Peaceful protesting is a vital part of the government that allows individuals opinions and experiences to be heard and integrated into policies. Shoko Kambara and I created this page to lend our voices to a few of them. Stay tuned for the other half of the world later in the week!
Upper row left: Black Lives Matter & LGBTQIA Pride sign. From the start, the founders of Black Lives Matter have always put LGBTQ voices at the center of the conversation. The movement was founded by three Black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, two of whom identify as queer.
By design, the movement they started in 2013 has remained organic, grassroots, and diffuse. Since then, many of the largest Black Lives Matter protests have been fueled by the violence against Black men, including Mike Brown and Eric Garner in 2015, and now George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.
But it's not only straight, cisgender Black men who are dying at the hands of police. Last month, a Black transgender man, Tony McDade, 38, was shot and killed by police in Tallahassee. On June 9, two Black transgender women, Riah Milton and Dominique "Rem'mie" Fells, also were killed in separate acts of violence, their killings believed to be the 13th and 14th of transgender or gender-non-conforming people this year, according to the Human Rights Coalition.
In 2019, Layleen Polanco, a trans-Latina woman who was an active member of New York’s Ballroom community, died while in solitary confinement at Rikers Island jail.
Upper row middle: on August 23, 2020, Jacob S. Blake, a 29-year-old African American man, was shot and seriously injured by police officer Rusten Sheskey in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Sheskey shot at Blake's back seven times during an arrest, with four of the shots hitting Blake. He was shot when he opened the driver's door to his SUV and leaned in. Unlike so many of the people who have become grim symbols for a movement, Mr. Blake survived and has begun to tell his own story.
“Your life — and not only just your life, your legs, something that you need to move around and move forward in life — could be taken from you like this, man,” Mr. Blake says from his hospital bed, snapping his fingers for emphasis, in a video released over the weekend. In the video, he speaks publicly for the first time about what happened to him. His injuries are severe, and his family says he was paralyzed from the waist down in the shooting last month.
“Every 24 hours, it’s pain — it’s nothing but pain,” Mr. Blake says. “It hurts to breathe; it hurts to sleep. It hurts to move from side to side. It hurts to eat.”
For demonstrators seeking broad changes to American policing, the prospect of Mr. Blake’s presenting the public with a personal voice to his experience was encouraging.
“My son is gone,” said Monique West, whose 18-year-old son, Ty’Rese West, was shot and killed in 2019 by a police officer in Racine County, not far from Kenosha. “He’s not here to tell nothing. There are only two stories — either the officer or the person that’s gone.”
Upper row right: on March 23 Joe Prude, called 911 seeking help for his brother Daniel Prude's unusual behavior in Rochester NY. He had been taken to a hospital for a mental health evaluation earlier that night but released after a few hours. Daniel died after police found him running naked in a street, put a hood over his head to stop him from spitting, then held him down for about two minutes until he stopped breathing. He died a week later after he was taken off life support.
His death sparked outrage after his relatives on Wednesday released police body camera video and written reports they obtained through a public records request.
Seven police officers were suspended Thursday, and state Attorney General Letitia James said Saturday she would form a grand jury and conduct an "exhaustive investigation” into Prude's death.
Police union officials have said the officers were following their training.
Protesters have demanded police accountability and legislation to change how authorities respond to mental health emergencies
Bottom row left Brazilian women have taken to the streets to protect a 10-year-old child who was being persecuted by religious extremists for trying to legally undergo an abortion after being raped.
The child told police she had been abused by her uncle since age six and had stayed silent out of fear. When the girl reached the hospital where the termination was to be performed on Sunday afternoon, it’s entrance had been occupied by far-right anti-abortion activists and politicians who were filmed hurling abuse at hospital staff and the child, and trying to stop them entering.
“When you see a 10-year-old girl being criminalized for terminating a pregnancy resulting from rape and because her life is in danger, it really gives you a sense of how religious fundamentalism is advancing in our country,” said Elisa Aníbal, a Recife-based feminist campaigner.
Bottom row middle: The Mapuche are a group of indigenous inhabitants of present-day south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina, including parts of present-day Patagonia. The native Mapuche population, most of whom live in poverty, have been in conflict with authorities since the Spanish conquistadors forced them into Araucanía in the late 19th century after some 300 years of conflict. Protestors demands revolve around three themes: jurisdictional autonomy, the return of ancestral lands, and cultural identity.
Bottom row right: Black Lives matter - political and social movement advocating for non-violent protest against incidents of police brutality and all racially motivated violence against black people and systemic racism.