Have a Beautiful Weekend.

My thoughts too :(

I like Athleta swim bottoms… I haven’t checked the site this year, but in the past you could search by amt of coverage!

The artist did say that she was intentionally referencing Klimt’s Golden Phase. So beautiful.

Age is hard to guess – especially in edited photos. Someone last year said I look like I could be in high school, and … I’m in my early 40s.

Julie, I had the same reaction to those photos.

Why can’t a young woman be shown modeling swimsuits? I’m confused. I don’t find these inappropriate or to exploit her in any way. Per the post, the collection, “Italiana, is a dip into a teenager’s 1990s summer spent on the beach”.

The swim suit spread had a “Lolita” feel to me, don’t know why, it just did. I yearn for the day that grown woman don’t hold that type of body as the ideal.

Sasha – is it the terminology or the concept that makes it frightening?

Holding the police accountable didn’t seem to work very well though, did it?

I don’t agree with disbanding or completely defunding the police, but if cuts can be made and money reallocated to things like school and social work, hopefully there will be long term benefits. If not, budgeting will swing back the other way I’m sure. What has been happening recently is obviously not working however.

Please research what is meant by “defund the police”, I don’t think you understand the concept.

Because radical reform is necessary, radical reform rarely (never) comes from within powerful systems led by powerful people who befit from the corrupt system they exist within, and reform is often accomplished by staying again from the ground up, “defunding” the police is absolutely necessary. Read about the history of EMS and how change was brought about with that system for a good analogy.

The majority of activists who are working under the banner of “defund the police” have been working towards this for years. They didn’t just come up with it recently. I suggest you look up Mariame Kaba. What is new is the sheer numbers of people who are realizing that we’ve tried and tried to hold police accountable and they refuse to be held accountable.

Thank you for this rec. Will listen.

yeah, I looked at that link like “well, the only reason the bathing suits look good is because they’re on a very specific type of woman…..”

I live alone and long for the day when I can hug someone again. This comment lifted my spirits. Hope you are having a wonderful time living a normal life again, Agnes!

beautiful comment and something to look forward to!

So happy to see this comment here. Thank you for being a dispatcher… the first voice the helpless and frantic caller hears. The voice of hope and help. And in this case, a voice of REASON regarding the ridiculousness of “defunding the police”.

The problems of brutality currently within our police departments are so deeply engrained that a simple “restructure” won’t do, an the entire thing has to be rebuilt. It can be done and it is successful. Just look at Camden, NJ. They had some of the highest crime rates for a city their size along with problems of police violence. In 2014 the City defunded their police department and worked with county authorities to have a new force take over. It has meant firing ALL officers and requiring retraining & reinterviewing for any that want to join the new force. They now require body cams on all officers, de-escalation training, a community-focus, and more. There are more officers on the ground than before, less than half the rate of homicides, and a 95% reduction in complaints of police brutality.

Defunding and rebuilding from the ashes works.

Rachel, thank you for sharing an alternative perspective. We definitely don’t want long 911 hold times, but I have to say, if this country values quick response times, then we can find a way to fund it. We are a wealthy country, and we have yet to truly tap into the wealth of the 1%. As for #defundthepolice, I agree with the movement but, due to white fragility (myself included), I think it could use a rebrand. I think the point is to #supportthepolice. Police shouldn’t be dealing with non-violent homeless people or other non-violent situations on top of everything else; we need to reallocate those responsibilities to trained mental health professionals and programs that can be preventative and help keep people out of trouble all together. For instance, at the extremely high poverty high school I taught at in Brooklyn, we had several police officers but just one counselor. He was an awesome guy who lasted two years. His room was near mine and I checked on him one time to ask how he was doing. He sighed and said, “It’s like I’m always just doing triage–just trying to control the bleeding.” It’s true that we did use the police to prevent or deal with fights a few times a month. But to deal with the trauma these young adults came to school with we could’ve used ten full time counselors each day.

Thank you for saying this!

Are you sure you read the whole article ?
What is explained in the article is very different from what you are saying.

Thank you, Rachel. Anyone who doesn’t have personal experience with being a police officer, working with them, or having family/friends that are officers has no clue what the job is like, what it requires, or the toll it takes.

I encourage everyone who has such strong opinions on what needs to be done to go for a ride along with your local police. Educate yourself on what they have to deal with on a daily basis. We want people who are moral, intelligent, compassionate, who can think on their feet and make split second life & death decisions. We want people who have more self control that most people could dream of. There are officers like that. If we want to keep them & get more we have to pay them what they’re worth. If we pay them peanuts, who is going to want to do an already thankless and dangerous job? Not the qualified people we want, that’s for sure. Bernie Sanders recently spoke about this.

100% we need more mental health care. Most officers are ill-equipped to deal with that.

Individual officers have zero control over their coworkers. Even if they speak out to their superiors, it usually falls on deaf ears. It’s the management & unions that make it impossible to fire the ones that should not be police officers.

We as lay people have no idea what the job is like, why cops are trained the way they are or do things how they do. So telling them how we think they should work is ridiculous. Go for a ride along. Talk to your local police officers. EDUCATE YOURSELF.

I feel like you have not actually read what any abolitionists are calling for. Many activists have done decades of research into abolition / defunding, and it does NOT call for cuts to 911 dispatch.

Hi Rachel, there’s no reason police should have access to military-style tanks and gear, to which much of their funding goes, not to mention very bloated overtime and pension payouts. Would love to see ay evidence or analysis to show that defunding and demilitarizing police will put an extra burden on 911 dispatchers. That’s a pretty big jump in logic.

Hi Emily,

Camden ended their police union. They actually hired more officers, which is the exact of opposite of defunding. Thanks.

“Defund the police” doesn’t mean take away all the money and leave a gaping hole where emergency response should be… it means reducing bloated police budgets (in my home town the police get fully 1/3 of the city budget), and replacing them with people who are better trained and equipped to handle non-violent situations, and also investing in community resources that will reduce the causes of lots of crimes in the first place. It’s not coming from a place of privilege, it’s coming directly from the places that have suffered decades of over-policing and unchecked police brutality. I encourage you to look up “8 can’t wait” and keep an open mind.

Yes! Thank you for saying this.

Great point. Thanks for the recommendations. I will be getting Layla Saad’s book for sure. It looks very practical, and I really want to hear directly from people of colour about these things.

I think Savala and the anti-racist kids Instagram post are getting at a point I haven’t seen fully articulated in recent discussions around race-conscious parenting, so I’m grateful Jo is sharing these resources with her audience.

Plenty of non-black adults have older people in their lives with racist and colorblind attitudes, and I gotta wonder if all of these kids we’re talking about feel the same way about us (or will soon). I think it’s worth remembering your kids aren’t going to stay kids for that long, that racial innocence is impossible to preserve, and– particularly if you are newly aware — a lot of this learning is probably going to happen alongside/from your children.

EC, this is such a great point. I homeschooled my kids, and they had a better history education than most American school kids (I have an MA in history), but had I the chance to go back again I’d learn with them so much more about racism. My kids had enough that when they went to high school and had a teacher that pronounced “Andrew Jackson was the greatest president ever!!”, they called bull shit, loudly and with examples. For all I didn’t get to with them, they know better than me. Now 23 and 21, they have taught me so much and pushed me to be better (about sexism and antiLBGTQ as well as racism). I think it’s at least partly because I taught them to read, question and always think critically. I’m so grateful for what they are teaching me and their dad, and their grandparents too.

Yes! Part of being anti-racist is realizing how racist it is that your own kids might get the lion’s share of education dollars. No one wants their own kids to “suffer” so acknowledging that you don’t want your own kids to give up anything r he already have means we all demand more for our schools. How would funding change if suddenly districts across a state were all funded equitably?

Well said.

Oh AMEN. We absolutely need a new funding system for education (and universal free University and college too, and loan forgiveness). It’s appalling that this incredibly unfair racist system still stands and that so many don’t even bother to question it, all while bragging about how they bought their house in the neighborhood with the “best schools”. Can we please all start calling this out????

While not decoupling public education from property taxes entirely, you might find Wyoming’s model of interest to look at how they fund all their schools equitably. You can read more here (https://www.wyofile.com/wyomings-k-12-education/), but the gist of it is that each district has a goal for its budget, based on number of students and other things like how much special ed. is required etc. They get money from their area’s taxes; those districts who do not meet that budget goal though those taxes alone, have the rest of their budget given to them by the state. Those districts whose taxes exceed their school district budget goal, have that excess “recaptured” by the state and redistributed to those other districts that needed more funding to get to their budget goal. This happened after the state’s supreme court ruled they needed too. It’s not perfect because Wyoming’s revenue stream is all oil and minerals which can go boom or bust. But when budgets are cut…. it is also equitable so across the state….

Basically tl;dr the state of Wyoming makes sure the same amount is being spent per student across the state, regardless of what school district they are in or what the taxes are there. If one state can do this, surely we can do it elsewhere. I hope so anyway! Kids deserve equitable and good educations!

I didn’t mind. Sometimes it is nice to think of less heavy things.

Agree. While I don’t think that everything we do or say or share from here forward must be black-focused, I do think that everything we do moving forward should be vetted for inclusiveness/anti-racism. Yeah, a couple of those suits were pretty and a bit different than the average, but most are “beautiful” because they’re on skinny white girls. No diversity in age, body type, ethnicity, race, nothing….I would have passed on sharing that.

The bathing suit link bothered me for a few reasons. First, coming off of a week of posts honoring diversity, slipping this one in there just felt wrong, out of place and out of touch. Secondly, agreeing with Molly that these suits are “beautiful” mainly owing to the 14 year old waif models displaying them. Maybe it’s just where my head is this week or maybe it’s just being tired of struggling to accept and love my body despite what the fashion industry tells me it should look like, but those models irritated the crap out of me.

Hello, the reason the “white models” show “no diversity in age, body type, ethnicity, race” is because they’re all one single white model! ;)

It’s hopeful that many more of us are seeing the lack of diversity in places we may not have noticed it a few weeks ago. I honestly don’t want to see models that look like me anymore, anywhere. I want the whole beautiful spectrum of humanity from now on.

Let’s not forget to vote in November. ♥️

Don’t go to the campaign rally, don’t vote for him.

Oh the irony…My great grandmother had a hotel that was burned to the ground during the Tulsa massacre. She took her 9 month old daughter (my grandmother) and fled. You know where they ended up? Minneapolis. If trump ends up in Tulsa he should be met by protestors.

This was such a stupid choice and I want that person fired immediately. Suspected: Steven Miller.

Google Yvonne Reeves-Chong’s strategy.

TLDR: Trump is using the Juneteenth rally to incite riots, create the narrative, and then step in as the Law and Order president to people’s relief. Her solution: NO ONE protest in Oklahoma that day, but in every other state have peaceful protests that call for media attention.

The last I heard, he’s changed the date. Don’t quote me on that, though. Also, don’t give him the opportunity to play the hero. I don’t need another four years of this, especially with my sister hoping he’s re-elected just because she believes COVID-19 is a hoax.