As we face tumultuous times in this current health crisis, Critical Resistance (CR) is hosting two webinars next week, one boosting the urgent organizing happening right now, the other being a Portland book talk we had to reschedule two weeks ago due to Covid-19. Despite these trying times, we are glad to be able to connect digitally.
Organizing Against Toxic Imprisonment in the Face of COVID-19
Join by Phone: (646) 558 8656
Meeting ID: 706-313-003#
Join us for a webinar sharing campaign updates, strategies and tools from organizers across the country. Our panel of speakers will discuss efforts organizing for decarceration. We hope they can help inform and inspire local organizing and a strong national movement.
Our friends, family members and loved ones are facing significant risk in jails, prisons and detention centers as states, local governments and communities try to fight the spread of COVID-19.
As abolitionists, we believe that social structures, both formal and informal, need to support people's lives and ability to live. We also believe that policing, imprisonment, and surveillance do not, and cannot, ensure safety or create opportunities for care. As a severe public health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated abolitionist demands and practices as the most common sense and practical steps to ensure that we are as strong and healthy as possible. We are gathering people on this call today to boost local organizing into the national sphere.
Those Who Know Don't Say Book Talk with Garrett Felber, Anoop Mirpuri, and CR PDX
Critical Resistance Portland (CR PDX) invites you to the digital book release event for Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State, featuring author and abolitionist educator Garrett Felber in conversation with Portland educator Anoop Mirpuri and CR PDX's Marcus Carter.
This book explores how state repression laid the groundwork for the modern carceral state and uplifts how Muslim organizing paved the way for the contemporary prison abolition movement. We look forward to a rich discussion with Felber and Mirpuri about the legacy of this resistance and its impact on our contemporary abolitionist movements.
About the Speakers
Anoop Mirpuri is an associate professor of English and affiliate faculty in the Black Studies Department and the School of Gender, Race, and Nations at Portland State University. He has published essays on policing, race, and prison growth in journals such as Cultural Critique, Critical Ethnic Studies, Oregon Humanities, as well as in anthologies including The Punitive Turn: New Approaches to Race and Incarceration and Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports. He is currently writing a book about neoliberalism, mass criminalization, and the construction of the prisoner's voice in U.S. public culture.
Garrett Felber is an assistant professor of History at the University of Mississippi. His research and teaching focus on twentieth-century African American social movements, Black radicalism, and the carceral state. Felber was the lead organizer of the Making and Unmaking Mass Incarceration conference and is the Project Director of the Parchman Oral History Project (POHP), a collaborative oral history, archival, and documentary storytelling project on incarceration in Mississippi. In 2016, Felber co-founded Liberation Literacy, an abolitionist collective inside and outside Oregon prisons. He also spearheaded the Prison Abolition Syllabus, a collaborative reading list published by Black Perspectives which highlighted and contextualized prison strikes in 2016 and 2018. Felber is also the coeditor of the Portable Malcolm X Reader with the late Manning Marable and is currently working on a biography of former political prisoner Martin Sostre.
Marcus Carter is a member of the Critical Resistance Portland chapter and active in the local Care Not Cops campaign organizing with CR PDX.
Our friends, family members and loved ones are facing significant risk in jails, prisons and detention centers as states, local governments and communities try to fight the spread of COVID-19. 
