Ep. 26 - Coalition-building & #NoCopAcademy ft. Monica Trinidad & Debbie Southorn

GUESTS
Monica Trinidad is a visual artist and organizer, born and raised
on the southeast side of Chicago. She is a co-founder of For the
People Artists Collective, a radical squad of Black artists and
artists of color in Chicago who create art for Chicago's most
powerful justice movements. Monica creates artwork to cultivate
the practice of hope and to spark imagination in both organizers
immersed in the day-to-day spadework of movement building and in
every resident in Chicago. Her work is currently in permanent
collection at DuSable Museum of African American History. You can
listen to her every week on the Lit Review podcast, a literary
podcast for the movement, with her co-host Page May, founder of
Assata’s Daughters.


Debbie Southorn is a queer abolitionist who works for the
American Friends Service Committee in Chicago, where she supports
community-based efforts to end police violence, surveillance and
militarism. She’s also a founding member of the People’s Response
Team, and serves on the National Committee of the War Resisters
League.


From
#NoCopAcademy: “#NoCopAcademy
is a grassroots campaign launched by Assata’s Daughters, Black
Lives Matter - Chicago, People’s Response Team, For The People
Artists Collective, and 100+ grassroots organizations to mobilize
against Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plans to spend $95 million for a
massive training center for Chicago Police in West Garfield Park
on the city’s West Side. The city’s quiet unveiling suggests they
are trying to avoid public scrutiny of this latest spending
scheme, but we will not be robbed of our resources quietly. We
refuse any expansion of policing in Chicago, and demand
accountability for decades of violence. We will fight for funding
for our communities, and support each other in building genuine
community safety in the face of escalating attacks.”


OVERVIEW
As two adult lead organizers in #NoCopAcademy, Monica and Debbie
outline their journeys into activism, noting how they both cut
their teeth in organizing in the 2000s in resistance to the Iraq
War. The group discusses Chicago’s history of radical organizing
from the Rainbow Coalition in the 1960s, to We Charge Genocide in
2014, to Reparations Now and Justice 4 LaQuan. BrownTown and
guests dissect what the larger Invest/Divest framework means in
terms of #NoCopAcademy as positioned against reformist arguments
of piecemeal solutions to systemic problems. Recorded about a
month after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that he would
not run for a third term in February 2019, BrownTown listens to
Monica and Debbie’s reaction to the newst, organizers’
relationship with his administration, and the (presumed)
effectiveness of public shaming people in power. With
coalition-building at the helm, Monica and Debbie are clear to
describe #NoCopAcademy as a campaign first-and-foremost with a
coalition built around it, rather than a coalition taking on
several campaigns over its tenure (like R3 Coalition Chicago).
Coalition work is difficult but, at times, necessary. Debbie
elaborates, giving a nod to musician, activist, and Black
Feminist Bernice Johnson Reagon’s reflections on the subject, as
well as noting some of the endorsing organizations who throw down
for #NoCopAcademy through their own unique perspective,
experience, and analysis (noted: i2i in the Lunar New Year
parade, SURJ, etc.). Last but certainly not least, the group
takes their hats of to the youth who consistently spearhead the
campaign, and look forward to the next iteration of the fight,
the upcoming municipal election season, and what it means for the
future of Chicago.


Find out more about the campaign at
NoCopAcademy.com and @NoCopAcademy
on Twitter,
Instagram, and
Facebook.


--


Follow Monica on Twitter, Instagram (personal / work), and
Facebook. Learn more about her and buy her work at
MonicaTrinidad.com.


Follow Debbie on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and learn more
about her work with American Friends Service Committee.


--


CREDITS: Intro song Cops Shot the Kid by
NAS. Outro music by Fiendsh. Audio engineered by Genta Tamashiro.
Episode photo by David of BrownTown.


--


Bourbon ’n BrownTown
Facebook | Twitter |
Instagram | Site |
Patreon


SoapBox Productions and Organizing, 501(c)3
Facebook | Twitter |
Instagram | Site |
Support