You may have seen these words strung together: Daily Kos Liberation League. Together they form a section of Daily Kos' newest front page design. You may even get activism emails from the Daily Kos Liberation League, urging you to take action or read staff and community articles about social justice. Yet I've often been asked, “What is Daily Kos Liberation League? What does that mean?”
Daily Kos Liberation League is a part of Daily Kos's Activism Team. We are a small but mighty team of people of color, primarily Black. We live or have significant lived experience in the Southern United States, the upper Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, and the D.C. metro area. We have also been deeply impacted by systemic racism.
Just like the rest of the Activism team, we want to change our world for the better. We are guided by a commitment to seeing, naming, and rooting out anti-Blackness in American institutions and systems, and securing a world in which Black people—among the most vulnerable people in the face of the violence of American capitalism—can live free, civically rich, prosperous lives.
Our focus on anti-Blackness is not to the exclusion of other groups, but because anti-Blackness most closely reflects our own lived experiences. Of course, our movements are cross-cultural and intersectional.
Hopefully, as progressives, we understand how anti-Blackness and white supremacy are intimately woven through our systems and institutions. Since the long hot summer of 2020, after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were murdered by police, our political movement seems to have grown in its capacity to name and analyze anti-Blackness, yet we bristle at radical change to root out anti-Blackness (or queer/transphobia, or Islamophobia, or antisemitism, or fatphobia, or ableism), and pin our hopes on incremental policies that have already failed time and again. We have also scapegoated vulnerable communities for our political losses, while heavily relying upon them as a base for electoral victories.
Instead, the Liberation League will advocate for the radical change that is necessary for Black people to live out liberation in this country, and partner with grassroots leaders whose strategies will form the basis for our campaign work. Our campaign priorities are ending mass incarceration, including immigration detention; ending the police state's reign of terror; re-enfranchising people whose voices and votes have been stolen through mass incarceration, voter suppression, and gerrymandering; and creating economic security, first and foremost for the communities who have been targeted and ravaged by systemic racism.
We are aspiring abolitionists. We believe that the prison industrial complex (PIC) is a stain on our nation, that it was devised to protect the owning class's property interests and never to protect and serve lives. The PIC operates as an extension of chattel slavery, and its core mission is so far removed from its stated mission of public safety that it is not possible to shape what exists into a system that serves justice. We must not only expose this chasm between the criminal justice’s public relations propaganda and its actual impacts. Together with our Daily Kos community, we want to build a larger progressive community committed to erecting life-sustaining alternatives in place of prisons and detention. For 2022, we will campaign to:
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attack the Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights legislation that affords police far too much armor against accountability.
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minimize the stranglehold of power that police unions have on our politics, public institutions, and communities.
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end cash bail, which is a system where wealth–not guilt, innocence, or threat–is what determines who stays locked up and who walks free while awaiting trial.
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reinstate (or retain) voting rights for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people.
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improve the human conditions for incarcerated people, who often suffer abuse, neglect, and straight-up violence.
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end the cruelties baked into our immigration and asylum systems, particularly for Black migrants.
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end the harmful collaborations between police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
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ensure fair wages, labor practices, and housing policy so that these communities can thrive, rather than be criminalized.
Black History Month invites us to reflect on the unique contributions Black people have made to this country. This reflection is important, but we feel that if we are not vigilant, it may lull us into an inflated sense of progress against anti-Blackness. We are invigorated by the invitation from the Movement for Black Lives to reflect on and act to bring about thriving Black Futures.
As Black History Month comes to a close, we invite you to remain in practice, in action, for Black Futures all year 'round. You can:
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Study these resources on the fight to end the punitive, carceral system as we know it.
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Visit the Abolition-ish podcast we created last year.
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Check out and support the work of Daily Kos's Black Solidarity Grant recipients.
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Resist and interrogate your urge to argue against the merits of anti-PIC work.
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Visit our group and the Black History/Black Futures group on the Daily Kos site. Let us know about work we should be republishing but might have missed.
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Check your email inbox and take action with us.
We're looking forward to this community getting to know us better, and getting to know you all as well.