Pennsylvania State Sen. Amanda Capalletti recently announced her intention to propose legislation that would allow people convicted of crimes related to resisting their own abuse to ask for shorter sentences. The legislation also enables those already serving long sentences for crimes substantially related to their experiences of violence to seek resentencing. The law is meant to offer hope…
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We are living through a coordinated assault on knowledge. In a moment when Big Tech is waging war on complex thought, a fascist government is targeting higher education, and the media landscape is being demolished by the same oligarchs driving this era of smash-and-grab politics, libraries are under-appreciated outposts of struggle, sharing and survival. They are sites of refuge…
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After two National Guard soldiers were shot in Washington, D.C. last week, several U.S. pundits and politicians were quick with their descriptions of the alleged attacker. They erroneously assumed that he brought his “culture” or “society” to the United States. “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies… At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the…
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When I was a child, I used to naively invert the colors of the Palestinian flag — green in the place of red, red where black should be, and black replacing the green. Back then, I didn’t realize that I was imagining an entirely different country: Sudan. Little did I know that one day both of us would be dragged into the same campaign of elimination, exposed to the same colonial ideologies…
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I looked at the slave shackles in the exhibit. My ancestors wore chains like this one. A bone-deep sorrow hit. When I researched my family history, names began to vanish as I traced it to Indigenous and African slavery. Here, right in front of me was material proof of the horror they survived. What is my responsibility to them? The Slavery and Freedom exhibit at the National Museum of African…
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Women are the fastest growing incarcerated population in the United States. The female incarceration rate has ballooned by more than 700% since 1980 — 172,700 women and girls were in jail or prison in 2023. A quarter of these (46,300) are confined because they were either refused bail or cannot afford it, rather than because they were found guilty of a crime. Over 14,000 are awaiting trial for…
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