RtR Community,

In case you’re wondering, no I will not be releasing statements every day. The Trump Administration is notorious for fire hosing us with oppressive policies and outrageous statements so we’re in a constant state of reaction and disillusionment. Trump freezing all civil rights cases, passing the Laken Riley Act and emboldening ICE to terrorize people at schools, churches and hospitals, are just a few of the horrific things that have come out of the first days of the administration, with many more to come.

Playing whack-a-mole with (ultimately) virtue signaling statements is not the answer. There are organizations and individuals doing real work to not just resist these measures, but build spaces and systems that protect and empower communities under attack. 

RtR will continue to point our audience to places where the work is happening and encourage you to join us in the work we’re doing in Lake Oswego and with our partners throughout Clackamas County. If you’re interested in getting your hands dirty with us, join our direct engagement and/or research and data collection teams. If you’re a student interested in connecting with other students doing this work, join the Youth Empowerment Coalition. You can sign up for any of the three committees here. The Clackamas County Equity Coalition is always looking for more organizers ready to roll up their sleeves. Beyond our day to day activities, we are sharing and encouraging community members to tap in with groups doing necessary justice work throughout the PDX Metro Area and Oregon on the @respond_to_racism IG page just about every day.

There’s no shortage of opportunities to get involved. There’s also no shortcut to getting involved. If you’ve been able to tune out the alarm bells until today, that’s okay. But understand, we’re in the thick of it now (and frankly, have been for some time). If you’re looking for some places to get started, see the calls to action from the Coalition of Communities of Color “Cultivating Belonging in Clackamas County” report and join us at next week’s CCEC quarterly meeting at Mary’s Woods at 5:30pm. 

We look forward to building with you!

In solidarity,

Bruce Poinsette 

“I realized that regardless of the tragedy, regardless of the grief, regardless of the monstrous challenge, Some of Us Have Not Died. Some of us did not die… and what shall We do, We Who Did Not Die?”

images from @blackwomenradicals on Instagram, displaying 1968 protests against a Columbia-proposed, gentrifying bid for a gym in Morningside Park (dubbed "gym crow" by students and Harlem residents). Protests coincided with student pressure for the administration to divest from and denounce the Vietnam War (several professors and affiliates worked with US military weapons dealers), and culminated in the occupation of several buildings. 

This week, university students around the country made headlines as they took defiant stances against their institutions in support of ending the genocide on Gaza. There is much to be said about the activism of Columbia students and the history of encampments in general, but as a Columbia University student who left because of my disabilities, I am keenly aware of how we are leaving disabled people behind in our organizing for liberation.

Of course, I am enraged by institutions for not acting in the empathetic interests of true education and social advancement, but as someone with experience with marginalization (I’m a poor disabled asian trans dyke), it’s safe to say these colonial institutions were never what I had the most faith in. 

I am angry, too, with the students of Columbia University and those reporting on their “occupation,” as there’s been a myopic, US-centered self-interested, anti-globalist shift in our conversations and a concerning lack of access in our organizing. 

Though actual student protestors at Columbia have released clear and necessary statements against the co-optation of the movement for Palestinian liberation, I feel it necessary to explain my simultaneous disappointment in the profound display of “solidarity” made by students, faculty, and allies. Like many terms of the movement from “mutual aid” to “intersectionality,” the solidarity we are witnessing, I believe, has the potential to be disingenuous, misleading, and even deceptive. 

My current disappointment stems, in part, with the faculty, students, speakers, and panelists who have boycotted and protested as “allies to Columbia students.” To ally oneself with privileged students who receive one of the most financially impressive and elitist educations in the world, is already red flag number one. My initial questions about the Columbia encampment grew to concern when I saw similar ones pop up at Yale and other selective schools in reaction to the CU administration’s collaborating with the NYPD and FBI to remove forcefully arrest and abuse their own students, as opposed to, you know, actual Gazan people, and indigenous people in general. This, of course, is all in the same week that we learned of hundreds of bodies in mass graves at Al Nasser hospital in Khan Younis. Bodies were found in horrific displays of the IDF’s brutality, with men, women, and children being treated for wounds found mutilated, beheaded, and even with organs missing. Recent coverage in Gaza mirrors that of the uncovering of mass graves of thousands of Indigenous children, who often died due to malnourishment, and physical and sexual abuse at boarding schools (forced-assimilation colonial camps) in both the U.S. and Canada. 

Obviously, it’s important to take a stance against the Columbia administration for mobilizing the NYPD en-masse to arrest hundreds of students. But to stop there is to be missing the point of all the “work” we were supposed to have been doing since whenever we last woke up. To anyone who has been paying attention, Columbia’s allegiance with the police makes perfect sense. Columbia is the largest landowner in New York (they avoid paying almost $180 million in taxes every year while they poach and gentrify Harlem, Manhattanville, and Washington Heights). Like most if not all universities today, they are ultimately guided by money and capital, so their reluctance to give up lucrative, forthcoming ethnic cleansing investments through the Tel Aviv Center, Dual Degree Programs, and other cash crops, can only possibly be rescued by crying “terrorist!” on their own students. What’s most disappointing is the seemingly new and confusing circumstances my peers, teachers, and admin claim to be facing, despite me being the one who was too crazy to be a full-time student, and was subsequently forced to leave school in October. Did we all forget “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” or was that just a reading assignment y’all got chatGPT to write for you? (Lest us not forget the blatant exploitation and traumatization of Kenyan workers that went into creating chatGPT’s software, but I digress.)

So let’s rewind. In my fall term of my sophomore year, at the beginning of October 2023, my partner and I were forced to leave Columbia University due to medical reasons and the school’s inability to accommodate our needs. After realizing we were putting our bodies through unimaginable trauma from neglecting our invisible disabilities, and then experiencing massive periods of burnout from academic stress, our needs could no longer be ignored. When we initially confronted our friends about changes in our lifestyle to support sensory, mobility, and learning needs, they thought that we demanded “too much change” from the school, and even from them. This was our last straw, and our first big push to reject the internalized ableism and White Supremacy Culture contributing to their responses. So we left.

In this scenario, I feel it necessary to call out those I once called my “peers,” alongside those who up until now have been silent about the calculated destruction of the Gazan people, but suddenly speak out against… what exactly? Is it that they’re surprised the institutions built by enslaved black people, who founded research that medicalized the madnesses of poor, queer, disabled, femme bodies of color, and created the most world-destroying nuclear technologies of human existence, those institutions are the ones *checks notes* criminalizing students? Well, I guess the folks who voted for the “Leopards eating peoples’ faces off” party are shocked to find their representatives are Leopards eating peoples’ faces off. 

Nevertheless, I hope my criticisms are understood from a place of good faith. After all, we are our actions, and thus are ever changing. I hope for the better. My remaining friends at Barnard have told me of their beautiful experiences at the encampment and how hopeful they are for the learning and community displayed there. Of course, I’m writing this from a thousand miles away, where all I have is a screen to tell me, somewhere, it’s real. And it’s true. Something is coming. 

I’ve seen videos of students rushing in to tarp and umbrella each other in the night as rainfall endures and the encampment floods. Circles of songs and drums on the lawns. Poem readings and discussions. Overtaking admittance week and encouraging admitted students to participate in the encampments events and speaking engagements. This is a time of learning and organizing in the face of grave adversity among largely first-gen, low-income BIPOC students suspended, evicted, and unhoused by their school, given only 15 minutes to collect their stuff, and then banned from campus, dorms, buildings, classrooms, and even dining halls. The stream of love, respect, and student/teacher/alumni fostering is courageous, if not incredibly brave. The CU encampment has adopted the language of “we take care of us” to reject the university’s total denial of responsibility over barely-minted adults.

I’m simultaneously frustrated, envious, and inspired to see Columbia students’ ongoing encampment, along with a revitalizing outpour of community support, immense disturbances to neoliberal desires for “business as usual,” and the ripple-effect of recognition felt nationwide and globally. Finally, the world is not silent! (But is the spotlight so good?)

I’m fighting the urge to look to my not-so-unique circumstance for “what if”s. I am envious and inspired because I wonder what possibilities there could be, had I not listened to my body and stayed. If I was physically able to be there: contribute, sit, volunteer, listen, and mourn in community. To get involved in campus organizing as I had intended before being rushed home for months of prolonged (and ongoing) isolation. If I was physically able to expose myself to the sensory overload of putting my body on the line, through music and sirens and noise, through crowds and crowds of masked (and many unmasked people). If I was financially able to have stayed as a part-time student, instead of jumping ship entirely. With the rush of what-if’s, they often lead to other more unsolvable, untenable questions. What if I had received the gender affirming care I was promised from Columbia’s health plan, instead of months of delays from understaffed healthcare professionals serving over 20k students? What if I could have attended classes virtually when my panic attacks and dissociation were so violent I couldn’t leave my dorm? The questions lead nowhere, except back to pitying my own displacement rather than recognizing the shared feelings of truncated time with the students of Gaza, the students of Sudan, of Congo, of Tigray. Anywhere kids are grown by the time they lose a loved one or a limb. Until I recognize that’s what our oppression is meant to do—isolate and fearmonger, police, compete, disable—I cannot reject that pedagogy. I am thankful for my disabling because it reminds me of my shared humanity, my smallness, and my very big feelings. 

Nevertheless, what am I supposed to feel as someone forced out of this very community, both by ableist social support and institutional demands for optimization, productivity, and, without fail, academic excellence? What am I supposed to feel as I see videos across social media of known-predators, white men with indie sleaze mustaches who are proud of their diverse music tastes (and friend groups), singing along on their “occupied” pristine campus lawns to anti-indigenous anthems like “This Land Is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie? (I can’t hear this song without thinking of when Jennifer Lopez performed it for Joe Biden’s Inauguration. If you’re not a fan of American Nationalism, you’ve been warned.) As mentioned, statements have been made by key Pro-Palestinian groups on campus, like SJP, about the denouncement of these virtue signaling individuals, yet where, if any, is the centering of the indigenous Lenape People alongside the indigenous Gazans they divest for? How, especially, can we use social media as a tool for strategizing and organizing, a tactic long-used by disabled and house-bound individuals, while simultaneously making participation in the movement inaccessible unless we can individually show up?

Though my issues with Columbia are valid and not by any means unique, I am tired because, I know, as a disabled person with mobility and sensory needs, I likely would be pushed out or invisibilized by this very moment. And, as you may recall, disability is an oppression that can occur at any time, so every issue is a disability issue. Thus, a movement that leaves us behind can never truly be liberatory.

May we learn from one another in this time of momentum, and may all walls fall. 

from Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, 1968
"Columbia University, as an institution owned and run by the same interests that run corporate America, can never support an education directed to the overthrow of those interests. A revolutionary movement wishing to educate revolutionaries can not come to terms with Columbia. Ultimately its goal must be to destroy Columbia.

References/recommendations for doing more research and staying updated:

• Instagram: there are MANY on-the-ground activists, journalists, organizers, writers, artists, and community members but here are just a handful who have recently posted about college encampments for Gaza, abolition, police encounters, and how to support Palestinian liberation.
  • @sjp.columbia
  • @cunygse
  • @anthony.depice
  • @comradecami
  • @pal_actionus
  • @ykreborn
  • @beyonkz
• Essays:
  • Ismatu Gwendolyn’s “to Columbia’s undergraduates (and students everywhere): HOLD THE LINE.”
• Books:
  • I highly recommend checking out Verso’s Reading List for Free Palestine!

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing

Of the numerous profound wisdoms Mic Crenshaw shared with us at our last meeting, one thing he said early in the night stuck with me as a survivor of student activism and Lake Oswego’s racial gaslighting. “My best friends and I were doing the work when we were teenagers not because adults told us to, not because somebody invited us to an event or a meeting,” he says frankly, “but because we had to face the immediate threat to our existence that was in our community.” I think of the students today and how isolated they must feel after witnessing literally incomprehensible amounts of death genocide on their phones, only to be met with silence in the “real world.” What kind of future are we envisioning for our kids if we’re unwilling to even take accountability for creating both the silence and the genocide in the first place?

Censorship of student voice and student power is one of the most frequent examples of harm towards students today. As it goes, it’s easy to tell young people “I know more than you, so I won’t even promote your voice.” Considering “politics” as an isolated incident rather than a dialogue with which we are constantly using is immensely dangerous. It makes one believe there is a “before” and “after” to history, to violence. There is only now and then. And until then we still have time. As long as we’re still breathing, we always have a chance, if not a responsibility to do better.

After publishing a student magazine COLOR on our experience as people of color, Serena Lum, Barbara Chen and I experienced an outpour of support from peers, but ambivalence from administrators. We wrote the paper in the summer before our senior year as our attempt at verbalizing our racist encounters as Asian students in Lake Oswego and at showing solidarity for the Black Lives Matter Movement following its resurgence in mid-2020 due to public outcry over police-sanctioned murders. As Chen remembers in her recent Life After The Bubble interview, our then-Principal Rollin Dickinson likened us to “gangsters in pubs” for using specific radical rhetoric such as “ACAB” (spelling “All Cops Are Bastards”). He considered it so inappropriate that he was unwilling to mention our paper in his weekly newsletter, let alone amplify our voices and denounce racism in our schools by sharing any of our sentiments or mesages. He explained at one point that he was uncomfortable with the language since white supremacist skinheads in the UK in the ‘90s also adopted that language, but he failed to address the concerns of actual people of color using “ACAB” for their outcries against police brutality. 

One problem activists find themselves facing too often is semantics distracting from accomplishing anything–whether that means helping those who are most vulnerable, or criticizing those responsible for their subjugation. It’s hard enough when your peers barely even believe you about the racism, ableism, homophobia, etc. you experience, but to have administrators and leaders who you look up to dismiss you for something as superficial (and classist!) as rhetoric, it’s another layer of disbelief and loss. 

What Cathy Park Hong describes as “Minor Feelings” is the constant bombardment of racial microaggressions and following disbelief: “Did you just say that to me?” “Is this really happening?” “Are you not who I thought you were?”. Park Hong refers to them as “emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.” Park Hong addresses the frequent demand of people of color to put aside their minor feelings in favor of white comfort, white privilege, and “white living,” as Claudia Rankine describes. Minor Feelings happen all the time. It’s how I felt when Rollin Dickinson made those comments about our magazine. When the Lake Oswego Library has carceral policies that allow them to remove unhoused people (who are disproportionately BIPOC), or whoever is not deemed respectable enough to be in a public space. It’s what I experienced while watching the Lakeridge HS performance of Little Shop of Horrors this past fall. Sitting there in all my senseless liberal reboot disbelief, asking why a deeply racialized story of poor Jewish and Black people on Skid Row was suddenly so whitewashed. Even small situational moments of racism in the dialogue were erased, and all the previously BIPOC characters were ultimately played by white kids—yet they elected to keep the misogyny and abuse present in the original show? 

Though now I have language to describe these feelings, to see these intertextual connections, and I’m older, I can’t help but be angry. Nobody among friends, teachers, admin, or even my family protected me from the gaslighting capabilities of white supremacy! Nobody told me that it’s okay to be angry, spiteful, and even downright rageful at these oversights and injustices, big and small. Racism is inhumane. All oppression is. It’s okay to want to say “fuck you” to Rollin Dickinson, to all the people who either directly or indirectly failed me. It’s okay to be disappointed in their passivity, just as it’s okay to forgive them even if they don’t deserve it. We are not powerless to these not-so-minor feelings, and harnessing them just may be the key to restoring our truth, inner wisdom, and humanity.

There’s a beautiful thing happening on my Instagram feed right now. Though we are facing over 130 days of aggression in the genocide against Palestinians, over 20 days of state-wide blackout in Sudan, among many other global atrocities from Congo to Rwanda to Yemen, there is so much hope. Activists have addressed these current manifestations of colonization and the massive loss of humanity from those perpetuating harm by using the term “soul loss.” A translation of a spiritual phenomena believed in by Indigenous circles around the world, soul loss is meant to encapsulate the harm inflicted upon an individual after carrying out dehumanizing acts such as settler colonialism, racism, and oppression in all forms. This includes passivity or silence, such as seeking individualist relief from the discomfort that awakening and awareness brings. The account @breadxbutta on Instagram shared a post about the presence of Susto: 

In latinx cultures we use this term to describe a traumatic experience that ‘changed’ someone. This traumatic event does not even have to be one that was personally experienced by you. You could have Susto from being told about a happening, you could have been close enough in proximity to it, or in a lot of our situations, have seen images or videos of them. When we have susto, we are somatically trapping the experience in our bodies and losing a piece of our soul in that moment. In curanderismo and shamanism, this is called soul loss. We go through a traumatic experience or recount and can lose a piece of ourselves in that moment. This susto/ soul loss causes us to have weak energetic boundaries and even leaky boundaries. This leaves us more vulnerable to losing even more energy and being attacked on spiritual, mental, emotional and physical levels. Sickness can also begin to occur over time if we leave our soul scattered and in its place, hold grief/pain/trauma.

By inflicting violence, consciously or unconsciously, we lose empathy, intelligence, reasoning, hope, and even our souls. There is a misconception that there’s only power in oppressing others, but there is nothing human, nothing natural, about colonization, white supremacy, and even capitalism. Through recognizing soul loss, we can begin to repair the damage already done on us as global citizens. By bearing witness, we can heal ourselves and others. It is through community that we begin to process the trauma we’ve witnessed (and/or experienced) and can take accountability to prevent (and/or atone) for harming others. 

No one is going to apologize for not protecting me or my peers. No adult has, and I don’t expect them to. As we continue to talk about ending genocide in Gaza, Aaron Bushnell, Nex Benedict, dreams of liberation, and the billions of other stories out there who need our eyes, our hearts, and our souls, may we have the strength to listen. And the compassion to apologize when we are called upon.