Latest / Political Commentary Corner / Anti-Blackness in White Feminist "Victims Rights" Advocacy

Transcript

Anti-Blackness in White Feminist "Victims Rights" Advocacy · Political Commentary Corner

• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome back to Political Commentary Corner.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Lawrence Grand Prix.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: And today we have an episode that really started from some of our work in the Maryland General Assembly.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Maryland passes all of its laws in a hundred-day session every year from January to April.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: And this is something I actually really picked up towards the end of the session.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: We were hoping to get this bill passed, and it actually didn't pass, and there was some discourse, and we wanted to talk about some of the dynamics specifically around the victim rights lobby, particularly uh white women seen as victims of crime, and in this case domestic violence, so-called liberal, progressive advocates for domestic violence sometimes end up by passing or resisting reforms to policies that would disproportionately address the victimization of black men by the criminal legal system.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: But this is one of those topics where the more you start researching it, the more really insane the issue becomes and the more needed the discourse becomes.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because in this episode we're gonna talk about similar to other episodes, the inability to perceive black men as victims, in this case of the criminal legal system, but also of intimate partner violence and the societal dynamics that see black men as inherently perpetrators or potential perpetrators and the ability of in this case even liberal progressive so-called allies, in some cases around some parts of criminal legal justice reform being so tied to this notion of men, in this case, especially black men, as potential perpetrators and the needing to protect victims of crime, in this case largely uh white women, or in the words of the advocates themselves, black women, from potential perpetration of interpersonal violence, the structural violence, the massive structural violence that the criminal legal system does not just to black men, but also black communities, black women, and black families, gets obscured.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we hope you find this conversation useful.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: We hope that you go to our website, lbsbaltimore.com, where you can learn more about this particular issue, which deals with things like district court commissioners and some specifics around Maryland law, but also all the things we're doing to gear up for the next year's legislative session 2027 in Annapolis.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Also, check out all the other great shows on the Black Liberation Media Network on YouTube, and with that, let's get to it.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And you can find this video on the website of the newspaper, the banner, the Baltimore banners.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: You can just Google them and Google the five-part series they did on District Coal Commissioners.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: So you have individuals in the room, there appears to be a panel, and a person with a mask gets up and starts yelling at the people on the panel.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: A man who is well dressed gets up and puts his arm out in front of the man, puts his hand on his shoulder gently, but generally holds his arm out to protect the man from accosting the people on the panel.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: And this person is very agitated and yelling about how policy is not doing enough to help black folks.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: So at this point, the man is being escorted from the room where the panel conversation is being held by it appears to be a friend of his.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: So his friend is holding him by the shoulder, and the well-dressed person is actually again flanking him with his arms out, not really touching him, but just escorting him up the room.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the video.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: And like I said, you don't have to take my word for it.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: You can see the video on the website of the newspaper's A Banner.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the well-dressed person is actually a state delegate for the state of Maryland, delegate Caitlin Young.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the story says that for just the interaction that you see in the video, again, in this case, he's basically trying to protect this agitated person from, as you heard, the panel includes black women on the panel.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it is logical to interpret looking at the video.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: So he's largely trying to protect this aggravated person from potentially accosting these black women on the panel.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: And for just that interaction, putting the hand on the person's shoulder and being behind him as what appears to be a friend guides him out by the shoulder, Lily Caitlin Young was actually charged with second-degree assault from this person's van, going not to a lawyer, but to a district court commissioner.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: So similar to how other states have a justice of the peace or something like that, Maryland has these district court commissioners where just from going in any person talking to them and claiming that was a crime committed, you can get an issue for an arrest warrant.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what happens to delegate Caitlin Young, based upon the interaction you see in the video.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: The banner goes on to write about five Marylanders caught in a system where you can be locked up on a person's word, a story by Dylan Siegelbaum.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: And here's an excerpt from the story quote In Maryland, people can be arrested, thrown in jail, and forced to defend themselves against criminal charges without input from police or prosecutors.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's because anyone, a jilted lover, a neighbor, a co-worker, can ask a district court commissioner to bring charges.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: These judicial officers are not required to have a law degree, but they hold immense powers and can make decisions that profoundly affect people's lives.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: District court commissioners can only consider one side of the story.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: They aren't allowed to investigate or ask people for proofs to back up their allegations.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Though the system was intended to expand access to justice, it has falsely swept up community members, including Mayor Brandon Scott and even T.I.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: So they go on to give two examples of people caught up in the system.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the first.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Robert Johnson III was at his home in Waldorf when he received a notification in the mail to appear in the District Court of Maryland for Baltimore City.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: They did not explain the reason.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Johnson 49, a retired master sergeant for the Air Force, was perplexed.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: He said he twice spoke to someone at the state's attorney's office to try to understand why he was being summoned to court, unsuccessfully.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: He hired an attorney who picked up a copy of court documents that detailed allegations against him.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: The paperwork listed his name and address, but the court's documents contained the wrong phone number.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And they say that he was only 5'1, 150 instead of 6'250.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: A woman alleged to the District Court Commissioner that someone with his name has threatened and harassed her and posted videos of them having sex on social media without permission.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Johnson was facing charges such as electronic communications, harassment, and distributing intimate sexual image.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: Man, this is obviously not me.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Kafka tried to convince prosecutors to drop the charges so it could be refiled, but he was unsuccessful.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: So on March 4, 2024, Johnson appeared at the court for trial.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: A different man named Robert Johnson also showed up with an attorney.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: He does not know the young lady and has never seen this young lady in his entire life.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Kafka told the judge about his client.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Assistant State's attorney Caitlin Cosby explained that when the woman filed for the charges, she used an internet search engine to try to find the proper address for service.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Prosecutors cannot get in touch with her.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: End quote.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: So this is an example of a black man being falsely accused by someone he didn't know.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: And even though they couldn't get in contact with the person who filed the initial charges using a search engine to look up a person named Robert Johnson, finding the wrong one, he still has to go to court, hire a lawyer, ironically named Kafka, given the Kafka-esque nature of this event.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Let's listen to the second example.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: So going back to the story quote.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Police arrest Monique Pulley on April 4th on two counts of second-degree assault after a man purported to be her brother, alleged a district court commissioner that she attacked him and his loved one was a weapon, including a taser.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm reading these charges and I'm like, I'm going to jail.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: I know I'm going to jail.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's no way they're gonna let me go home, Pulley said.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: She was right.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Police took Pulley to the booking where a district court commissioner ordered her held without bond.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Commissioner Jones also issued a no-contact order.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's my brother, Pulley told Jones.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't write that stuff.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: I was just on the phone with him.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Pulley said that she was on a cell phone with a woman facing a cell with a woman facing charges of first degree murder.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: Pulley, who did not file for charges, showed up for bear review hearing that his sister's name.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: District Commission did not require people who are seeking charges to show proof of identity.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: The judge, however, wanted to see his ID.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Slawkin released Monique Pulley31 of Baltimore on her own recognizance.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: More than one month later, prosecutors dropped the charges.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: You should not be able to use the criminal justice system as a weapon, Pulley said.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: This is a big, big scam.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: End quote.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: So again, you have a woman with someone claiming to be her brother, claiming that she assaulted him with a taser.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Her brother shows up saying, That's my sister, she didn't do this.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: The judge asks for ID to prove it's her brother, and only then is she let out after being denied bail and put in a cell with someone charged for murder on solely the word of apparently an anonymous person.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: So when relatively minor reform, HB 336, came up this session and passed the House, we thought this was going to be relatively simple.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: This court commissioning system is pretty intense to allow targeting of, in this case, black men and black women.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: And even we've not had great things to say about this person, state's attorney Ivan Bates was in favor of this bill passing.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: So we were somewhat surprised that even if this bill is compromised, because this bill would have made it so that you have to go to the state's attorney for an actual arrest warrant.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: So you can still issue the summons based upon the accusation to a court commissioner.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: But for the arrest warrant, which produces disproportionate minority contact, possibility of, again, people being arrested, help without bond, possibility of, again, police disproportionately targeting black and brown people, police brutality, all these things come into play when you talk about arrest warrants.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: But for the summons to come to court, you can still get it.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: But for the arrest warrant, you'd have to go to a state attorney, which itself was a compromise.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the folks who were pushing against this bill were some of the folks from the domestic violence advocates lobbying.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Folks who were saying that people who are afraid of domestic violence don't go to police, they go to district court commissioners because they find less possibility of them being criminalized in this relationship, and the ability to basically arrest people very quickly if necessary to stop potential victims from being hurt by that intimate partner.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: Understandable concerns, of course.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: But given that this bill already had provisions designed to allow for some of those emergency requests to be heard, and given the nature of this being a compromise, and you could always go to the police in those most intense circumstances, the inability to conceptualize the stories we just heard, delegant Calvin Young, the brother Robert Johnson, and the sister Miss Pulley shows a callousness to this idea that there are just these evil perpetrators out there.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it's almost like this horseshoe theory where, again, nominally social justice advocates defending women's rights end up sounding a bit like Fox News people, the way they talk about these scheming abusers just waiting to commit acts of violence.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: So we need maximum leverage, maximum criminal legal penalties to be able to attack them.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: Given that this was holding up this bill, Director of Public Policy for LBS Dave on Love ends up writing a piece that talks about some of the ways in which the victims' rights lobbying, largely white women working for domestic violence nonprofits or other nonprofits doing victim services, end up replicating anti-black logic in the way that they talk about these issues.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: You can go to lbsbaltimore.com to find the full piece on Davon Substack, but I just want to read a few quotes from the piece because it sets up some of the back and forth that's at the heart of why we did this episode.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: So an episode from the piece reads A foundational mythology that shapes the American collective consciousness is that black men are uniquely prone to violence and criminality.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Violence against white women, from non-white men in particular, is a threat to patriarchal masculinity that is central to white people's collective false projection as the most civilized people in world history.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Their traditional historiography, they are rendered as perfect innocent victims, and black men are perfect bodies projected as greatest threats to these perfect victims.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Many lynchings of black men historically were justified by making false accusations of sexual violence towards white women.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Underlying logic is phenomenal did not go away, it still remains a significant part of the collective American subconscious.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Black people, particularly black men, are seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of a crime than a white person, according to 2022 report.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: When a black man has engaged in a violent altercation, it is assumed that it's an expression of proclivities to violence in ways that are not attributed to white men who destroy property and get in fights after college sporting events.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: These societal stigmas run to black men being assumed guilty until proven innocent, resulting in policies and practices that pull men into the criminal legal system.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: HB 336 in the 2026 Marilyn General Assembly changes a long-standing practice that uniquely endangers black men.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Currently, anyone can go to a district court commissioner and make an accusation of wrongdoing.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: This often results in accused person being placed in jail for days without any evidence of wrongdoing.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: This can result in the loss of employment because of unexpectedly missing days of work and the stigma that comes from charges that are documented in a person's record.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: Many of the biggest opponents of changing this policy are elements of domestic violence lobby that is deeply inflected with a brand of feminism that's complicit in social society's assault on the humanity of black men.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: This brand of feminism both heavily from the eugenics analysis of someone like Thomas Jefferson, who believes that black men are a semi-privative species that is animalistic in the ways that is characterized by Jefferson's quotes.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: We can acknowledge the need for black men to be held accountable for harm that we cause just as any other human being, but also acknowledge that black men are often treated as if we are guilty until proven innocent.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: The only reason this dynamic can persist within mainstream domestic violence service ecosystem without substantive engagement.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: What the unique problems that black men face within this system is the normalization of black men as prone to criminality.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: The disproportionate burdens of child support, limiting access to their children, and having no viable recourse for violence committed against black men are generally unaddressed by mainstream domestic violence ecosystem because black men are illegible as victims of violence and are the most seen as recognized as perpetrators of violence.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: HB 336 is one step towards changing a practice that results disproportionately in the criminalization of black men.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: End quote.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: No, and I'd like to explain my vote.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I really want to support this bill because I understand there are abuses to the Commissioner system.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I think we really could have worked on this bill as we have in other ways in this committee, and we were about to do that.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_02: That just got short cut short.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um and it's really disappointing that that happened.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: I also want to address some really toxic things and ugly things that have been said about uh white feminists who oppose this bill and saying it's because they're racist.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a white feminist, and I'm proud of it.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm opposing this bill because we are taking away a very important tool for victims of stalking and victims of domestic violence.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: And who are those victims?
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: Nearly three in ten women and one in ten men in the United States have experienced rape, physical violence, andor stalking by a partner.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: So who are those victims?
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_02: Well, 27.2 of Asian or Pacific Islander women, 41% of Hispanic women, 53% of black women, 57% of American Indian or Alaskan Native women, 63% of multiracial women.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: Black women experience domestic violence at a rate 35% higher than white women.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: They're all more also more likely to be killed by their intimate partner.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: 40% of black men have also experienced some form of intimate partner violence.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: All of these victims deserve protection.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: Women, men, black, white, Hispanic, Native American, Asian and Pacific Islander.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: That is the reason I am voting against this bill.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: So again, that's Senator Sarah Love from Montgomery County, obviously no relation to LBS Dr.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: Public Policy, Dayvon Love.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: And she's more or less directly responding to the piece that Dayvon released, basically saying that what they're doing shouldn't be considered akin to the way Thomas Jefferson and other folks project deviancy on black men, because again, these are folks who are Democrats, they consider themselves progressives on certain issues, so that's different than some of the more hardcore right-wing victims, rights advocates.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I think part of the point of the piece was the nature of anti-blackness permeates liberal and progressive conceptions of protection around things like intimate partner violence, so that as the original banner piece talks about, there's no possibility of seeing black men as systemic victims of the legal system or black women of systemic victims of the legal system, because the overarching framework is what about the possibility of that being a victim of domestic violence who can't immediately get the cops to arrest her intimate partner based upon going to the court commissioner?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that fear is so overwhelming that the reality of all the people swept up, again, this woman was locked in a cell with someone accused of first-degree murder off of just the accusation from to a court commissioner.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: So all those victims, including black women, become invisibilized, but it's because of the threat that looms of the possibility of a perpetrator who, because of the way American racism works, the way that the legal system justifies itself is that there are these dangerous prosecutors, these dangerous perpetrators, and because of American racism, that black male is put in that brain space for so many people, which justifies a heavy-handed legal response.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: So it's one of those things where you have colorblind racism where domestic violence advocates will never project an explicitly racialized perpetrator.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: What we know is in in the world of Fox News, in the world of Sinclair Media, conceptions of black criminality fill in that space for a lot of people, whereas a possibility, again, of a perpetrator preying upon women means in America, given the history of black men being seen as sexual predators, intimate partner violence disproportionately triggers fears of black men.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not changed by the idea of black women also being preyed upon by black men.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's just solidifies black men as a theoretical perpetrator, ignoring the possibility again of black men actually being the victims of intimate partner violence.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that this is really important because we are laden in society with images of powerful men getting away with domestic violence.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I heard a conversation in the meeting about Chris Brown and the what he did to Rihanna being uh a violent attack that's indefensible.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea of wanting the type of punishment for powerful offenders like Chris Brown is because that sends a symbol that patriarchal violence is okay.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: So what I think is creeping into these conversations is we need to use these laws, and this is not spoken, but the reality is it seems to be that there needs to be a symbol.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: These laws are symbolic that we do not stand for patriarchal violence.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: And the symbols are powerful men who have resources.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: And in the case of Chris Brown, he is valuable to powerful white businesses.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not his black male privilege being a rich black man, it's the fact that he is a millionaire who is used tool for billion-dollar institutions that makes it so that he wasn't canceled.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: But the possibility of Chris Brown being in someone's face selling a sold-out concerts makes people so angry.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: They want someone to pay.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: And these laws are seen as sending a symbol against people like Chris Brown, but it's not the Chris Browns of the world that are swept up by these laws.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, it's not the rich white man beating his wife that's swept up by these laws.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: It is poor, working class, black and brown people, men and women who are swept up by these laws.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: So when we say that the mentality replicates white supremacy, we're not saying that people are individually racist.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: We're not saying people individually hold conceptions that black men are super predators.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: We're saying the politics of the victim rights space replicates a political, structural organization of Power that produces violence against poor working class black people, disproportionately, but not exclusively poor working class black men.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I think a question that is worth answering is when love gets so Sarah Love gets so adamant about defending the idea of white feminism, is the idea that no, that's compatible with an analysis of social justice and all these other things.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: So why is it important to see feminism itself as part of the problem?
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's where we look to the work of academics like Tommy Curry, who is actually a professor in Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, Scotland, who talks exclus extensively about white feminist philosophical foundations and how they normalize and ignore the reality of anti-black male violence.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a longer quote from Dr.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: Curry, but I think it's really important because this idea of black male vulnerability, specifically in a quote, intersectional lens of being black and male, making them uniquely vulnerable to forms of oppression, is such a challenge to the feminist logic that to be male is always to be privileged.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: Which is why it's important to see it as a critique of feminism and white feminism explicitly, which says that maleness always comes with privilege, where for black people historically, maleness has come with some degrees of specific gender disadvantage in terms of being seen as a rapist and being seen as a threat for state violence, including state sexual violence.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a quote from Tommy Curry, the book Men Not, slow along, but I think it's important.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: Quote.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: Despite the contemporary intersectional feminist and liberal progressive framings of gender hierarchy that maintain that black men have privilege based upon their maleness, black men and boys lag behind on practically every population indicator, from education and income to health and mortality.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: Classrooms are hostile environments for young black boys.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: Rape, when it does happen to men, is ought to be perpetrated only by other men.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: Women are never thought of as rapists or perpetrators of sexual violence.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: As Stemple, Flores, and Myers explain, quote, stereotypes about women, which reflect gendered and heterosexist bias, including the notion that women are nurturing, submissive to help mates to men.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that women can be sexually manipulative, dominant, or even violent runs counter to these stereotypes.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yet studies have documented female perpetrators' act that spans wide spectrum of sexual abuse that includes several harms such as non-conceptual oral sex, vaginal, and anal penetration.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: Female perpetrators of sexual violence does not occur in a vacuum.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: Female perpetrators are aware of the innocence attributed to femininity and consequently the protection being female offers them from being seen as perpetrators of sexual violence, especially in cases involving imprisoned black men.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: Even with the change to the definition of rape by the FBI, there has been little change in the public's perceptions of male rape.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: Despite the change to the actual law, data collection still operates on the idea that males are perpetrators rather than victims of rape.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because male victims are, quote, who is made to penetrate are classified under sexual victimization in the FBI, the actual numbers of non-conceptual sex acts forced on males is not classified as rape.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: This means the number of males who are actually raped remains invisible not only to the public but also to scholars reporting on the data.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: Despite the prevalence, female perpetrators of rapes remain unrecognized and under-theorized.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: Such definitions serve as the cultural foundation for how we understand rape generally to our society.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps even more consequently, is the role these definitions play in the disregard for rape in prisons.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: The heteronormative lens, which limits rape and desire to rape to the power of men over women, has severely overdetermined how scholars come to understand incarceration.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: The popular notion is prison prisoners rape prisoners, so in reality, significant numbers of staff, both male and female, are reported to rape inmates.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: The dominant perception is that male staff rape female inmates.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: In reality, however, we find varying expressions of rape that are not only homosexual but also heterosexual and perpetrated by women.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: Even with the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 69% of male prisoners report sexual misconduct by female perpetrators.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: The notion of black male criminals stigmatized inside and outside prison as hyper-masculine rapists might be sexually abusive by law enforcement women contravenes every institution of race and gender stereotypes have to offer.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: He concludes.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: Young black men are constantly subject to sexual assault and coercion in their daily encounters with the state.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: In the seclusion created in public streets through police interrogation and under the aegis of now unconstitutional surveillance practices known as stop and frisk.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: Avenue Luima, a Haitian man, was sexually assaulted by Officer Volpe in a Brooklyn police station.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: The violence Luima suffered was not isolated to an incident created by Volpe, the officer.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: The violence he suffered was an imposition of white's will on his black male flesh.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: For centuries, racism has materialized through racist erotics composed on black flesh.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: The power white society maintains over black bodies can be recognized in the defenselessness the black male body shows in the face of determined racial narratives whites use to defend murder, rape, and sodomy of black males for the pleasure of the state and society.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: Black males, even as children, are denied the capacity to be seen as sexual victims.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: Racism, taken only at the hatred of one's skin color, erases the sexual vulnerability that black males historically have endured at the hands of white men and women.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: Legend asserts that the black male transforms into the worst fears of his onlookers upon the recognition of him.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: He is known as death, rape, murder to all but himself.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: James Baldw once said, quote, to be an American Negro male is also to be a kind of walking phallic symbol.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: End quote.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: So this is really important because it shifts the frame of sexual assault away solely from interpersonal relationships to structural violence.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: Just imagine.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: If every time a black person was patted down, that was seen as a form of sexual assault.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: It would entirely change how we understand sexual violation in America, but it's not just Curry, it's Baldwin, who talked about this in the 70s, where if Beale Street could talk.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: This idea of chronic sexual harassment when cops are grabbing on you looking for a gun, specifically targeted at black males for their maleness.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: Not to mention, again, this idea of sexual vulnerability with targeted racialized hyper-incarceration targeting black men, the sexual violence happening to black men in prisons becomes invisibilized, and the violence happening to them because of guards, including female guards, where if you talk to black people on the streets, we know this happens a lot.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: As the data shows, 69% report sexual misconduct by females in prison in terms of the staff.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: This really shows when we call white feminism or carcerial feminism, ignores the structural emboldening of these structural institutions of incarceration, will be disproportionately used to attack black men.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: So when we say people are racist, it's not that they hate black men in their minds and their spirits.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's that the politics they present will empower the institutions that have dedicated themselves to showing protection of white women by demonstrating the ability to violently attack black men.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: Just another example, I talked to someone who was in addiction services and social service administration, and she talks about when you are locked up for drug possession, being addicted, drug selling, and you're forced to go to recovery, there are usually women in the program who are administering the programming, and they have the ability to send you to jail if you're fined non-compliant.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: So, like any arguing with the staff, again, what disproportionately women, they have the power as women, and oftentimes black and brown women, to send disproportionately black men to jail on a whim.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: That I don't think you're taking your recovery seriously, or I think that you have combative personality.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: And they can take any inability to just simply comply to whatever the people on staff say, which is oftentimes like they yell at you, they tell you you're messing up, they sometimes verbally berate you, they have the right to do that.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you just have to take it.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: And if you stand up for yourself in that moment of structural vulnerability, given the power imbalance encoded by the state, you can get sent back to jail.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: White feminism, traditional feminism, carcerial feminism have no space to interpret power arrangements like that.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: We hear people talking about eyes of, again, black men disproportionately subject to being on parole and probation, they come home, they live with women, and we hear people who are squashing beefs in community, domestic violence beefs, who say that sometimes women are aggressively intimate partner violence towards black men.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: And they say, Who's gonna believe you?
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a woman, you're a man, you are on paper, you've been incarcerated.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: If I complain to a court commissioner that you're attacking me, not only is that court commissioner not able to research whether I'm lying or not, that's just gonna violate your probation.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: So you need to accept whatever verbal or physical punishment I meet out to you, or else I can use the state to send you back to jail.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: People in community doing violence prevention, community violence intervention, this is part of the beasts they're squashing and what we're hearing in terms of the reality of how violence functions in our community.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: And to completely ignore that.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: For the very real problems, intimate partner violence against women, ignores the structural state violence and the ability for women to leverage that structural state violence and the vulnerability of black men to that structural state violence.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: This is the point of the piece.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sorry that we didn't make the piece an entire book.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: But if you are someone who is doing advocacy that again has the lives of tens of thousands of black people in your hands when you write policy, to dismiss these concerns as as senator, Sarah Love calls it toxic, is exactly the kind of cultural politics to ignore black male vulnerabilities, which is the entire point of the piece.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to conclude by looking at the actual advocacy infrastructure that the victims' advocates bring to Annapolis.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: So one of the folks that is prominent in this ecosystem is LeSay Jordan from the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to smash two interviews of her against each other.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: One, when she's speaking to other people in the coalition during the pandemic.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: So this is post-2020s, there's more Black Lives Matter.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: And you can see again the ideas that we are advocates for people of color.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: We are promoting uh, you know, people of color the biggest victims of crime.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: But the policy agenda she's proposing has some interesting parallels to things that we advocate for and some interesting deviancies from things that we may advocate for and support.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: So again, let's listen to Lisse Jordan for from a few years ago talking about the policy agenda or critical issues policy-wise for people uh in the victims' advocacy space.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: So here's a clip from LeSet.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_04: Lisse Jordan with the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_04: And let me address first the specific issue of the COVID crisis.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_04: It really is creating unprecedented challenges.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_04: Sexual assault survivors report that their trauma is amplified by the quarantines, economic pressures, fears for the future, and our programs are stretched thinner every day.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_04: I think that we focus so much sometimes on survivors that we forget to also assign responsibility to the perpetrators.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_04: And let me tell you, the perpetrators are emboldened by COVID.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_04: They have had more access to children, more access to people they want to sexually exploit.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_04: And what's happened is that there is a fund called the Victim of Crime Act Fund.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, it was established by Congress, it was it was funded through fines on criminals in federal cases, and there was a change in the way they were prosecuting those cases.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_04: So they went from prosecuting people to doing what's called a non-prosecution agreement.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_04: And so this fund went way, way down.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_04: And so we fixed that at the federal level through advocacy.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_04: But what we have right now is a gap in Maryland.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_04: And let me be absolutely clear this gap threatens our domestic violence shelters, it threatens our rape crisis centers, it threatens the counseling, the therapy, and the support that women need and that they need even more during the COVID-19 crisis.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_04: And if I could just have the next slide.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_04: So this was over 120 services providers.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_04: And look at that list of people who are helped, survivors of rape, domestic violence, trafficking, child advocacy centers, where we do child-centered interviews of children who may have been sexually abused, families of murder victims, people of color, of people who are of limited needs.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_04: And so they are really facing the brunt of the lack of services that will come to us in October if this is not affixed.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_04: Human trafficking, we need to keep our youth victims out of the criminal justice system.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_04: Right now, too often when we have a survivor of uh sex trafficking, often black and brown girls, some black and brown boys, certainly all sorts of people caught up in sex trafficking.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_04: But we are unfortunately charging them with petty theft, with possession of marijuana, with joy riding.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_04: We need to take those low-level crimes and say, if you committed these crimes because you're a survivor of sex trafficking, we shouldn't prosecute you.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_04: We should provide services.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_04: This promotes their health.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_04: Protective orders, I'm pleased to say that we have bills really very close to being passed that will allow for remote access to getting a temporary protective order.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_04: So that initial filing of the protective order.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_04: We learned during COVID that we can do this, and those judges who said, Oh no, we can't, well, we've proved them wrong, and so now we want to continue that.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_04: Um so my hope is that everyone on this call starts to think more about that intersectionality.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_04: And I would again just beg everyone three things.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_04: In Annapolis, it makes a difference.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_04: When you guys make phone calls, I walk into those offices and they say, Whoa, your people are calling me.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_04: So please, please be one of those women who is supporting other women.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: So again, there are things that we think would be important funding for institutions that work with people who are victims of crime, and decriminalization of certain offenses that take into account people's trauma and experiences, but the context of how she advocates for them.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: Again, this is an entire network, federally funded, of people who support people who are victims of crime.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: Remember that context, victims of crime.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: And again, they have crisis centers all over the place.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: And even the way she talks about it, she mentions, you know, all these domestic violence victims, and oh yeah, people who are victims of gun violence and violent crime.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: And those are disproportionately black and brown people.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: So black and brown men make up the vast majority of people who are shot, 10,000 people.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: But the so the primary victims of crime are black men.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: But the victims advocacy service ecosystem has largely excluded black and brown men for years to focus on women who are victims of domestic violence and especially white women.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: But now, with 2020, there's a new influx of funds to address gun violence of victims with the idea that in their trauma and retaliation they may become perpetrators.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: So now you hear talk about victims of crime being black and brown people, that they can get money to now provide services for the black and brown men who are victims of crime.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: So you have this weird situation with the same people who are pushing policies that again criminalize black and brown men.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: Listen to the beginning of her quote.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: They're in the house, they're targeting women, they're emboldened by the pandemic.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: So this context of the criminal justice, the carcere-feminist framework that views men, especially again, with all the conversations we've had, black men as the perpetrators of violence.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: The very same people who benefit from promulgating that iconography now get the money to service the black men, potentially, when they're victims of crime.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really part of the debate and part of the conversation that needs to be had about the victim services ecosystem.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's simultaneously presenting people as perpetrators, but also trying to get resources that theoretically would benefit from benefit the very population, that they have an incentive to portray as these dangerous perpetrators.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that kind of is played out where you hear when it comes to victims of trafficking alone, we want to have potential recognition that these folks' criminal behavior may be impacted by that trauma.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that really frustrates a lot of people when you think about black people, again, black boys especially being underseen as sexual victims for all the analysis of Curry.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's really, really well documented that black boys especially have really systemically been victims, not of trafficking alone, but of sexual violation, including of older women.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the trauma that comes from that can be seen as driving negative behavior later in life.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_00: Also, black people in general have so much gun violence in our communities and the need to sort of engage in survival economics because of disinvestment in our community.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: All these things produce conditions where we're doing things like joyriding, we're doing things like hanging out with the wrong crowd, quote unquote, that we feel needs to be recognized as not being super predators or subs or giving into fights, not predators, but victims of a violent system that's then reflected in the individual behavior.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that L'Say could see that only for victims of trafficking.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: And policy recommendations pushed with this very powerful victim's rights law began, hundreds of organizations pushing decriminalization for certain behaviors only for victims of trafficking.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: In a society that explicitly views black boys' sexual vulnerability as impossible because they're always already perpetrators.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's where the frustration comes in.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's where the reality, when we say racism, that's what we're talking about.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about you as a person having negative conceptions of black people or using the N-word.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's about that's the implications of your advocacy.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: That thousands of kids are being demonized by Fox News every day for engaging in the exact same behaviors that you want carved out explicitly for the people in your service provider catchment ecosystem that can document that they're victims of trafficking.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: Which means they probably will have gone to police, and we know that especially black and brown people don't typically go to the police.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now we know lots of victims of trafficking also don't go to the police, but that's the that's the problem of carcerial feminism.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: And as much as they claim, well, we want to keep the district court commissioners because some people don't like going to police.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: The reality is these service provider ecosystems, this nationwide network of folks who have been tied to this ecosystem, a lot of the people who get access to the ecosystem is because they have worked with police.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: And we know some people in the ecosystem are saying that's messed up, we shouldn't make it so you have to go to police.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: We know people are working on that, but that's not been the dominant voice in the space.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: And we're looking for more contestation around things like that, but especially show up for people that aren't directly in your service catchment ecosystem when it comes to decriminalization of things like joyriding.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I'm sorry, but come on.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: We're seeing Fox News demonize our kids every day for doing the exact same thing you're pushing decriminalization of.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: And these folks, you know, some of them have good relationships with the youth shelters advocates, but a lot of them are just entirely absent.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: Not just entirely absent, but actually promulgating and working with the exact same news ecosystem that's demonizing our youth, that's saying that we have to lock these kids up, that these kids are predators, and not just the same uh organizations, but the same people.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: So here is, let's say, in an interview with Fox News, Sinclair Media, Fox 45, where you're not gonna hear as much of the analysis around this is for the black and brown victims of crime.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: You're not gonna hear the analysis around um a social justice perspective.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna hear the more lock-em-up tough-on crime perspective.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_00: So here's Lessay in an interview around basically claiming that we're not tough enough on kids who are accused of sex crimes, and some of them actually going back into school, and a Fox News story that basically is designed to turn that into a, you know, crime panic, sex panic car celeb.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_00: And LeSay is being interviewed for that story.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: So here again is L'Saic Jordan.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_03: Tonight we are following major developments in two investigations.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_03: Fox 45 News pressing city leaders about gang ties in the Safe Streets program.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_05: And more outrage over a Project Baltimore investigation that found a 15-year-old convicted of rape was allowed to attend the Baltimore City School.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_05: Good evening, I'm Kai Jackson.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm Mary Bubala.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_03: We begin with that Project Baltimore report.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_03: Under current state law, some juvenile sex offenders are allowed to be in class with other students.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of sex offenders are very opportunistic.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_04: Putting them in a school, there's a lot of opportunity there.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_04: I think it's outrageous.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_06: Lisa Jordan is the executive director of the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_04: I think it really makes me wonder if the school system is fully appreciating the mindset of sex offenders.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_07: I understand wanting to rehabilitate juveniles for minor crimes, but a felony and a slap on the wrist, what are you what are you teaching them?
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_07: You're just teaching them, oh, I can do this and they're just gonna send me back out on the streets.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_04: They should be able to say, this is a serious sex offense.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_04: Let's keep the child out of school until we can really make some stronger protections and make sure our other students are safe.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_06: This mom told Project Baltimore she feels Maryland laws are trending towards putting the rights of juvenile offenders over potential victims.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_07: Everything's hush-hush, everything's sealed.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_07: But what we do know is protecting the offender, he'll live a pretty normal life.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_07: Because there's no there's no consequences.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: So if you remember from the previous quote from Lisa Jordan, when she's talking to our other advocates, she mentioned one of the things on Their legislative priorities was getting a carve-out for sexual offenses from the Second Look Act.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, we push the Second Look Act.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_00: We support people like Delegate Pastor who pushed the Second Look Act so folks could get a second look at their sentence if they've done more than 20 years incarcerated because we know folks change when they're incarcerated.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: We know folks, again, oftentimes the victims of sexual assault if they are perpetrators.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_00: We also know folks are wrongfully accused and wrongfully convicted.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: Especially as stated, seven times more likely if you're a black man.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_00: But to carve out sex crimes from that limits the possibility of those folks getting out and then becoming people who work in community to address those problems on the outside.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one of the big problems with this carcerial feminism.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: This what about the victims?
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_00: Again, they're not thinking about the victims at all.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's just, it's impossible to say you look at Fox 25, St.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_00: Clair media constantly talking about victims and say that our policies are not designed to look at the victims at all.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: So we have these carve outside things like second look around sex crimes, and we have a discourse that says these predators are getting access to youth, these 15-year-old predators.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_00: And again, this is from Baltimore County.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_00: The woman is anonymized, but it's clear that she's a white woman.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_00: So if this person did get a degree of leniency, that kind of proves our argument around the racial bias embedded in the system.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_00: Where if you have the ability as a white child, boys will be boys, you can get leniency, but then that boomerangs against the black kids.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: So do you understand how perverse the system is?
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_00: Where Fox 45 runs a story about one white child returning to school after being convicted of a sex crime, we don't know any of the context of what happened in that incident.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: But they returned to school, so therefore, if a black kid, you know, you got an 18-year-old black kid dating a 16-year-old white girl, that's statutory rape.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: But given the nature of, again, racialized conceptions of black male hypersexuality, those are the types of things that are like more likely to be applied to black boys and young black young men in situations like that.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: Or, you know, black girl, white girl has a sex with a black kid boy, they're accused of, you know, um that thing that's inappropriate in their friend group or their social circles, so then they make an accusation of sexual assault.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_00: These are things that we know happen consistently.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: But none of that's conceptualized when we talk about, oh, it's a it's a child sex predator.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: We have to keep them out of school.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: And what we know about school separation being the school to prison pipeline, putting them on alternative schools, increased exposure to disproportionate contact with police, lock locking off people's socialization and their life trajectories.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_00: Not to say that that can never be called for when you have serious documented incidences of abuse, but what we know is that the blanket assumption that these are predators just looking for more prey in schools, that's going to be disproportionately racially applied to black boys.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: And given it's a Sinclair Media, given the rapacious attacks they place upon people doing violence prevention and used in community just meeting up and hanging out at the harbor, their very presence is a threat in the context of Sinclair media.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: Folks want to have it both ways.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: They want to claim to this is for the victims of crime, this is for the social justice perspective, but then we needed to, they want to go to Sinclair and say, what about the victims?
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: We need to be more tough on crime.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a critical thing, is that we are talking about folks that claim to be part of a coalition at the advancing social justice, but empirically, in the context of, let's say, specifically her, specifically trying to have it both ways, where they're engaged in Sinclair's tough on crime perspective, and their conception of balance is not balanced.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: Maryland is notoriously out of balance when it comes to how it treats youth in its justice system, the most youth charged as adults, the most youth and adult facilities.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: So this claim that, like, oh no, we're balanced, we can't be racist, just belies decade after decade of empirical data on the Maryland justice system, these advocates, these victims' rights, domestic violence advocates have disproportionately been a powerful force in shaping.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_00: So when LeSay says to her people, come to Annapolis, make calls, because that gives us the juice to push these policies, she's right.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: And they've used that juice to produce a criminal legal system in Maryland, which objectively, from the outside, objective analysis has been violently, disproportionately attacking black boys and black young men.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_00: So this is just a call for accountability for that reality.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: And you may believe what you're seeking is malice, you may believe you're part of a coalition for racial justice, but until we can see the proof in the pudding and changing how folks move, where it's not just seeking resources to do victim services, but also really conceptualizing the people you call for incarceration, they can be victims as well.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: Where you understand that calling for just for court commissioners to have the power to continue to incarcerate people produces literally victims of sexual assault because then they are in prison, as in the example, someone in in in pre-child for first-degree murder accusations, that produces the real vulnerability to sexual assault that you claim to be against.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_00: We know that there are woman-on-woman sexual assault cases, men-on-men sexual assault cases, that people in the community are doing grassroots, violence prevention, squashing those beefs.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we can't really trust you when you're clicked up with Sinclair Media who is saying that those people doing that work to stop sexual assault, which you claim to care about, are stealing money.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_00: So this is one of those things where I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming that the piece was designed to be a provocation in the domestic violence victims advocacy space, not because there was a particular vendetta or we wanted to be toxic, but because there needs to be an intervention in domestic violence, victims advocacy, victim service space, because folks are trying to have it both ways.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_00: They are claiming to be part of a larger social justice movement when pushing an agenda and engaging with allies like St.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_00: Clair Media, who are not only not part of that movement, who are viciously specifically attacking the people in that movement, who claim to be doing the exact work of squashing beefs and stopping future victimization of sexual assault that these people claim to want to do as well.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want a different relationship, if you want to not be accused of being in league with people who are racist, then the answer is pretty simple.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: Change the way that you do your job.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_00: Change the way that you advocate.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_00: Actually look at what is driving sexual assault in our community and see that this multi-billion dollar carcereal juggernaut, we have the biggest city budget for policing in the history of the Baltimore police,$700 million,$150 million, which alone goes to the country that produces the company that sells tasers, Axion.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_00: If you're really against sexual violence, you gotta be against that too.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: If you're really against sexual violence, you understand sexual violence happens in prison.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: Those folks come out worse from the trauma or sometimes the literal sexual violence that happens there, and then they push that out into community.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you would support the people that interrupt that replication of the violence inside outside the community, and you would make it so that you'd be very, very cautious about who you advocate be placed in that condition of incarceration, knowing that it itself is a driver of domestic violence and sexual assault.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's just data-driven analysis.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's just the reality.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_00: And what what has happened with this piece is that those domestic violence advocates have a confrontation with reality that's just difficult for them to stomach.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that looking at the decades at this point of women of color feminists who have called for non-carcerial interventions into domestic violence, like community violence intervention, like conflict mediation, like alternative mechanisms of dispute, I think that that would go a long way to beginning to bring a new sense of genuine partnership and genuine allyship into domestic violence victim services space, because we do have good relationships with folks that are trying to change that space, folks like Heather Wernkin and the University of Baltimore, who's worked very hard to look at the difficulty of uh men who were shot, men who are victims of crime, they're seen as culpable in their own victimization, very similar to how women, when they go to the police for domestic violence or sexual assault, they say, you know, where were you worrying?
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_00: Were you culpable in your own victimization?
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_00: Very similar thing happens to black men when they shot.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like, were you selling drugs?
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: Were you outside?
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: Were you part of a criminal conspiracy, which means that you were culpable in your own victimization?
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_00: So we're very clear that there's the possibility for connection allyship there.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_00: But given that the folks who have been dominant in this space have connections and access to millions of dollars for these victim services and are mobilizing multi-billion dollar earned media through Sinclair Media and pushing narratives that are directly hostile to people, including us, in this space, if folks want that allyship, I think the burden is on them to show that they're moving differently so that we can actually begin to deal with all victims of crime and all victims of sexual assault, including black and brown people of all social economic demographics and all genders.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: So again, when they wanted to carve out for sexual assault and the second look bill, lawmakers are getting bombarded with you gotta stand with victims.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_00: You can't let these sex predators back into community.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_00: When they want to, again, push back against bills that will make it so that this someone who has not gone to law school, who cannot investigate solely on an an accusation, can get a police sent to your house to arrest you, when they say that's necessary to support the victims.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_00: Lawmakers hear that over and over and over again.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_00: But specifically from the networks of people that are plugged into their advocacy machine.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: So at LBS, again, we're not a nonprofit, made a very intentional effort to not be nonprofit, so we can build an advocacy machine that could do for something very similar for our people without being beholden to the philanthropic community or other folks that may have issues with calling those folks out very explicitly in ways that if we were a nonprofit, they might not be comfortable with.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_00: So your ability to invest in us, we call for especially sustainers to give us money every month, starting at$10, gives us the uh freedom to be able to advocate unapologetically and to have, when necessary, provocative confrontations with these established ecosystems of advocates in Annapolis that may believe, genuinely, that they're pushing an agenda that is balanced and cognizant of social justice, but from our perspective and the perspective of community and looking at theory and history and empirics as not meeting the moment.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_00: So your support allows us to be politically independent to push back, not just against right-wing Republicans, but you know, these are all not just Democrats, but in many cases, again, feminist, progressive Democrats in their own way, against Senator Love, formerly with the HCLU.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_00: We need to push back against those folks as well.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because when they become impediments to our liberation, we need the freedom to call out people who may even consider themselves allies with us on other issues.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the freedom we have being an independent black political institution.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_00: So go to lbsbaltimore.com slash sustain.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_00: Again, monthly donations give us predictable income so we can use that unrestricted income to be able to directly engage in the political battles needed to represent our community.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_00: So again, like and subscribe to the podcast, like and subscribe to In Search of Black Power, our other podcasts, where we engage in topics about the national political scene.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so much of this is tied to the National Democratic Party saying we went too far with defunding police.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_00: We gotta show tough on crime against the real bad guys, which again, domestic violence, people carrying guns, those people are selling under the bus in the name of 2020 going too far.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_00: But we know that that's going to rebound against specifically targeting our community because of the national politics.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want to know more about that, check out In Search of Black Power or all the other shows on the Black Liberation Media YouTube network and continue to come with us as we give you this analysis on political commentary corner.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_00: Appreciate you all listening and look forward to seeing you next time.