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Media for good trouble.
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Southern politics

Out Loud on the Gate City Front

A report from the frontlines of ATL's 'Pack City Hall' event.

Legacy media and tech titans have been instrumental in promoting and protecting Atlanta's Cop City project. Pack City Hall is just one example of the power of alternative media and grassroots organizers mobilizing to challenge the state narrative.

Cop City protesters face felony charges for distributing flyers

Truthout has obtained Cop City's certificate of insurance as police repress activists and student sit-ins targeting the project's investors.

Three activists who distributed flyers exposing a police officer's role in the murder of Cop City forest defender Manuel "Tortuguita" Esteban Paez Terán are being held on intimidation and stalking charges. Dozens more face domestic terrorism charges.

To Save the Soul of Weelaunee

Lessons from the religious leaders driving Atlanta's faith-based resistance to Cop City.

Cop City or Beloved Community? Meet the interfaith organizers and Forest Defenders mobilizing their congregations in the tradition of Atlanta's Black churches to imagine a world of community care over one of violence and policing.

The Taking of Peachtree-Pine and the Dawning of Cop City

The same rhetoric about safety surrounding Atlanta's increased criminalization of homelessness and closure of the biggest shelter in the Southeast is being used to defend Cop City.

The simultaneity of the increased criminalization of homelessness and the Peachtree-Pine closure engendered the public emergence of Cop City. It's emblematic of Atlanta's cycle of state abandonment that exploits and reproduces the homeless population.

Arts & Soul

How Tina Turner's trauma remains a hip-hop trope—and why we need to abolish it

Fully reckoning with Turner's legacy forces us to confront an uncomfortable fact: her trauma has often been mocked in the pop landscape that she helped create.

In their lyrics, rappers and hip-hop artists have long reduced Tina Turner's abuse to a metaphor for violence, aggression, and dominance. Erasing the nuance of her lived experience stalls our collective understanding of domestic violence and abolition.

Altars for the alter-life

Destiny Hemphill's latest poetry collection, 'motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life' opens portals that transcend capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, and antiblackness.

With Destiny as a guide, we are invited on a walk around the block, into other worlds—the alter-life. More than a collection of poems, 'motherworld' tunes songs of the South, lit up with magnolias, dandelions, rivers, and "testaments/of the cosmic."

Oshun's Suicide, Part II: Eros, Repetition, and Reprieve in Black Popular Culture 

Part VII of The Captive Maternal Roundtable, a forum on Joy James' new book, 'In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities.'

Is abolition a love language? Is care a synonym for violence? In the case of the first Black Bachelor Matt James and establishing the difference between Black erotic and Revolutionary Love, "we are not as far off from Joy James as it may seem."

Oshun's Suicide: Eros, Repetition, and Reprieve in Black Popular Culture 

Part VI of The Captive Maternal Roundtable, a forum on Joy James' new book, 'In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities.'

Building on the concept of agape, Revolutionary Love challenges the erotic logic of racial fetishism. An examination of Black romance and the politics and libidinal economy of antiblackness in popular culture.

Race & Place

My heart is wrapped in concertina wire

Love is a fraught thing in prison, where opening yourself up can be dangerous. Is heartbreak inevitable?

An incarcerated woman recounts her experience of having a relationship with another woman in prison—the highs and lows of their bond, the obstacles they faced from the system and themselves, and the heartbreak of letting go.

How to Build the End of the World

In defense of the Chaotic Protester.

In the Black Radical Tradition, chaos and experimentation are required to challenge the state and build a reality worth defending. In the Cop City movement and beyond, Chaotic Protesters create meaningful resistance by disrupting the state's order.

'Please Keep Playing.' An open letter to my son, Remix

An Atlanta mother contends with the limitations of safety and Cop City's false promises of protection in a letter to her two-year-old son.

"With all the generational paranoia of a Black mother raising her Black son in a militarized police state," one mom's plea for Black playing, collective problem-solving, and joy as the keys to her child's future safety and liberation.

31 Days in Dekalb County Hell

A Personal Account of Atlanta's Carceral Nightmare.

The struggles I heard about and experienced convinced me that the state of Georgia does not run county jails—it runs concentration camps that it calls county jails.

Making State Enemies

Reflections on abolition, carcerality, and our #StopCopCity movement from justice-impacted Black revolutionaries.

Justice-impacted organizers know well the stakes of expanded policing. In this interview, Julian Rose talks with longtime organizer Bridgette Simpson about how Atlanta's persistent carcerality creates state enemies by criminalizing resistance.

Long reads

Essays & Letters

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