Terrain Dandridge Release and Support Events

From Free the New Jersey Four

For Immediate Release: Sat June 21, 2008
Contact: Ralowe T. Ampu, media rep (415) 863-3249

Bay Area NJ4 Solidarity
freenj4@yahoo.com
(510) 400-8462
http://freenj4.wordpress.com

Terrain Dandridge, one of the New Jersey 4, released after 2 years of incarceration; first day free will be spent meeting with Angela Davis and the Queer Community in San Francisco

Appeal Update for the case of the New Jersey 4

Terrain Dandridge’s appeal has been successful and she should be released from Albion Correctional Facility as early as this Monday, June 23, 2008! Terrain Dandridge’s case was overturned, all her charges were dropped and her record has been cleared.. Renata Hill is awaiting a new trial of the events concerning the night of August 18, 2006, where her and seven other young black lesbians from Newark, New Jersey faced a homophobic assault in New York’s East Village.

The lawyers, who agreed that there was no strategy for involving grassroots support in the appeals process, have called this, “a miracle”. Terrain’s lawyer has acknowledged that to be granted a new trial is rare; to have charged dropped is unprecedented. The Bay Area Solidarity Committee realizes that regardless of whether we were factored in by lawyers as part of the appeals process, this unprecedented turn of events had little to do with divisive legal strategy, an unjust system’s benevolence or retributive justice. Terrain’s freedom is directly related to an international campaign of radical queers of color and their allies.

While we celebrate this victory, we mourn the divisive legal strategy, which has attempted to pit these friends and lovers against one another and further complicate those whose appeals are yet to be heard. Despite our great news, we must ensure that no one is left– not Venice, not Renata, not Patreese– to endure the horror of the prison industrial complex.

As a result of sexist, homophobic, and racist stereotypes held by law enforcement agents and institutions, the women later known as the New Jersey 4 were deemed to be a “lesbian wolfpack gang”, who were organizing to terrorize straight men. Our stories are so often retold with a complete reversal of who is being harmed and who is doing the harming. The impacts of allowing Dwayne Buckle to be popularly depicted in the media and during the court proceedings as the “victim” fails to identify how his desire to dominate women (and their spaces) only leads to the violence that resulted. On a broader social level, such negligent media reporting, police investigation, and courtroom bias only promises to generate more of these same violent experiences which target women and queers. The New Jersey 4, like so many of us, are survivors of a system which incorrectly identifies the root causes of violence and crime, only to create conditions for mass incarceration and displacement of queers, especially those queers, like the 4, who are already vulnerable to criminalization because of their race or class identity.

While, Monday, June 23rd marks Terrain’s long awaited release date from Albion Correctional Facility, where she has been caged for six hundred seventy three days of her life because of a wrongful prsecution and conviction, we must remember Terrain still unjustly spent two years of her young life in prison, which cannot be returned to her. Chenese Loyal, Lania Daniels, and Khamysha Coates still have felony charges that prevent them from getting jobs, registering for housing and other unjust discrimination. Renata is still behind bars awaiting a new trial. Venice, sentenced to 5 years and Patreese, sentenced to 11 years, remain incarcerated, awaiting appeals to be heard in the fall. , The 3 women will continue to navigate the legal system until the day comes when their stories will finally be heard without the racist homophobic sexist bias that denied them a fair trial to begin with.

Terrain Dandridge and her mother, Kimma Walker are due to arrive to the bay area on Tuesday June 24th, 2008 to meet with Angela Davis and the Queer community at the San Francisco Women’s Building. This public event is scheduled for Tuesday, June 24th, 7-9 pm, during PRIDE week in order to unravel the experiences of violence that Queer people of color face and how to prepare ourselves and our communities in the face of police harrassment, criminalization and mass incarceration.

The Bay Area Solidarity Committee is dedicated to promoting self-defense of our bodies to all forms of violence! We especially call on Queer People of Color to come to the fore to exposes the lesser talked about queer experience and it’s relationship to criminalization, policing, harsher sentencing, incarceration and state assault. This PRIDE week, we intend to remind all oppressed communities of the way racism and sexism set up predictably violent outcomes and to understand that this too is part of the Queer struggle.

The local organizing effort, broadly made up of Lesbians, Transgender, Gay, Two-Spirit, and multi-generational Queers, also encourages our peers to name and articulate the elements in the Criminal Justice System that permit homophobic and transphobic violence to be promoted and carried out on the community level. Please join us in this growing resistance movement of trans/queer communities of color!

co sponsors of the event include: Critical Resistance, LAGAI-queer insurrection, QUIT!-Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism, SF Women Against Rape, OLOC, Radical Women, and Gay Shame SF.

See also Support NJ4 Events.

Link Love: Trying Not To Get Too Angry Addition

It’s sad that this has to be done, but Gina from What About Our Daughters has started a Michelle Obama Watch blog.

R. Kelly is acquitted.

As the verdicts were being read on Friday, the singer started crying and whispering “Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus,” over and over again, his lawyers said.

Jesus had nothing to do with it, asshole.

Now that Sen. Clinton is out of the race, black folk get to be women too!. Added bonus, “those over-sensitive people of color can’t call us racists!” (I learned something new today. Apparently, if no Republican has every called you a racist, then you aren’t a racist.) [Hat Tip: Ilyka]

Can you say intersectionality fail?

But wait, I thought you didn’t see color?

Yesterday marked the 45th anniversary of Medgar Evers assasination.

Sigh

My feed reader is dwindling down to next to nothing.

I think the point where I went fuck it , is when a law student, a couple writers, and a professor basically endorsed a book and MISSED in reading something they were ATTACHING their names to .

Racist comics, about MY PEOPLE. Yeah MY PEOPLE, being KILLED and destroyed to save a white man and give a white woman the “courage” she so desperately desires .

And people fell over themselves to excuse them . Cause they’re learning

You know what , fuck off

Oh Mr. Clinton, Won’t You Please STFU?

Via Shark-Fu:

CNN Political Ticker. Bill Clinton: Obama camp ‘played the race card on me

The former president had been asked whether his remarks comparing Obama’s strong showing in South Carolina to that of Jesse Jackson in 1988 had been a mistake given their impact on his wife Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “No, I think that they played the race card on me,” said Clinton, “and we now know from memos from the campaign and everything that they planned to do it all along.”

I suppose you’re feeling a tad emboldened by your buddy, that paragon of the War on Folks of Color for Profit ™ , Bob Johnson. Allow me to clue you in to something: anyone with a brain knows that he’s a fool. You should also know that folks are getting tired of the “black folks are voting for Obama because he’s black” meme. You see, we are actually capable of more complex thoughts than “That one look like me! Me votey!”

That said, get the hell outta here with this race card bullshit. The fact is that YOU tried (and are still trying) to portray Barack Obama as the “black candidate,” and therefore not the American (no-hyphen) candidate. That you got called out on it is your own damn fault. That you pissed off a substantial black electorate that was willing to give Sen. Clinton a chance is YOUR OWN damn fault.

Now, I yield the floor to Shark-Fu:

I do not have a race card.

I was not issued one at birth with instructions on how and when to play it.

When I call a person out for an ig’nant race-baiting comment that action is not ‘playing the race card’…it’s calling a person out for an ig’nant race-baiting comment.

If that person is uncomfortable with that shit a bitch suggests that they get in touch with their inner asshole, because this bitch has had enough of motherfuckers whining and keening about that mythical race card every time they get corrected for deliberate verbal malfunctions designed to rouse prejudices they themselves have spent a lifetime concealing behind a mask of tolerance.

Thank you, Shark-Fu. That was very well said.

Shark-Fu’s got the quote of the day as well:

I am the wage that should be equal…the privacy that ought to be honored…the violence that will not be tolerated…the hair you’d better not touch…the reality that debunks the stereotype…the fierceness that keeps ig’nant motherfuckers awake at night…the anger that will not be ignored and the worthiness that will not be denied.