#when i first saw her i gen thought she was south asian

[aetsiv]

desi allura is real to me

[hhsaryrud]

I ran and turned into another street

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[gigilberry-wips]

11/11/11 Tag

I was tagged by @kaptune in this post, thank you!

I am now exactly half way through the second draft of my WIP Thrown For A Loop, so I feel more comfortable doing one of these.

1. Did you have alternate ideas for your wip that eventually didn’t make it in the story of were exchanged with a better scene? If yes, tell us one or a few that you left out (could be a character too or a name)

A: Oh, I’ve had quite a few of those. Like, I had to rewrite the intro more than a couple times because the first time I started off in the wrong place, then because my main character was info-dumping and making no sense, and then because I mis-characterized my characters and had to write more about them and develop them properly before I could go back and write it again.

I wrote a few scenes that felt off to me because some of them relied on harmful and misinformed troupes, while others were not true to my characters.

I remember at least 2 instances where I actually tried to write scenes that had been inspired by scenes I’d read in books many years ago. For example, there was a scene that I’d based loosely off of something I’d read in a Terry Pratchett book where my main character confided in another because the character she was talking to was so calming and easy to pour her heart out to.

But that didn’t seem to fit somehow, so I flipped the entire thing around. Instead of being calm and happy while confiding in the character, my girl was instead very upset. She was angry! She was scared and confused and frustrated and no one was telling her anything! It was unfair and she made sure to say so! Now that felt more in line with what she’d been going through, especially when a person she didn’t know told her that they’d been looking after her when she’d been so sure that she was all on her own the entire time and then this person showed up late and said all these pretentious things, like how they’ve been trying to help her and how much they cared about her. Of course she blew up. It helped her feel much better after she did, but that’s how it went down and I’m pretty happy with it.

2. Do you have a specific audience in mind for your wip?

A: Teenagers ranging anywhere from 12-18 can read this! :D There’s no cursing or mature themes in it, no violence whatsoever, and it fits pretty well into the general audience category. It’s an urban fantasy adventure, first and foremost.

But I would recommend it specifically for the teenage age-group, because the main character herself is a teenager and deals with the growing pains of being at that age, which hopefully many of them can relate to.

3. Is it important to you that your wip has a moral or a message?

A: I suppose so. I think so. What I’d initially wanted to write for this story was something fun. I’d also wanted to write a story where my main character is wholeheartedly and unapologetically loved, by her friends, by her family, and by all the people who claim they love her.

As I’ve written this story, I find that if there are any messages that I want to reach the readers no matter what, it would be: 1) it’s alright to reach out for help if you need help. You don’t have to climb to some threshold of being “deserving” of help or “proving” yourself worthy. It’s not a bad thing to rely on the people who love you to help you. It doesn’t mean you’re weak. and 2) there’s always more than one kind of strength, some more obscure than others. Look out for them.

4. What kind of relationships do you like writing the most (romantic, platonic, familial, etc.)?

A: I love writing friendships. I’m all about the friendships, I love them so much. I especially love writing friendships between young girls and teenage girls because I never saw that anywhere growing up. I especially want to write about friendships that involve girls who look like me, who are asian like me. And they don’t have to be young girls! I want to write about the friendships between old women, middle aged women, young women, all the women! I want to write lots of this so that there’s more of it in the world!

I love writing healthy family dynamics! I love writing scenes of platonic intimacy. It’s so, so rare for me to read about asian families and poc families where there are healthy family dynamics. I am hungry to write about families that are supportive, loving, happy. I wish I could write faster just so I can write more of them!

I want to write lots of stories where women who look like me fall in love with men who cherish them and are proud of them. Whether the relationships they have are goofy or awkward or competitive or soft, I want to write healthy romances that are based on friendship, respect, and trust that is earned. I want more sweet, wholehearted romances, and I want all of them to have woc.

5. What kind of research have you done for your wip?

1) I remember one fateful day when I researched the fruit festivals that occur in France, particularly the orange festivals in the south of France

2) I’ve learnt a LOT about flowers, like the kinds that grow commonly in northern regions or which can be found during autumn or in the late part of the year, the kinds that can go in tea or can be baked into foodstuff, the kinds that hold special meanings, lots of fun things

3) I asked some questions regarding sensitivity and miscellaneous cultural details to a fellow asian writer to make sure I didn’t do anything particularly upsetting

4) general writing advice like how to make a compelling story narrative, writing dynamic characters, about story beats, how to keep a plot moving, etc.

5) my story takes place in the early 2000′s. I myself am a millenial/gen z hybrid. And yet, I have very hazy memories of this time. I’ve looked through so many, so many, of those “you know you’re a millenial if”, “young millenial aesthetic”, “remember back in 2005 when we had-”, “being born in the 1990s like”, etc. And I’m still not sure if any of it’s helped =_=“

6. If your wip became very successful would you want to make a movie adaptation? why or why not?

A: Heck no. A graphic novel maybe, but a tv or movie adaptation? - absolutely not. I feel like it would have a lot of inaccuracies in how the characters are portrayed, I feel like they’d focus on all the wrong things and none of the right ones, and most importantly I’d be scared that they wouldn’t get the feeling right, because the feeling is very, very important to me.

7. Did you have alternate title ideas for your wip?

A: I don’t believe I did, no. I thought about what to title, a pun came to mind, and that’s what I went with.

8. What has been the hardest part about writing your wip so far?

A: Convincing myself I’m going to finish it. I’ve kept thinking about when I’d finally start posting and if I’d be able to put up with a steady posting schedule and get stressed out thinking about it, and then I’d have to shake myself out of it and keep going. Also worrying that my characters aren’t lovable enough - because I love my characters and I want others to love them too, or that my story isn’t compelling or interesting enough, or most of all that the feeling that I had in mind for the story just isn’t coming through. Like I want this story to be overall light but also an adventure, but what if I’m making it too serious? Or angsty? Or plodding and boring?

9. Do you prefer writing action or description?

A: Description, definitely. ^^” When I write action, I feel like an grade schooler putting one word in front of the other and all of them feel tedious and redundant, like I’m describing basic, boring things. With description I can at least info dump before I refine it later and make it pretty. With action I have to be sparse and smart, I need to know what to cut, when to cut it, and how to do it right. And that makes for a whole different kind of brain exercise.

10. What do you want your readers to come away with after reading your story?

A: A good time. No really, I want them to have happy feelings when they’re done reading my story. I want them to have happy feelings while reading my story, because there’s a lot of fluff and happy things going on in there.

But I also want to write a character who is both timid and strong. I want to write a character who freaks out and cries a lot and is still trying her best and still being very brave, and I want the readers who do stick around to value her because of that. The choices she makes and the thoughts she has are going to be frustrating to read at times, but whether they like her or not I hope they can understand that her strengths all lie in her exceeding her own expectations and her mentally set limits and I hope they can appreciate her for that.

11. What’s your favorite part of your wip? what make you excited to write?

A: I want to write the fluff so bad. I love writing a character who receives so much love from others, who is seen as a love interest and is genuinely treasured. I love writing the friendship scenes, the bonding scenes, all the platonic intimacy. I love that I get to write healthy family relationships in an Asian family, I love that I get to write about friends who love and support each other. And most of all, I love that I can write an anxious and imperfect character who is surrounded by people who accept her as she is, and that I can write her as the heroine of her story - the one who drives the story, the one who makes things happen, the one who has power and agency and a voice in her own narrative. That part makes me happy beyond words.

                                                   --------------------------

And that’s all for me! Here are my questions:

1. If your OC were to meet you in real life, what do you think they’d think of you? Would they like you?

2. Which of your OCs has the most appealing aesthetic vs. which of your OCs has the aesthetic that matches closest to yours?

3. How would you say your story has changed as you’ve written it?

4. Which story troupe(s) do you want to take and flip on its head?

5. Have you ever based an OC off of a song? If so, which song was it?

6. Have you ever read a fanfiction that filled your heart with soulful feelings and quite possibly moved you to tears?

7. Which OC(s) that you’ve ever created would you say is/are the farthest from you in terms of personality? What about intelligence?

8. Which relationship dynamics do you find yourself writing the most often?

9. Pick one: Angst or Fluff

10. Have you ever written a self-insert OC (no shame here - in fact, I love those! A lot!), be it in fanfiction or original fiction? If so, how old were you when you first wrote them?

11. Have you ever written a story based off of a dream? Did it stay true to the dream as you wrote it or had it changed drastically by the end of it?

Tagging all the people on my “like being tagged in tag games” list:

@roll-a-bi20 , @cjjameswriting , @welcometomycerebralcortex , @inexorableblob , @lordkingsmith , @theunubun , @harrybpoetry , @smudged-glasses-writing , @ill-write-when-im-dead , @cosmic-storytelling , @furryarbiterangel , @ecritblr , @owlsofstarlight , @drarrybabes , @lura-wilcox , @purrfectwriting , @this-was-my-2nd-choice-for-a-url , @poetbelieverhere

(if you wished to be tagged if future tag games, then please interact with this post)

[agentlereckoning]

What I think about Alison Roman

Any Gen-Z’er with a Twitter account has probably seen the latest Gen-Z Icon Controversy, i.e. the one involving Alison Roman. In case you’re not caught up on its details,  the tl;dr is that The New Consumer (which appears to be a one-white-man show of an online publication steered by a former Vox and Business Insider employee named Dan Frommer) published an interview with Alison last Thursday — an interview where Alison, when asked about the difference between “consumption and pollution” (as if there even is a material difference), said:

“I think that’s why I really enjoy what I do. Because you’re making something, but it goes away.

Like the idea that when Marie Kondo decided to capitalize on her fame and make stuff that you can buy, that is completely antithetical to everything she’s ever taught you… I’m like, damn, bitch, you fucking just sold out immediately! Someone’s like ‘you should make stuff,’ and she’s like, ‘okay, slap my name on it, I don’t give a shit!’

....

Like, what Chrissy Teigen has done is so crazy to me. She had a successful cookbook. And then it was like: Boom, line at Target. Boom, now she has an Instagram page that has over a million followers where it’s just, like, people running a content farm for her. That horrifies me and it’s not something that I ever want to do. I don’t aspire to that. But like, who’s laughing now? Because she’s making a ton of fucking money.”

This is the quote that most people who’ve followed this drama have latched onto, and I’ll come back to discussing it in a moment. I’m really not sure why the interview was published at all, other than for a publicity or financial boost during these times, because I don’t think anything worth hearing was uttered by either the interviewer or interviewee. Moments in the interview seemed either tone-deaf or trivial to the point where I wondered why they were included at all. Early on, for example, Alison laments that she hasn’t been making enough money during this pandemic. (She does not live in want of money.) Later she half-jokingly complains that her public persona has been reduced to “anchovy girl”, ostensibly because she often uses them in her cooking. (She does, and often proudly owns that fact, which makes this complaint pretty uninteresting.) But the point of this interview was meant to be, I think, a rumination on how Alison would turn her belief that she “isn’t like the other girls” into practice.

It’s a common thing to desire, I think — this ingenuity balanced with relatability, and I think seeking this balance is what propels so many people my age. Few things are more embarrassing to us than unoriginality, than being a carbon copy of someone else, yet few things are scarier than social rejection. We don’t want to like the same things as everybody else, but we want at least some people to like the things that we like. I think it’s what drives certain subcultures to exist in the first place, the way that subsections of people can congregate around something or someone, reveling in each other’s presence but also in knowing that they are, in fact, just a subsection of the greater population. 

This mentality is, admittedly, sort of what drove me to like Alison Roman in the first place. For background: the first time I cooked a recipe of hers happened unwittingly; in December 2018, I saw the recipe for the salted chocolate chip shortbread cookies that became known as #TheCookies (Alison’s virality can be encapsulated by the fact that all of her most famous recipes have been hashtagged, e.g., #TheStew, #TheStew2, #ShallotPasta or #ThePasta), but I made them without knowing that Alison was the person behind the recipe. The cookies were good (though I think any recipe with over two sticks of butter and a pound of dark chocolate is bound to be good.) At some point about a year later, I watched a YouTube video published by NYT Cooking where she made her white bean-harissa-kale stew, and I thought she was funny and really pretty and, like me (I think), had a fastidious yet chaotic energy that I always thought made me awkward but made her seem endearing. Alison’s recipes taste good, they come together really easily, and you don’t need special equipment or a lot of kitchen space to execute them. It’s why I’ve committed at least three of them to memory, just by virtue of making them so often. I liked her recipes so much that, for over three months, one of my Instagram handles was inspired by one. But I also liked her, or wanted to be like her, or some combination fo both. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to be her friend, or that I didn’t aspire to her lifestyle of Rachel Comey clothes, glistening brass hoop earrings that cost 1/4 of my rent, regular trips to downtown Brooklyn or Park Slope farmers’ markets or small butcher shops where the purveyors all knew her name, an always-perfect red gel manicure, the capacity to eat and drink luxuriously and seemingly endlessly and to have the money for a yoga studio membership to help her stay slim anyways. 

Of course all of those things are signifiers of social class more than anything else. But in oligarchical, consumerist societies, what is expensive and what is good become two overlapped Venn diagram circles, and I have not yet reached a level of enlightenment to be able to fully tease the two apart. And while I would never drop $425 on a jumpsuit, no matter how pretty I think it is, I could crisp up some chickpeas, stir in vegetable stock and coconut milk, and wilt in some greens, and act like my shit was together. I liked Alison because when I first started liking her, she hadn’t yet risen to the astronomical level of digital fame that she enjoys now, and by making her recipes, some part of me believed that I would be inducted into a small group of her fans who, by serving up her dishes, telegraphed good taste.

This idea of “good taste” is a complicated and racially charged one. Alison is white; she lives in one of the whitest neighborhoods in Brooklyn (maybe even all of New York City); her recipes cater to a decidedly young, white audience. I think another reason why her dishes hold so much Gen-Z appeal, beyond their simplicity and deliciousness, is because they sit at the perfect intersection of healthy-but-not-too-healthy and international-but-not-too-international. Her chickpea stew, for example, borrows from South and Southeast Asian cooking flavors, but you wouldn’t need to step foot into an ethnic grocery store or, god forbid, leave Trader Joe’s, to get the ingredients for it. The shallot pasta recipe calls for an entire tin of anchovies, and you get to feel cool and edgy putting a somewhat polarizing food into a sauce that white people will still, ultimately, visually register as “tomato sauce and pasta” and digest easily. All of the recipes in her cookbook, Nothing Fancy (which I received as a gift!), are like this. She doesn’t push the envelope into more foreign territory, probably because she doesn’t have the culinary experience for it (which is totally fine — I never expected her to be an expert in anything except white people food), and probably also because if she did push the envelope any further, her book, with its tie-dyed pages and saturated, pop-art aerial shots, wouldn’t have been as marketable. 

That’s what’s unfortunate — that white people and white-domineered food publications have been the arbiters of culinary taste in the U.S. for centuries. I’m thinking about Julia Child, about bananas foster being flambéed tableside and served under a silver domed dish cover, about the omnipresent red-and-white-checked Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, about Guy Fieri and Eric Ripert and Ina Garten and the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen. I’m thinking about how white women have long been the societally accepted public face of domestic labor when it was often Black women who actually did that labor. It’s Mother’s Day today, and I’m thinking about how, in middle school, I’d sometimes conceal my packed lunch of my favorite dishes my mom made — glass noodles stir-fried with bok choy, cloud ear mushrooms, carrots, and thinly sliced and marinated pork; fish braised in a chili-spiced broth — so that my white friends wouldn’t be grossed out, and so that I wouldn’t have to do the labor of explaining what my food was. 

And I’m thinking of that now-notorious Alison Roman quote. To be fair, Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen do have large consumer and media empires, which have become profitable and which require huge teams of people to sustain. Both of them probably do have large amounts of money at their disposals. What’s weird to me is that Alison accuses both Marie and Chrissy of “selling out” because they each branded their own lines of purchasable home goods, yet Alison herself said in that very same interview that she had also done that very thing. It’s just that Chrissy’s line is sold at Target, while Alison’s, according to her, is a “capsule collection. It’s limited edition, a few tools that I designed that are based on tools that I use that aren’t in production anywhere — vintage spoons and very specific things that are one-offs that I found at antique markets that they have made for me.” I suppose it’s not “selling out” if it caters to the pétite bourgeoisie. I don’t know if Alison is explicitly racist, since I don’t know if she called out two women of color simply because they are women of color, or if she genuinely just so happened to select two of them. But that she feels like she has the license to define things as “selling out” based on who the “selling-out” behavior caters to reeks of white entitlement. 

There’s also an air of superiority with which she describes how she would market her product line:

That would have to be done in such a specific way under very intense standards. And I would not ever want to put anything out into the world that I wouldn’t be so excited to use myself.

She says this right before talking about Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen, accusing them of being lackadaisical and unthoughtful (”okay, slap my name on it! I don’t give a shit!”; “people running a content farm for her”) when she likely has no idea what the inner workings of either of their business models are. To be sure, it could very well be true that Marie and Chrissy have handed off these aspects of their brands to other people. But for Alison to assume that they have, and that her own business management style would, by default, be better because she would retain control, is egotistical. 

Alison ends the interview by proclaiming that her ultimate goal is to be different from her contemporaries. She says, 

To me, the only way that I can continue to differentiate myself from the pod of people that write recipes, or cookbooks or whatever, is by doing a different thing. And so I have to figure out what that is. And I think that I haven’t ultimately nailed that. And I’m in the process of figuring it out right now.

I expect that her path to “differentiation” will contain riffs on the same iterations of preserved lemons, anchovies, canned beans, and fresh herbs that she’s always relied on. I expect people will still think she’s cool, because that’s easy to achieve when her recipes and aesthetic are a series of easy-to-swallow-pills,  when she tells the cameraman not to cut the footage of her accidentally over-baking her galette, and when being a white creative and working among mostly white colleagues means that she’ll get a lot of latitude. I expect she’ll continue to sell out, which is completely fine, so long as she’ll be candid with herself and actually call it selling out. 

And I want to learn recipes from a chef who looks like me, and I want that chef to be “marketable” enough to achieve Alison’s level of fame. I want people of color to get to decide what recipes deserve their own hashtag. I want Alison Roman to be emotionally okay, because Twitter backlash can be vicious. And I kinda want to buy Marie Kondo’s drawer organizers now. 

[nchyinotes]

Race, Mental Health and State Violence: A Two-Day Symposium. (Panel 1 - Critical Intersections)

April 9 2018

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/race-mental-health-and-state-violence-a-two-day-symposium-tickets-43160409948?aff=erellivmlt

Thoughts: I was only able to attend Day 1, Panel 1: Critical Intersections. All of these talks were important and provided some really great statistics & sources, but the one I found most interesting was the first by Fatima. I found her insights about personal experience as a (female) researcher fascinating, and I enjoyed hearing select interviewee’s stories in detail. I also appreciated distinction she raised between the perception of Black vs Muslim looking men and that intersection, as that was actually a conversation my Muslim Egyptian friend (hi Alshymaa!) and I were talking about at a war on terror exhibition a few days before this talk. While I still found the talks informative, I felt like they definitely focused a lot more on race than they did mental health. While I don’t know much about mental health in the criminal justice system, I did my final year research essay on mass incarceration in the US, so I am quite aware of how race factors in. So while the British statistics were different from the sources I studied (and it was helpful to see UK centric numbers), I personally wish that there was more about mental health in these talks.

intersections of muslimness, race, gender & mental health (fatima rajina)

form of biological racism - south asians perceived to be muslim even if they aren’t. stopped & searched based on how police perceive them.  

black muslims?

grenfell, palmers green, london bridge, manchester, ??? bridge - all the attacks last year happened during research period

muslim men, a lot of people were getting paranoid in being interviewed in public about (counter)terrorism

female interviewer - men more comfortable in crying & opening up & showing emotion in front of rather than men

one young interviewee, 20 yo been harassed since 16: active on college campus in east london, group of muslims organised a petition against a legislation, teachers weren’t happy about it & saw them as a nuisance. thinks one of his teachers gave his name to counterterrorism (prevent officers)??, wakes up and saw two police outside his house in the morning, being interrogated there & then.

way they spoke to and addressed him —> lots of coercion

offered a role as a snitch (role in counter terrorism)

got random no caller ID phone calls at ridiculous hours, asking if they’ve thought of their proposition as a snitch

really struggled during this time, was wetting the bed

felt like an attack on his masculinity - cannot express himself, how he was treated by police

white irish in SE london, muslim convert:

was accused of being a terrorist within 2 years of converting

in 2006 he travelled to syria (way before the conflict kicked off in 2010), looked like your typical white backpacker. was interrogated at this point, visited by the police + put on control order (“secret evidence” used against you, essentially on a tag, like severe bail conditions)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/feb/03/civil-liberties-control-orders

https://nearlylegal.co.uk/2007/11/control-orders-and-secret-evidence/

felt his masculinity was constantly being questioned, wasn’t offered any compassion

was unemployed, forced to go to this police station an hour away

2 year legal battle to be freed [famous case, been covered nationwide]

whiteness has been stripped off of me because of my religion (when became visible muslims in public - gets questioned where they are from)

they tried to break him down - he had to seek therapy, be put on medication. they were aware of the context of him breaking curfew etc but still treated that as a penalty

black jamaican, muslim convert

when police stop him its not because he’s muslim (or has a beard), only when his name (arabic) comes up does the intersection kick in

black male supersedes whether they’re muslim or not

interviewed about 8 girls (non/muslim)

female muslims have experienced violence from CT officers through male in their lives - “the conversation" was had at like 11. sisters responsibility to look out for brothers, if they’re present may calm things down with officers?

south asians, generally associated with islam already: paki bashing (her parents gen) —> muslim bashing  (her gen)

terrorists - white or brown. black people are “gangsters”, not terrorists. they never get told to go home ??

arrested safety: intersectional police violence, neoliberal securitisation and abolitionist visions (Vanessa-Eileen Thompson)

increasing securitisation (ie. policing) in parts of post colonial europe - urban policing, slow violence

recognisability of criminals?

“districts of danger” - police can check anyone without any individual suspicion, generally where (san p?? in hamburg, in 2001)

criminalisation of right to exist, to space and to move

forces you to decriminalise yourself in front of others

institutional racism makes it hard to counter racist policing on legal basis - swiss legal ?? black person ??

policing as a form of property, appropriating radicalised bodies

black people call police for help, but they are then being abused by the police instead - outside of the safety they’re supposed to enforce. repressive measures + criminalisation that can lead to death.

death of dominic ?? in germany, 2006

christy schwundeck - shot in job centre. struggling with depression, trying to get child out of foster care

race, gender, migration status, mental health —> threat, unworthy of safety + protection

pathological threat instead of a subject worth of safety and care

for them the police never means safety

mental inferiority is so much part of colonial projects (slavery) —> mental health is at centre

quality of life crimes - public nuisance

police + prisons have become substitute solutions to mental health crises

more likely to cause them to get in contact with these institutions + everyday triggers & makes it worse

starts with racist profiling

networks of communications + warnings - counter control maps, text messages, calling someone became the primary ???, stoplecontroleaufacies.fr (documenting cases to stop the normality of this phenomenon)

how does a society without policing look? caring instead of punishment. rooted in methods of care rather than institutional violence

reinstitutionalisation in an age of deinstitutionalisation (Zin Derfoufi)

S136 Mental Health Act - police detention power

to remove people who appear to be in “immediate need of care or control”

can use reasonable force if necessary, detain for 72 hours + possible extension

really about social control at the end of the day

reliable numbers by NHS digital vs detentions recorded by police (FOI requests) - 352 people are detained by a police force every year

lack of continuation of care —> many people end up back in

race and differential experiences - completely ignored in the debate about mental health

people from ethnic minorities are more likely (esp. black) to be detained

there isn’t much good data out there, because the forces have not been recording it properly

“mixed ethnicities” much higher to be detained under mental health act?? (even than just black - v surprising)

social control actors - general rise in use of powers

law and violence at the intersection of race and mental health in custody environments (Dinesh Napal)

public sentiment - demonising victims of police brutality + increased militarisation and state violence

law has failed to act as an apparatus to protect people from state violence

data is a medium for representing scale of issue, should never be held in higher regard than stories of individuals

in 2012, blacks 30x more likely than white to be stopped and searched (in england/wales)

dismantle idea of BAME/POC - dilutes the ways in which distinct racial groups face unique ways of oppression

black people targeted under MHA

chinese at the bottom (even below white)

laws on use of force: reasonability and responsibility, lack of clarity in enforcement

no convictions

statutory provisions are not enough

deaths in custody = state sanctioned deaths, extrajudicial killings

scope to rethink definition of ^ - no accountability for over 500 deaths of POC in police custody

should be treated as murder/homocide cases from outset

summary executions, state sanctioned murders? burden of proof moved on to individual officer + institution

channel 4 documentary released over weekend

panel

one sided reproduction of an argument, using police numbers, rather than critically investigating

security state is criminalising + capitalising on poor

parents generations likely to call police, because they come from bangladesh / ghana (where the perception is corruption), and there’s an element of trust here in britain. —> youth centres are the ones that get the respect - community orgs.

black/brown police are even worse bc they have to prove their loyalty to institutions / white colleagues — way more traumatic

role of trade unions

creating archives of resistance - what worked, what didn’t, why, how this can be applied transnationally

the police state is organising transnationally - they are traveling + communicating all the time (biometric systems for asylum seekers)

pro restraint should be eradicated