse will persist into peeling, itching, and ultimately bleeding. This downside can be neutralized by water (preferably fresh, though sea water can also neutralize her weakness in this regard. Sea water merely makes her recovery process longer).

Additional weaknesses include: - when any plant she blooms is separated from her body, it turns to dust (large trees may take some time to disappear entirely). - producing a plant without having consumed it prior is much more taxing on her body and leads to her skin cracking at a much quicker pace than if she consumed the plant prior to producing it. - can really get fucked up if she has no access to water. - due to her incredibly high pain tolerance, Abiteth is often unaware of when her body is in a severe state.

Abiteth’s Quirk is essentially a combination of Transform, Creation, and Manifest, BUT ONLY PLANTS!!! This does of course extend to water based plants too (ex. sea urchins, kelp, lily pads, etc). Her parents are S-Rank Villians, and her brother is the leader of a group that precariously walks the line between villain and vigilante (and until the LoV is formed, aren’t particularly well-known).

Other Trivia: - Abiteth’s name means “devourer” and Kenka means “flower offering”. - Her hero name is a combination of “devour” and “fiore”, so... Devour Flower aka Deviore.

Hiro Vlatka, I have much less info on but!!! He is a melee combatant, and isn’t afraid to engage in physical altercations to get to the desired outcome. His parents are both jokesters and named him Hiro because it sounds like Hero (and Dabi teases him about it by calling him “Hero the Hiro” and I could go IN FULL ESSAY DEPTH about their friendship but I’ll save that for another time). He is skilled with a bo-staff and takes one with him everywhere because it is his main tool when dealing with Villains outside of his quirk.

He’s employed at an Agency I haven’t named yet, and as I mentioned Flashfreeze ends up working there. Hiro forms a very strong bond with Dabi and is 10000% The Mom Friend.

His Quirk, Premonition allows him to accurately predict his opponents next move - the more people their are, the more chaotic his vision can be, but it at least allows him to choose the best course of action in any given situation (ex. knowing whether to stop a villain or stop the falling building based on whether or not the building collapsing will cause more causalities than stopping the villain).

Hiro does not have to be looking at someone to be able to predict what they will do, and so he can catch people off-guard if he is not looking at them yet still dodges their attack. This is especially frustrating for others as he has a visual tell - his eyes - when his quirk is active.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of his quirk, Hiro is susceptible to eye strain, dry eye, and migraines (particularly migraines as if he blinks, his quirk does not immediately deactivate).

I gave him Hierophant as his hero name because it’s a synonym to prophet, and one of the definitions for prophet is “a person who makes or claims to be able to make predictions”, which is pretty fitting! Additionally, Hiro’s name means “abundant, generous, tolerant, prosperous” (of course this depends on which character you use specifically to spell it), and Vlatka means “peaceful ruler”.

I ALSO 100% UNINTENTIONALLY GAVE HIM A RED THEME BUT I THINK OF RED/WHITE COLOR COMBO WHEN I THINK OF HIEROPHANTS SO IT’S HERE TO STAY!!

[him-e]

Hey! I love your analysis’ of Reylo. They’re my favorite. I have a loaded question (hopefully you’ve never been asked) — when do you think both Rey and Kylo became PHYSICALLY attracted to each other? And when do you think Rey became ROMANTICALLY attracted to Kylo, because I think we can all agree after killing Han Solo and their fight on Starkiller Base, she was, and rightly so, hostile and angry. Sorry if it’s a stupid question but you just seem to go really in depth with details. :)

ok so I noticed a very similar ask is already making the rounds on here, but since I started writing this post before I saw it, you’re getting mine too, yay. 

First: physical vs romantic can be a false binary. Some people don’t experience a difference in physical attraction vs romantic attraction. On a literary level, and especially in the context of a space opera/fairytale geared towards a young audience, the distinction might be entirely redundant: the two spheres coincide, as the sexual element is never explicit in fairytales, and the romantic interest is often a stand-in for both. You don’t get a point where the characters are “only” physically attracted to each other in this kind of stories.  

Second: going from hating someone to falling in love with said someone is a pretty standard romantic trope. It’s juicy, it’s sexy, and it’s all about CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. In enemies to lovers stories, the initial hatred is not an obstacle but part of the romantic build-up.Usually there isn’t “one” turning point where the relationship dramatically changes, but many. It’s a gradual evolution. 

With that said… I believe a degree of attraction was always there on both sides (Kylo’s side being a bit more self-evident than Rey’s, though Rey’s part is interesting as well, more on that later). The romantic feelings, on the other hand, are still a work in progress. They still haven’t acknowledged them. 

Let’s start with Kylo because it’s easier. 

1) Kylo is VERY attracted to Rey since the beginning.

Our boy is very transparent when it comes to Rey.He instinctively recognizes that there’s something special to this girl, and he’s drawn to her like a moth to a flame.

^ He looks her up and down. Adam emphasizes this gesture with a blatant head motion because he’s wearing a mask and he can’t be subtle about it. Which means he was probably asked to be unsubtle.

^ He gets in her personal space immediately after that. There’s really no need to be this close if he wanted to simply mind probe her. 

This is especially interesting because the way this scene is edited we don’t see how he got so close that he’s practically…what, sniffing her neck? Whispering in her ear? So I guess the final cut was rather toned down compared to the raw footage of this scene, and it’s for the better, since Rey is immobilized and terrified and in no position to give consent to this closeness. (tbh, I suspect he was originally meant to touch her or cup her face in this scene, and they cut it because they wanted to make sure that Kylo never touches her—aside from bridal carrying her into his ship. See also how he touches her during the interrogation in the tfa novelization but not in the movie. This is an excellent decision in my opinion. It’s crucial that Kylo doesn’t cross that boundary without Rey’s consent, so it makes it all the more poignant when he touches Rey’s outstretched hand in TLJ. Yeah, don’t tell me this wasn’t all planned.)

This attraction isn’t conscious on Kylo’s part—he seems to be completely clueless about it. Both Rey and Kylo are coded as very immature for their ages, both because they’re supposed to have a coming of age arc (which in true sw fashion overlaps with a hero’s journey), and because they’re emotionally stunted as neither had a “normal” adolescence (for different reasons).

^ more unnecessary closeness and he’s also blatantly looking at her lips and neck here. I won’t go in deep into the interrogation scene because there’s too much to dissect, but yeah, the whole thing is Kylo being ridiculously fascinated by Rey and not knowing what to do with it.

But this is also where he starts going deeper into her… ahem, poor choice of words, sorry. I mean he looks inside her mind and he’s enraptured. He sees her loneliness, her fear to leave the place where she’s bound in a forced state of childhood, he sees the island of her dreams—and her affection for Han, which immediately triggers a cascade of unpleasant feelings for him. In short, this is where he connects with her emotionally (although forcibly) and where it stops being just curiosity and attraction and becomes something more, on a deeper level than just the physical, for him.

(casual reminder that this is a space opera so yes, Kylo can see a kaleidoscope of Rey’s inner world and HOPELESSLY FALL IN LOVE WITH IT in the span of 2 minutes of mind probe. This isn’t to be taken literally.)

As she slips out of his grip just when he’s starting to know her, Kylo LOSES HIS SHIT. He gives in to a childish temper tantrum at the sight of her empty interrogation chair, and when she shows up again at Finn’s side, he sees red. This is very possessive/jealous coded behavior.

THEN REY SUMMONS THE LEGACY SABER AND HE’S LIKE:

^ Heart eyes, motherfucker. I think at this point our boy’s fallen HARD. He still doesn’t know, of course. But it’s clear that this moment—the whole duel with her—left a huge impression on him. Later in TLJ, he tells Rey that she has “that look in her eyes, from the forest”, which, wow, someone’s been thinking about Rey’s eyes A LOT and memorizing that particular expression and romanticizing the shit of of it.

Verdict: Kylo immediately finds Rey attractive but has probably no idea why he feels that way, and starts making a lot of irrational decisions in order to take her with him and make her stay. By the end of TFA, he’s already caught a variety of Feelings. They will only intensify in TLJ, but the foundation, both in physical and emotional terms, is already there.

2) Rey. Rey is more complicated because she’s our protagonist/main pov, she’s female—female attraction is depicted differently than male attraction—and most importantly she’s in a situation of disadvantage for most of TFA. Due to her limited agency she is forced to react rather than act, and she’s constantly in a fight or flight mode. 

This, of course, makes her (subtle) attraction hard to notice and problematic to discuss, but we’ll get there.

^ Her first reaction to a full masked Kylo Ren is blind terror (with reason: Kylo chases, immobilizes, and then threatens her with his lightsaber). But remember: per the novelization, “she has seen this man before. In a nightmare, in a dream”. This already introduces an element of ambiguity: why this distinction? Was the dream pleasant? Kylo is, at this stage, the physical manifestation of a shadow that seems to be haunting her (in her subconscious, but also in the force vision she had minutes before). It isn’t as much repulsive as it is scary. 

Soon enough, she starts conversing with the shadow. Once the initial terror fades, she regains composure and starts demanding answers, even as tied up to a chair as she is.

The unmasking is a crucial moment.

^ This is when Rey sees Ben’s face for the first time—the prince underneath the beast—and it confuses her. It’s where she loses her combative attitude and has to regroup for a minute. She blinks, she breathes in, her eyes wander across his figure.The novelization states that it’s because he looks so average (LOL, sure) and not monstrous at all, but beyond the surface reading, this already tells us that Rey took time to register Kylo’s facial features and find them strangely unthreatening–even familiar. She definitely doesn’t find him repulsive or odd-looking.

From this moment on, she has trouble looking at him. She’s constantly avoiding his eyes or stealing short glances at him—he turned from creature into man, and she’s suddenly hyperaware of his closeness and her restraints. (this is where most people feel uncomfortable with that scene, because it’s dripping with ambiguous tension). Then she finds Kylo in her mind, she fights back and locks eyes with him again, this time unafraid. She chooses to look into the monster and while she turns the tables on him, invading his mind, she finds herself “inexorably drawn to”… something. His fears? The novelization leaves this unsaid, but the choice of words is interesting. She’s not merely pushing him out, or defending herself anymore. She finds something that intrigues her in there. That draws her in.

This scene is where they truly reveal themselves to the other—Kylo’s humanity and weaknesses, and Rey’s powers and strength. It leaves them both shaking and bewildered. It’s a sort of initiation—for both. To each other’s force powers, but also to the attractive power each has on the other.

Then comes another turning point—Han’s murder, which Rey witnesses from a privileged perspective.

^ There’s a sort of softness, but also enrapture, in her expression here. She’s completely sucked into this scene, all but forgetting she could shoot Kylo from where she is and end this at any moment. No, what she’s seeing is another side of Han, but also another side of Kylo Ren.

It goes back to when she was first introduced to the story of Ben Solo.

See? Raptured. Camera zooming in on her face. Light spheres floating around her as Han tells her about the boy who destroyed it all. This is a magical moment, the cinematography is telling us. 

On some level, even before meeting him in person, she’s drawn to him. Remember, this is a fairytale.

By the forest scene Rey is horrified, angry, exhausted, grieving. In the span of two days she was forced to grow past childhood, cut her umbilical cord to Jakku, and enter a scary phase of transition into adulthood, which Kylo is, like it or not, a big part of. Now she’s seen him murder his own father—he is a monster with a human face, something that seems to enrage her even more. The following duel is more of a discovery of her own powers (and potential darkness) than it is about Kylo (whereas for Kylo it’s definitely about Rey), but in the end she can’t bring herself to kill him. Again, this tells us more about who Rey is and what is her inner conflict than it does about her relationship with Kylo but… it’s something. I think on an instinctual level, even at this early stage, she recognizes something in him that resonates with her. His loneliness, his anger, his misery perhaps.

Verdict: at the end of TFA, Rey is mostly angry and scared of Kylo. All her actions revolve around getting the hell out of dodge, keeping Kylo out of her mind, and punishing him for Han’s death. Understandably. 

But she’s also curious. This man confuses her. He shows up in her subconscious, and he’s inextricably linked to her understanding of the Force, and her first experiences with it. It’s a sort of imprinting.

TLJ is when the really meaty part begins for Rey. In broad terms, TFA was Kylo’s romantic/sexual awakening to Rey, and TLJ is Rey’s to Kylo.The peaceful, safe setting of Ahch-To and the fact that through the force bond they can communicate but NOT hurt or manipulate each other draws Rey out of her fight or flight mode, allowing her to explore on her terms Kylo’s character, and all the questions and doubts he arouses (heh) in her. 

In their first force bond interactions, Kylo is calm and collected. In the other scenes he’s had so far he’s a hot mess of boiling rage and hurt (just minutes before, he smashed his helmet and launched an attack to the Resistance in which he thinks his mother perished), but with this girl who slashed his face in half and left him bleeding like a pig in the snow, he’s quite the soft spoken gentleman, lol. I think he’s been thinking a lot about Rey, he came to terms with his fascination for her, and now he wants to make Rey think about him too. He tempts and taunts her, from a place of relative knowledge/wisdom (or so he thinks). Rey’s the one who is in emotional turmoil. 

^ Initially, she tries to stick to her feisty heroine script, and she still has a lot of genuine rage and disgust for him, but mostly she can’t make sense of him. She feels insecure in what she knows (not just about Kylo but also about Luke, the Force, her role in this, everything. Nobody is telling her anything!), so she overcompensates with knee-jerk aggression and a false display of confidence (”I know everything I need to know about you!”). 

She also calls him “murderous snake!!!!”, which is hilarious and very revealing. IDK about snake symbolism in the GFFA, but here on earth, and especially in western culture, snakes symbolize insidious seduction, and that’s certainly the authorial intent behind this choice of words. By saying this line, Rey is framed as the quintessential virtuous maiden trying to resist (sexual) temptation, that biblically goes hand in hand with knowledge—which is exactly what Kylo offers. 

On a subconscious level, I think she already recognizes Kylo as a seduction.

^ This is the first thing that throws her off balance. She was probably expecting some angry shitty warped-moral-compass rebuttal, instead he quietly agrees that he’s a monster, while also “coming into the light” to let her see his face better. To make her see him. During the whole conversation, and part of the following force bond scene as well, Kylo is almost morbidly insistent to share with her the details of his past (”Did he tell you what happened? Did he tell you why?”). He wants her to see him, ugly as he is (in a spiritual sense).  

At this point, Rey’s sexuality is GETTING ANSWERS AND FIGURING SHIT ABOUT HER ROLE IN THE FORCE. And Luke (the biblical “God” of the island) is giving her none of that, other than hippie lessons about how the Force is a superior power blah blah and you better not fuck with it blah blah don’t go in the dark wet hole and remember that the Jedi aren’t supposed to intervene in mundane shit, blah.

I actually think the deleted fish nun party scene is important to understand Rey’s state of mind entering the third, and crucial, force connection. The point of that lesson—at least the way Rey understands it—is teaching her inaction and second-guessing her instincts. Luke is projecting his own disillusionment on her. He’s telling her to stop believing in heroes, when what Rey actually needs is believing in herself as a hero. She comes out of it feeling more frustrated and humiliated than ever. Depressed, almost.

Kylo, instead, gives her answers. Not definite answers, but something that propels her into action. He tells her, “do this and this in order to become the person you’re meant to be”. He strokes her ego. He talks about her destiny. He echoes and validates her suppressed anger and frustration. He digs up a painful truth about her family, and encourages her to face it. Even as she demands to know the reason he murdered his father, he makes it all about her. First, he made her see him; now he’s making her see herself through his eyes.

And, of course, he’s half naked through the entire thing. This is the first time Rey is confronted with something textually (as in, not simply existing in the subtext) sexual. The shirtlessness is obviously here for a meta reason too (to loudly communicate the romantic undertones of the dynamic, to symbolically strip Kylo of his layers, and to give the audience an eye candy) but even Rey the character is aware that this has to do with sex, someway. 

^ That’s why she stutters and averts her eyes. This is the unmasking 2.0, only this time the sexual implications are in the forefront. In a pg-13 format, of course, but still largely readable even for children.

This is where Rey starts wondering if they could actually touch. Gee, what a coincidence. 

The shirtless scene is a huge turning point where the romantic build up becomes, for a short while, glaringly sexual. It would be easy to say that this is when Rey’s physical attraction is born, but that’s an oversimplification. Everything in this movie and in the movie before has been building to this. Kylo Ren has been at the forefront of Rey’s thoughts since Starkiller. She has a powerful psychic connection to him, talked about him with Luke, wondered about the reasons of his patricide, questioned his backstory, exercised frantically to blow off the steam of their encounters. 

This isn’t when Rey first begins to feel attraction to Kylo—it’s where she’s first faced with the reality of it, and us with her.

And facing this reality is, in part, what prompts her to go into the dark side cave—the one the older male authority figure forbade her from going, the one in which she already subconsciously expects to walk a threshold. The threshold of knowing what happened to her parents, the question that she’s been avoiding for so long, that kept her bound to Jakku, to a version of herself who never grew up past childhood because growing up would make the years and years of abandonment painfully real, rather than just notches on a wall.

The cave scene has all the markings of an archetypal rite of passage into adulthood (and womanhood). The water, the near-drowning experience, the visions, the multiple selves, the mirror. Rey goes into it fully understanding that however it goes, it will imply a loss of innocence. Thematically, it’s a direct continuation of the other loss of innocence she’s just experienced—the sexual one, with Kylo.

Rey doesn’t get the answer she hoped for, but one that forces her to mature and come into her adult self—it’s time to take responsibility and be the hero of her own story, because the adults she were waiting for are nowhere in sight. So she comes out of the cave as more mature… but also desperate for human connection. Or rather, for connection to a specific someone. She feels “relief” when she senses Kylo’s presence in the Force inside the hut. 

And when she sees him, she thinks again of touching him.

In the movie we don’t get how the conversation started, and the novelization doesn’t delve into details either, and boy what would I pay to know what sparked Rey’s confession. But we can imagine. By this point, Rey already feels a kinship with Kylo, and her distrust and skepticism for him has eroded. She sees her own loneliness in him. She feels they were both betrayed by parental figures on some level. She’s made the mental connection that if Vader was brought back, then Ben could be too, by someone who loves him. Their force connections have been strange but they also gave her the chance to discuss stuff she would have otherwise bottled up. He’s physically attractive to her. He doesn’t judge her for going into the darkness. And when he tells her what she needs to hear the most—that she’s not alone—she makes that leap and reaches out to touch him.

It’s an olive branch, a comforting gesture towards someone she feels is just alone as she is, but it’s physical contact she seeks. She could have offered her sympathy in any other way, yet she chose to reach for his hand. Remember, she’s been thinking about touching him for a while already.

Kylo, after a moment of confusion, responds by taking off his glove. This is such a loaded gesture in terms of its romantic/sexual meaning that I’m still in shock it actually happened. He’s baring himself to her, so that this contact happens without barriers. His skin is not covered in first order leather when he touches hers. This is the real him.

^ And then they have their visions of the future, and that One Perfect Tear falls down Rey’s cheek and Luke blows up the hut and this is where my analysis can stop because by this point it’s completely obvious that our girl has FALLEN HARD, and since she’s the *shoot first, ask later* type, she hops on the Falcon to get her boy back before she can admit to herself she’s stupidly in love with him.

Rey saw a vision of herself with Ben Solo at her side, and she’s so blinded by the beauty of it that making it happen as fast as possible becomes her number one priority.

But feelings for someone don’t change overnight so radically. If she’s so massively affected by that vision, it’s only because her romantic attraction for Kylo has been building up at a consistent pace since the start of the movie, getting her to a point where she spontaneously sought an intimacy with him.

It’s the same for Kylo. Rey literally ships herself to him, but he’s no less reckless than she is in barreling into this promise of a future idyll. When Rey gets on the Supremacy, he already knows this has to end with Snoke’s death somehow. He doesn’t know how to do it, but he will. He will sacrifice his master to be with her, just as she did.

If you asked either of them if they’re in love with each other, I bet they would stare at you with uncomprehending eyes—it’s like they lack the basic lexicon to understand their feelings, let alone verbalize them. So Rey’s like “save the fleet because it’s the morally right thing to do!”, and Ben’s like “join me to rule the galaxy!”, and they’re both like, “you’ll stand with me!”. They’re trying to express the love they already feel but they’re doing it in non-romantic terms, because that’s all they know.

(gifs are credited with the “ ^ “ - click on it and reblog the op!)

[bountyofbeads]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/politics/trump-ice-raids.html#click=https://t.co/mxkw6omSWV

DHS officials were reluctant to undertake Trump's mass arrests, because they feared the "optics" of child separations would be brutal, the NYT reports.

One top official says Trump's tweet about the raids put ICE agents' safety at risk.

Trump Says He’ll Delay Deportation Operation Aimed at Undocumented Families

By Michael D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs | Published June 22, 2019 | New York Times | Posted June 23, 2019

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Saturday delayed plans for nationwide raids to deport undocumented families, but he threatened to unleash Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in two weeks if Democrats do not submit to changes in asylum law they have long opposed.

The announcement, made on Twitter as Mr. Trump was meeting with aides at Camp David, was the president’s latest attempt to pressure his adversaries into making immigration changes. Last month, he threatened to levy tariffs on Mexico unless it did more to stop the flow of migrants into the United States.

Immigration agents had been planning to sweep into several immigrant communities in 10 major cities — including Miami, Los Angeles, Baltimore and Chicago — beginning on Sunday. Officials said on Friday that they had targeted about 2,000 families in a show of force intended to demonstrate their strict enforcement of immigration laws. Children of immigrants — some of whom were born in the United States — had faced the prospect of being forcibly separated from their undocumented parents.

Mark Morgan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, had announced this month that his agency would begin the raids at some point in the future. But on Monday, Mr. Trump revealed on Twitter that they would start the following week, claiming that officials would deport millions of people and sending panic through cities across the country.

The president’s abrupt reversal on Saturday came as lawmakers were considering a measure to send $4.5 billion in humanitarian aid to the border, money the Trump administration has said is desperately needed to handle a huge influx of migrants.

Some Democrats, including members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, had threatened to withhold their support for the funding package when it comes to a vote in the House this upcoming week, in protest of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies. The specter of high-profile immigration raids had risked imperiling its chances of passage.

The Senate has reached a bipartisan deal on a similar measure, though Democrats have conditioned their support on assurances that none of the money would go toward Mr. Trump’s threatened raids.

Democratic lawmakers and immigration activists had demanded in recent days that the raids be prevented, calling them a cruel attack on minority communities whose only crime was illegally entering the country.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Mr. Trump on Friday evening to persuade him to cancel the raids, according to a person familiar with the conversation who was not authorized to speak about it. During the 12-minute call, the president said he would consider doing so but made no commitments, the person said.

On Saturday, Ms. Pelosi put out a strongly worded statement, calling the raids “heartless” and saying they would rip families apart and terrorize communities. She publicly urged Mr. Trump to “stop this brutal action.”

The president did that a few hours later, announcing that “at the request of Democrats, I have delayed the Illegal Immigration Removal Process (Deportation) for two weeks.”

But Mr. Trump made clear he planned to use the threat of family deportations to extract concessions from Democratic lawmakers. He said he had delayed the raids “to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border.”

“If not, Deportations start!” he tweeted.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, has said he wants to work with Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, on a possible solution to asylum and other immigration issues. Mr. Graham introduced a bill that would radically revamp immigration policy, blocking many migrants from seeking asylum and loosening rules around detention. But the odds that a negotiation between the two senators will bear fruit are exceedingly slim.

Shortly after Mr. Trump’s tweet, Ms. Pelosi responded on Twitter, saying: “Mr. President, delay is welcome. Time is needed for comprehensive immigration reform. Families belong together.”

The president was not specific in his tweet about what changes he was demanding, but Mr. Trump has angrily denounced the country’s asylum laws as “stupid” and the “worst in the world.” He has claimed that releasing migrants and their families into the United States while they wait for their asylum cases to proceed amounts to the “catch and release” of dangerous criminals.

The coordinated deportation operation, scheduled to begin in the predawn hours of Sunday, would have targeted immigrants who crossed the border in recent years and either received deportation orders from a judge or failed to appear for a court appearance. They were among thousands of migrants who had their immigration cases expedited by the Trump administration last fall.

Deportation raids are not uncommon. ICE will often approach undocumented immigrants in their home, workplace or even in court to detain and deport them. But the scale of the raids that were expected to begin on Sunday was much greater, spanning several states over multiple days.

The raids also drew condemnation because ICE agents planned to specifically target adults with children, raising again the possibility that families would be separated. The Trump administration abandoned its policy of separating migrant families at the border after it incited global outrage.

On Friday night, the Guatemalan-Maya Center in Lake Worth, Fla., held an information session about immigration. Lake Worth, part of Palm Beach County, has for decades attracted Guatemalans who work in construction and agriculture as well as at resorts nearby. By Saturday, some undocumented immigrants had already gone underground to avoid arrest, having left their homes to stay with relatives or friends in other places. Others said they had prepared to hunker down and hope for the best.

“My family was shopping for the whole week today. We didn’t plan to go out all week,” said Jessi Zavala, 23, the American child of an undocumented Nicaraguan mother, who was working the cash register at World Thrift Store.

“My family was shopping for the whole week today. We didn’t plan to go out all week,” said Jessi Zavala, the American child of an undocumented Nicaraguan mother.CreditEve Edelheit for The New York Times

Candi Vasquez, 13, who was born in Florida to undocumented parents, said that she and her brother, Rudolfo, 8, were still frightened after hearing about the postponement.

“I am kind of happy,” Candi said. “But if it happens in two weeks I am still scared. I don’t want to lose my mom.”

The surge of Central American families crossing the border has infuriated Mr. Trump. Last month, more than 144,200 migrants were taken into custody at the border, the highest monthly total in 13 years. Border patrol facilities, built to house adults who would quickly be deported, are now packed with migrants, including children, who would usually be housed in shelters managed by the Health and Human Services Department. Those shelters have also been pushed beyond capacity.

Mr. Morgan, who won his job at ICE in part by pushing for aggressive deportations in appearances on Fox News, has said the new family raids were needed as a deterrent.

But in recent days officials within the Department of Homeland Security have fiercely debated whether to begin the operation, according to government authorities. Officials within the agency have been hesitant about the effort because of limited space in family detention facilities and the bad optics of separating undocumented parents from their children.

Mr. Trump’s tweet of the operation frustrated high-ranking ICE officials, including the deputy director, Matthew Albence, who expressed concern that the disclosure put agents’ safety at risk, a government official said.

One homeland security official said the operation could lead to “collateral deportations,” in which agents looking for certain individuals detain other undocumented immigrants who happened to be present nearby.

In a meeting with White House officials on Friday, Kevin McAleenan, the acting secretary of homeland security, pushed back against the planned raids, arguing that they would lead to family separations. He said he could achieve similar numbers over a measured deportation plan spanning four weeks.

Mayors of several cities, including Denver, Baltimore and San Francisco, vowed not to cooperate with immigration authorities.

On Saturday morning, Thomas Homan, the former acting director of ICE, went on Fox News to advocate the operations and criticize officials who were arguing against Sunday’s raid, including Mr. McAleenan.

“These mayors aren’t the only ones resisting ICE,” said Mr. Homan, whom Mr. Trump has chosen as border czar. (Mr. Homan has not yet accepted the position.) “You’ve got the acting secretary of homeland security resisting what ICE is trying to do.”

News of the delay spread quickly in immigrant communities on Saturday, as acute dread turned to confusion. In Lake Worth, the Rev. Frank O’Loughlin, who runs the Guatemalan-Maya Center, had tried to soothe anxieties that morning. “A lot of people are scared today,” Father O’Loughlin told immigrants who had gathered for an event. “Let everything else go. You and your children are here.”

Hours later, the priest heard that the raids had been postponed. “Wow. We are at the end of a yo-yo string,” he said. “It’s incomprehensible.”

Julie Hirschfeld Davis contributed reporting from Washington, Miriam Jordan from Lake Worth, Fla., and Maggie Haberman from New York.

[taylor14firefly]

By Caitlin Dickerson

July 5, 2018

Faced with a court-imposed deadline to reunite families separated at the southwest border, federal authorities are calling in volunteers to sort through records and resorting to DNA tests to match children with parents. And they acknowledged for the first time Thursday that of the nearly 3,000 children who are still in federal custody, about 100 are under the age of 5.

The family separations, part of an aggressive effort by the Trump administration to deter illegal immigration, have produced a chaotic scramble as officials now face political and judicial pressure to reunite families.

Records linking children to their parents have disappeared, and in some cases have been destroyed, according to two officials of the Department of Homeland Security, leaving the authorities struggling to identify connections between family members.

The effort is complicated by the fact that two federal agencies are involved in detaining and sheltering migrants, and they did not initially share records with each other. On Friday, the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services, which shelters the children and must now undertake reunifications, sent out a plea to federal public health workers for help with an exhaustive manual search of records.

The agency said it needed to read through original documents of all children in federal custody “to screen whether children in our facilities were separated from parents.” That involved scrubbing the documents of an estimated 12,000 children to determine which had been separated from their parents by the authorities, as opposed to arriving in the country without a parent or other relative.

“HHS is requesting volunteers over the weekend to review case records,” said one of the emails. “Everyone here is now participating in this process, including the Secretary who personally stayed until past midnight to assist.”

The rushed attempt to confirm identities, locations and connections makes clear what immigrant advocates said from the beginning were potential pitfalls in the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” border enforcement policy, introduced in May. The crackdown, critics said, was announced with little advance notice and, apparently, little planning for how to deal with its far-reaching impacts.

In interviews with federal employees, immigration lawyers and shelter operators, those closest to the process raised questions about the initial assertions that federal authorities could account for the locations of both parents and children after they were separated.

In fact, the Health and Human Services agency charged with overseeing the care of migrant children, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, established such procedures, which included identification bracelets, the issuance of registration numbers and careful logs to keep the records of parents and children linked.

But those precautions were undermined in some cases by the other federal agency that has initial custody of apprehended migrants in the first 72 hours after they cross the border — Customs and Border Protection. In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a “family identification number,” according to two officials at the Department of Homeland Security, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the process.

As a result, the parents and children appeared in federal computers to have no connection to one another.

“That was the big problem. We weren’t able to see that information,” said one of the officials, who is directly involved in the reunification process.

Officials cautioned that this was not a deliberate attempt to obfuscate, but a belief that it made more sense to track cases separately once a group of migrants was no longer in custody as a family unit, these sources said.

Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for DHS, disputed the description of events at the border and said that the agency had always provided clear information to HHS linking parents and children to one another.

“Not only is it categorically false that DHS destroyed records, but the opposite is true: DHS personnel has worked hand-in-hand with HHS personnel to share clear data in the most useful formats possible for HHS – which included names, dates of apprehension, and identifying alien numbers for both children and parents who were separated as a result of zero-tolerance,” she said in a statement.

Over the past week, the Health and Human Services Department has been forced to undertake a herculean effort, deploying hundreds of federal workers, to comply with an injunction of a federal judge in San Diego, who ordered that all families separated under the policy must be reunited by July 26. The deadline for children under the age of 5 was set for Tuesday.

“I think it’s mission impossible,” said José Xavier Orochena, a lawyer in New York representing about a dozen parents whose children were taken from them. Mr. Orochena said that he met this week with the president of a shelter in New York where some of the children are being held. Neither one of them could imagine how the vetting that is required to bring families back together could be completed by the court’s deadline.

“Unless they waive all these requirements,” Mr. Orochena said.

Alex Azar, the secretary of Health and Human Services, said on Thursday that the agency was dealing with nearly 3,000 children separated from families, about 100 of them under the age of 5, but would make the reunifications happen in time.

“HHS is executing on our mission even with the constraints handed down by the courts,” he said, calling the judge’s time limits “extreme.”

He echoed President Trump, who has repeatedly placed blame for the separations outside the executive branch — pointing to policies and court decisions from earlier years that prevent migrant families from being held in detention for extended periods of time.

“Any confusion is due to a broken immigration system and court orders. It’s not here,” Mr. Azar said.

The problem that arose with the missing family identification numbers became apparent as soon as children were shipped away to shelters, agency employees said. Many were dropped off thousands of miles away from their parents and some were too young or scared to speak.

That left hundreds of federal employees, including Mr. Azar himself, to manually review the documents of each individual child over the weekend to look for any references to separation, including anything the child may have told agency employees or shelter workers.

But young children are often unreliable narrators, Mr. Azar said on Thursday, and there has been some confusion. For example, he said, some children might have told shelter workers they had traveled with a parent at some point, but they may not have actually crossed the border together. In those cases, while parent and child may indeed be in separate custody, they are not part of the group forcibly separated by immigration authorities, and thus are not subject to the court-ordered deadline for reunification.

The secretary added that steps could not be skipped in order to meet the court’s deadline, pointing to some parents who had already been weeded out of eligibility for sponsorship of children in the vetting process, which turned up histories of child cruelty and rape, he said.

The announcement Thursday that DNA testing would be used to help confirm family units drew some opposition from immigrant advocates, who said that the records could be used to track undocumented immigrants indefinitely.

Administration officials previously had said about 2,300 children had been separated from their parents. But over the weekend, the agency came up with its final accounting that showed nearly 3,000 in total.

Many questions remained unanswered Thursday about how the process of reunifications would unfold.

The rough plan is for a patchwork series of moves of both parents and children, according to the two immigration officials who described the process. Some of the parents under the plan are to be consolidated in those immigration jails that have extra room and children would be routed to meet them. Other parents, such as those of children who are under 5, have already been moved to the immigration jails nearest to the shelters where their children are being held.

But no pathway was in place as of Thursday for what will happen after the reunifications, for families released from immigration custody on bond or other conditions. Some parents and children will presumably have been moved several states away from their extended families or support networks, the officials said. They may not have the money for transportation back to their families, or even food.

But Mr. Azar insisted Thursday that his agency would meet the court’s deadline. A follow up to the email asking for volunteers to help with the reunification effort began, “Wow!”

Thanks to their efforts, “the mission will be accomplished,” it said. “And everyone should feel satisfied that we are doing our part to reunify the children with their families.”

Annie Correal contributed reporting.

[rightsinexile]

Prison or deportation: The impossible choice for asylum seekers in Israel

Annie Slemrod is the Middle East editor of IRIN news, which published the piece below on 31 January 2018. This piece appears here with permission, and has been reprinted in full. 

After escaping torture in Sudan, after walking 11 hours through the Egyptian desert, and after handing almost all his money to men with guns who blocked his way, Adam slipped through an opening in a border fence and laid down on the sand.

The respite didn’t last long.

The 24-year-old told every Israeli official he met – first soldiers, then officials at a detention centre – that he was seeking safe haven.

It didn’t go down well, as Adam recounts calmly from his Tel Aviv kitchen table.

“I told them, ‘I’m a refugee’. They said, ‘we don’t have a place for refugees here’.”

“I asked for the UN… They said, ‘here in Israel we don’t have the UN’.”

“I said, ‘so let me go back’. They said, ‘no’.”

Little did he know it would go so badly that four years later he would be labelled an infiltrator and that, as an unmarried, childless male with no official refugee status, he would be high on the list for deportation.

Adam, who told IRIN he was tortured in prison in Sudan for refusing to fight in the military, has fallen foul of a new Israeli government plan to rid the country of the 38,000 African asylum seekers inside its borders.

A new policy

The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Tel Aviv has been overrun by “illegal infiltrators” who, it maintains, are largely responsible for driving up poverty and crime in working class southern parts of the city.

Starting the first of April, the government says it will give the asylum seekers – more than 90 percent are from Sudan and Eritrea – the choice between prison and “voluntary” deportation. Those who agree to leave will be given USD 3,500 (this sum will decrease after 1 April) and reportedly then be sent to Rwanda or Uganda, although both governments have denied entering into agreements with Israel.

Asylum seekers began making the trek to Israel in the mid-2000s. Between then and 2014, when the country fortified its border with Egypt, Israel’s policy towards new arrivals has changed often.

It gave them visas – renewable every few months – that read, “this permit is not a work permit”, but opted not to fine employers who hire them. It sent men to indefinite detention in a series of centres, until the high court limited this to a year in 2015. It has also paid asylum seekers to leave the country – reportedly via secret deals with Rwanda and Uganda (believed to be the destinations in this latest push).

Forced deportations haven’t been officially announced, but at least one of Netanyahu’s ministers has said they’re on the table.

When he announced the new policy at a January cabinet meeting, Netanyahu spoke of the “plight of the long-time residents” and said his new deportation plan was aimed at, “restoring quiet – the sense of personal security and law and order – to the residents of south Tel Aviv, and also those of many other neighbourhoods”.

Welcome to the medina

South Tel Aviv has become a hive of controversy – and a useful rhetorical tool for politicians – because the government and some locals (but not all) blame poverty and deteriorating conditions on the influx of African asylum seekers, even though one official report suggests state neglect was largely to blame.

Most did not choose this city anyway. With a dark sense of humour, and a bit of profanity, Adam explains what his one-way ticket to the Central Bus Station in the south of Tel Aviv was like.

After being apprehended at the border – an incident that involved running from a searchlight, losing his shoes, and an act of kindness when a soldier gave him his own boots – Adam was told he couldn’t claim status as a refugee but could stay in Israel and work a while, in what officials kept calling the “medina”, city in Arabic. 

He didn’t speak much of that language, but after weeks in detention he heard his name called a few times: “Adam-medina”, “Adam-medina”. Loaded onto a bus with other African asylum seekers, he eventually figured out what medina meant and that he was going to a city that turned out to be Tel Aviv.

Unlike some of his fellow passengers, he already feared his prospects were bleak. “We didn’t speak Hebrew; we didn’t have any experience,” he remembers. “People were so happy getting on the bus.”

“I said to them, ‘Why are you happy? This medina is going to be messed up [in more colourful language]. It’s not going to be easy’.”

Adam took one look at Tel Aviv, saw men sleeping rough in a park, and got on the first bus out of there. But eventually he came back and found work as an electrician.

Over time, many asylum seekers found jobs and places to stay near the bus station in south Tel Aviv. Nowadays, shop signs in Tigriniya (the language spoken in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia] compete for space in the area alongside those in Hebrew; barbershop and salons have sprung up to cater to a black clientele; coffee shops display posters of Eritrean musicians.

Teklit Michael, a 29-year-old Eritrean activist (and middle-distance runner) who fled his country in 2007, says he came to Israel “to be safe from detention, torture, imprisonment”, but never truly felt at home.

He recounts episodes of discrimination: “When you get on the bus and no one wants to sit next to you… when you cook at a restaurant and people say, ‘I don’t want to… eat what he made’.”

Refugee status

As Adam learnt upon arrival in 2013, the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, doesn’t process asylum claims in Israel. The government has handled refugee status determination since 2009, and until 2013 it was almost impossible for Eritreans and Sudanese to even submit applications.

When applying for refugee status did become an option, it was still extremely difficult and bureaucratic.

“I thought, if you can apply you can at least prove that you tried,” said Anwar Suliman, a Sudanese asylum seeker who IRIN profiled in this 2017 film and interviewed again for this feature.

He, like Teklit and many others, is still waiting for an answer.

Adam never filled out the refugee status determination form – what everyone calls the RSD.

Why? “They told me in the beginning they had no place for me.”

Plus, he says he knew a lot of people who filled out the form and it amounted to nothing.

The statistics bear this out – as of mid-2017, more than 12,200 people had filed asylum claims; more than 7,400 had received no reply. Only 10 Eritreans and one Sudanese – 11 people total – have been granted refugee status since 2009, even though Israel is a signatory to the refugee convention. One more Eritrean man is said to have been granted status this week, although IRIN could not independently confirm the report.

Fighting back

Despite utter mistrust in the system and frustration over the miniscule recognition rate, those RSDs have suddenly begun to feel like some sort of protection.

That’s because it is childless men who never applied or were rejected who Israel says it will send away first, although later phases of the policy could see others deported.

IRIN visited Anwar at his home near another central bus station, but not in Tel Aviv – after detention in a desert centre called Holot he was told not to return to the city.

He has been the face – and name – of lawsuits; he has encouraged his fellow activists to speak out; and he has learned Hebrew and English.

Now, he says, “we’ve struggled enough. We did everything by the law; we protested; we spoke to the international media, the local media; we did everything.”

“I think now is the time for the Israeli citizens’ to [join us in the] struggle.”

Some have heeded his call.

There have been protests (including some by residents of south Tel Aviv) against the proposed deportations, promises by rabbis to hide asylum seekers (should it come to that), and a letter from a group of pilots at Israel’s national airline, El Al, saying they would refuse to fly asylum seekers if they were forcibly deported.

Condemnation from human rights organisations and international Jewish groups perhaps led Rwandan President Paul Kagame, after a recent meeting with Netanyahu, to issue a statement saying he “would only accept a process that fully complies with international law”.

At local NGOs that serve the asylum seeker community, activists say they will do everything they can to put a stop to the new policy. Dror Sadot of the Tel Aviv based NGO Hotline for Refugees and Migrants told IRIN that there is “a lot of panic” about the possible deportations, and that “now is our time to do everything we can”.

Adi Drori-Avraham, spokeswoman for ASSAF – which provides psychosocial support for asylum seekers who are especially vulnerable (torture victims, single mothers) – says her organisation will keep doing what it has always done.

“We had an Eritrean woman, who is a single woman with three kids, sitting on a chair in her office, sobbing with her head between her hands, asking, ‘Are we going to have to hide?’ It’s a horrible situation, basically the stuff of nightmares.”

Deported to what?

In a recent cabinet meeting, Netanyahu reportedly called the notion that Rwanda is unsafe “a joke”.

But asylum seekers who have taken Israel’s “voluntary” flights to Rwanda in the past have told researchers they arrived to find no support, only a night or two of hotel accommodation, and no legal right to remain there.

With USD 3,500 in their pockets, they were easy targets for robbery and trafficking to other countries.

They felt they had little choice but to leave Rwanda and chance it through dangerous countries like Libya, and, according to UNHCR, “along they way they suffered abuse, torture, and extortion”.

These reports back up stories every asylum seeker IRIN spoke to in Tel Aviv had heard (from friends or friends of friends who took Israel up on the offer of cash), and everyone had also seen the video of three Eritrean refugees who were voluntarily sent to Rwanda, attempted to make it to Libya, and were killed by so-called Islamic State.

“[Rwanda and Uganda] are not our countries… nobody wants to go there,” says Teklit. “What is waiting for them is human trafficking to other countries, torture, other horrible things.”

Teklit says he can only describe how he feels as “desperate”, but calmly says he will choose prison if forced and must remain composed because “the good guys are always the winners, not the bad guys”.

Anwar feels the same: “100 percent I will go to prison. This is a crazy decision [to have to make]. But it’s the best I have.”

Adam has a different take. He knows the risks – he knows he’ll be a sitting duck – but he reckons if he is deported it could help those still in Israel.  If he’s kicked out of a place “that doesn’t feel like your home… maybe people will start paying attention… one day the people here will feel something.”

Changing hearts and minds

On a recent Friday night at the Eritrean women’s centre in south Tel Aviv where Teklit works – women and children are celebrating a move to new offices with a coffee ceremony and snacks.

In one corner is an odd-looking pile of plastic heads with hair, which made more sense when Teklit explains that hairdressing, along with cleaning, is one of the few avenues of employment for women from Eritrea.

Behind the chitchat and selfies, in another room, a group of Eritrean and Ethiopian asylum seekers quietly fills out RSDs – with the help of volunteers, as the forms can only be filled out in English, Hebrew, and Arabic.

The Israeli government says this won’t make a difference, and insists that the deportation exemption only applies to those who had open applications as of the first of this year.

So why are they still giving it a shot? “Maybe it makes them feel better,” offers one volunteer.

Because of the recent move, the centre’s walls are nearly bare, but for a painting of one black hand and one white, linked together. Printed beneath, in Hebrew and English: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”.

[handandbanner]

Seeing news of this incident last evening made me think of the work I have been involved in around racial trauma.  I feel hopeful around the fact that the profession I am associated is beginning to provide concrete ways of identifying and reporting trauma resulting from racist aggression/violence.  In part I’m hopeful because Social Work documents are recognized by the legal court system in Canada.  When I see an incident like this, I'm interested in quantifying the trauma experienced by the racialized observers in the room, the medical staff, the racialized children and all other children in the environment. In such cases I would like to see clarity on who is going to be liable for treatment costs, mental suffering and lost wages suffered as a result of racial trauma.  Ultimately the woman should be liable but perhaps tax payers would have to cover costs of making the woman liable.  This is a case of interpersonal racist aggression, but I would also like to see retroactively applicable laws that hold liable private and public institutions for damages resulting from systemic racism.  The good news is that we already have scientifically sound measurements for institutional racism.  In the next year I plan to stay involved and support efforts to include training on how to carry out this measurements  in social work curricula, so that any registered practitioner can apply the measurement tool to any institution if a client (individual, family or community group) reports experiences of institutional racism, and institutions in Canada or the government can be held retroactively liable for damages.  If you are a racialized Social Worker or an ally Social Worker and some of this totally doable work might interest you, feel free to contact me and I can connect you to the committee looking at curricula as well as our CASWE Race and Ethnicity Caucus. Also I can't help to think of how such efforts could be possible across human service professions. I imagine public health, and education.  The medical profession would be awesome but...  also I think we have key people in the legal field.  

Also seeing this very sad video made me think of how MLK said that the dominant race is not psychologically mobilized for racial justice (paraphrase).  Sadly I think that is still totally true (I would go further than psychologically and include morally, spiritually, intellectually, etc.).  It is a pretty severe inter-generational state. I’m sure no one I know would behave like the woman in the video. I have a spectrum of relationships experiences with the White people in my life. It is great to see those who have embarked on personal journeys and awakenings, but we are not comforted and our acknowledgement of such friends and individuals cannot eclipse our resolve and focus on the most vulnerable (and if that is what they desire in exchange for “allyship” they are worse than the aggressor). 

Experiences with allies and those who are not reformed by racial justice have however re-affirmed for me that the politics of persuasion is extremely limited.  Actually from early in my practice I never particularly believed in such politics.  I always though something was missing in for example, analysis of the CRM.  I never believed that abolition happened because enough White people became reformed and convinced of Black humanity. And I actually felt that having a false analysis of the CRM dis-empowered Black anti-racist activism.  There is a notion in community psychology under the topic of community organizing that is derived from Alinsky that discusses power as being derived from only two possible sources; money or people.  I was often bothered by this embarking into my own form of community organizing in my early twenties.   I suppose it is true in the context of the liberal capitalist democracy (and perhaps that is what he meant, it’s been a while since I browsed Rules for Radicals). But I remember thinking what of those of us who are not just low income minorities, but low-income minorities in communities such as mine where our numbers are so low that we cannot solely depend on mass mobilization to achieve empowerment. ��And this is when I began to explore what I would later come to describe as creative power.  I have been able to effect change and increase agency through my creating and it is life giving.  But that too has its limitations for achieving racial justice.  It is easy for efforts to be framed and engaged by the racial other through a respectability lens.  So access to racial harmony becomes tied to personal personal character through personal achievements.  This is particularly problematic in a context where we’re making gains but still experiencing marginalization because sooner or later as I am learning now, when our capacity to create is interrupted by any number of factors, we as actors and those we serve experience increased vulnerability to racial aggression especially from the White people who we engaged in our creative activism.  Having said that I continue to hold on to creating as the most life-giving and empowering approach for me.  I value agency and self determination.  If feel fully human when I am not just responding to the agenda of the deprived.  But I am also open to being “well rounded” in my skill sets and avenues of resistance.   It has been good to learn the limitations of creative power in racial justice work.  It is with the understanding of tools and approaches having their limits that I am able to continue to explore what approaches may work for the moment.  The BLM movement caused me reconsider to some extent my stance on the politics of persuasion and mass movements.  One cannot deny the results for our moment, it is inspiring to see the capacity of predominantly marginalized women and youth to capture public sentiment and use it achieve some voice in public square.  It is humanizing to see Black stories told, even though they are stories of Black pain, it is humanizing to mourn in public.  But the reality for example of the current US administration also provides us with an opportunity to understand the limitations of mass protest.  Yes there was power in people and numbers but it has been limited power and vulnerable power.  The most marginalized of marginalized groups that lead in actions and labour are the last to benefit and benefit the least from their own activism.  This is the CRM all over again.  We needed it, we are thankful for it, but it is not enough.  

Somebody once told me that justice is not best carried out through the legal system and I agree because I have always known the legal system to to stacked against marginalized people.  In its current state the Law of the Land has been used as a tool for colonization.  But beyond it being desperate times I'm finally considering that maybe we can decolonize and reclaim the law?  I recently heard an example of this on the radio about how in "New Zealand" the Whanganui River was recently recognized to have the legal rights of a person as part of the decolonizing environmental activism of the Maori.  Maybe this "law" that is used against us to kill and kidnap our bodies was actually alongside everything else stolen and deformed.  So maybe codifying Racial Justice is a form of reclamation and using "law" as a protective tool.  I would like to see a kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Racialized People in Canada to document past and ongoing racial injustice.  

Obviously the legal field is not my area of knowledge, perhaps there is already a way and precedence for the people in that clinic to be reimbursed as much as is possible for the emotional damages they have sustained in this woman’s rant. What I do know is that the experiences of those people sitting in that space matter.  Space must be created to quantify and document what it means for us to share space with toxic people who harm us.  How would a young Brown identifying child be triggered if this is their primary exposure to a White woman if they then have to move through spaces controlled by White women.  I learned about cognitive depletion as one of the identified forms of mental suffering resulting from race based aggression and micro-aggression. One of the confusing and disturbing effects of race-based trauma is when people who fill functional, proud and and confident begin to experience anxiety or stress that they are not sure how to integrate after having their power forcibly taken away after an incident.  We experience exhaustion from expressions of outrage and even expressing sorrow.  As we care for ourselves and invite our societies to care for us, we need to change the conversation towards the costs of living with the effects to exposure to these types of trauma.  

Personally, I continue to advocate for a diversity of tactics. I don’t pursue an illusion of a limitless and indestructible approach.   I also continue to promote the idea that we need each other and we must honor the various forms of action. For our moment l believe those of us who can must honor the work of our direct action movement folks by using the social power and space created to codify and institutionalize racial justice and also make use of our growing intellectual power to make this possible. History tells us that the grip we have on the media gaze will pass.  Those of us in a position to do so must also continue our efforts to create and build alternative liberation spaces with decreased vulnerability, influence and control of the oppressor. As it turns out and as history tells us, the morally bankrupt oppressor’s behavior can only be changed by just force.