We celebrate Pride this year in defiance of the almost 500 anti-LGBTQ bills pending or passed in state legislatures around the country. Unsurprisingly, these attacks are turning to the criminal legal system to enforce homophobia and transphobia:

• Bills that would criminalize health care providers and families of trans children for providing necessary and life-saving gender affirming care.
• Bills that would criminalize drag performances.

Queer people have always been over-criminalized and over-incarcerated. This is especially true for Black trans women and other trans women of color. According to the Sentencing Project, LGBTQ adults are incarcerated at three times the rate of the general population. Among trans people, 1 in 6 report being incarcerated at any point in their lives — and nearly half of those are Black trans people.

LGBTQ people live in a social reality that makes their lives much more precarious. For example, LGBTQ people are more likely to experience discrimination in housing and employment, meaning they are more likely to experience poverty and homelessness. Because our nation criminalizes people for poverty, LGBTQ people are more likely to be arrested and get trapped in the criminal legal system.

Governments criminalize queer people’s mere existence — and Black trans women and trans women of color are especially vulnerable. Police use laws criminalizing sex work to target trans women of color for “walking while trans.” For example, The New York Times reported in 2016, police used the extremely broad “anti-loitering” law to profile trans women of color as sex workers, including based on their appearance: they were “arrested while wearing short dresses or high heels or tight pants and, in one bizarre instance, that well-known symbol of sexual seduction: a black pea coat.” The law was repealed in 2021.

A relic of the moral panic around the AIDS epidemic, the majority of states still criminalize people living with HIV. These laws are based on discrimination, pure and simple, not on any valid public health rationale.

Ending mass incarceration and over criminalization must be, and has always been, a central part of the movement for LGBTQ liberation. Indeed, what we celebrate at Pride is an uprising against police violence and harassment, where queer and trans people asserted their right to live freely.

Credit: Eric O. Ledermann / Shutterstock

Because the criminal legal system is a tool for oppressing and controlling Black people, people of color, low-income people of all races, and queer and trans people — our shared freedom lies in significantly reducing the footprint of mass incarceration while investing in the resources our communities need to thrive and to be safe.

At the front end, that must mean supporting bail reform and pretrial release. On any given day in the United States, 427,000 people are incarcerated in our more than 3,000 jails despite not having been convicted of a crime. Many of these people are inside because they can’t afford their freedom. And, as a number of our lawsuits have shown, wealth-based pretrial detention is not only contrary to safety and justice, it is unconstitutional.

Even a few days in pretrial detention can have devastating impacts on a person, depriving them of their safety and stability. People in pretrial detention often lose their jobs, housing, or custody of their kids. They are separated from their families and community support networks — who scramble to figure out childcare and come up with the money to bail out their loved one. And conditions in jails are almost universally abysmal.

For LGBTQ people, pretrial detention carries additional risks. LGBTQ people often are held in solitary confinement to separate them from the general population “for their safety” — even though solitary confinement, even for short periods of time, has profound and irreversible psychological and physical effects.

Trans people generally do not have a choice about whether they’d feel safer in a men’s or women’s jail, do not receive access to gender-affirming health care or clothing, and face greater risk of violence, including sexual violence, from other people in the jail and jail staff.

The tragic and preventable death of Layleen Polanco is a case in point. Ms. Polanco was an Afro-Latina trans woman who could not afford $500 in bail. She died in solitary confinement at Rikers Island Jail in May 2019.

A report from the city agency with oversight of the jail found the Department of Corrections’ policy not to house transgender women with cisgender women contributed to the decision to put Ms. Polanco in solitary — even though she had epilepsy, a serious medical condition that should have exempted her from isolation. Her death was determined to be the result of medical complications due to epilepsy.

Bail funds like the LGBTQ Freedom Fund and SONG’s Black Mamas Bail Out Action center the intersectional experience of low-income, Black LGBTQ people and bail them out.

Jurisdictions that have adopted bail reform — whether through legislation or because of legal action — have seen significant positive impacts on safety and justice. A recent study of 11 jurisdictions with bail reform found eliminating cash bail had significant positive impacts for individuals, families and communities, in terms of relieving the financial burden and keeping families and communities intact. Those studies found crime and bail reform are not strongly linked — despite baseless fearmongering to the contrary.

The enormous efforts hostile state legislators and elected officials are taking to harm queer and trans people and pursue failed punitive policies only offer us fear and a lack of imagination, love, or empathy. If we want justice and safety for all of us, we need to reject punishment — and reject those who offer us punishment and call it safety.

Instead, we can demand investments in communities of abundance, where everyone has what they need to thrive: affordable housing, economic opportunity, health care access, well-resourced and affirming schools, and freedom from incarceration and violence.

Queer and trans communities offer us an expansive vision of love, safety, and justice. It is one where the streets are safe for all of us, no matter who we are or what we look like. It is one where we take care of each other. That is the world we want to live in, and that world is within reach.

The shared revenue bill just signed into law in Wisconsin follows a scary trend of state governments undermining the authority and independence of local governments across the country. Not only does this stripping of power silence the voices of the politicians and leaders closest to the communities most impacted by local government, but these attacks have also almost exclusively targeted cities with high populations of communities of color and queer people.

2023 Wisconsin Act 12 would remove many decision-making powers from Milwaukee’s decision-makers. After the majority white state legislature debated stripping Milwaukee’s leaders of their authority over the past few months, it’s important to note that for the first time in state history, four of the most influential decision-makers in Milwaukee’s City and County government come from Black and Brown communities. More importantly, this bill will force local governments to hand over their power to politicians in Madison, allowing them to impose their will on Milwaukee and override the discretion of elected officials at the city level. All throughout the negotiations, leaders in the state legislature demonstrated that they were trying to hold Milwaukee hostage. They would only give Milwaukee the resources it needed to survive if the city handed power over to them. 

Restrictions on local governments across the country

What’s happening in Milwaukee isn’t unique. Houston, St. Louis, Jackson, and other cities this year have either had their local authority stripped or attacked by their state legislature in 2023. The Texas legislature recently passed a bill preventing cities and counties from passing or enforcing any local policy that exceeds the minimum requirements set by state laws. Previously under Texas Law, the  “Home Rule Amendment: gave large, diverse cities like Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio the power to self-govern as long as their local laws didn’t conflict with state law. The new bill will undermine the previous local control of Texas’s most diverse cities. More blatantly racist, The Texas Education Agency will also take control of the Houston Independent School District, undemocratically ousting the elected Black, Latinx, and women leaders of the district with a population of nearly 90 percent students of color.

St. Louis, like Houston, had its local control attacked this year when the primarily white Missouri State Legislature attempted to place the St. Louis Police Department under state control. This would’ve removed local communities and elected officials' power to hold their local police department accountable and maintain control of it. 

A similar situation happened in Jackson, Mississippi, the state’s capital city, where Black people make up more than 82% of the population. The Mississippi State Legislature passed a bill to establish a separate court system for parts of Jackson, with judges appointed by the state chief justice and the area under the system’s jurisdiction patrolled by a state-run police force. These attacks on local criminal justice system control are highly undemocratic and racist. Purposefully or not, removing the power of communities and their elected officials in cities that are disproportionately Black and other communities of color is racist. 

Attacks on Milwaukee

State lawmakers from across the state should not have the power to impose their policy views on cities made up of communities of Black and Brown people. Allowing state lawmakers and voters from other districts across the state to influence the local matters of a city they do not live in strips the power of the communities inside the city to govern themselves. 

Why should lawmakers who never set foot in Milwaukee have more influence than local leaders who live, work, raise a family and serve the city daily? Limiting a city’s ability to govern itself suppresses residents' voices and makes political representation at the local level less meaningful. In cities like Milwaukee, this results in silencing Black and Brown residents, whose concerns are often overlooked. Milwaukee is the economic engine of the state of Wisconsin, and it is in everyone’s best interest to protect the stability, autonomy, and growth of the city. Part of that is allowing the communities that know and live in Milwaukee to lead it.

Once dismissed by many as impractical, the quest for reparations for the descendants of African people enslaved in the United States is now being embraced as a legitimate concept to be taken seriously. The remedy is not only being sought to address harms from the enslavement era, but also for lingering impacts which manifest today. The illegal kidnapping, cultural assault, and nearly 300 years of forced free labor, followed by 100 years of convict leased labor, Black codes, sharecropping, the peonage system, lynchings, mass murders, systemic racism, Jim Crow, gerrymandering, redlining, educational inequities, health disparities and mass incarceration, still reverberate within the collective genes of Black people in this country.

These harms were multi-faceted; thus, remedies must be as well. Indeed, reparations can be fashioned in as many ways as necessary to equitably address the countless manifestations of injustice emanating from America’s original sin.

Credit:

Bryan Dozier/Shutterstock

Talk of reparations is no longer fringe, but now front and center. There are multitudes of faith organizations, sororities and fraternities, professional and social justice groups and civil and human rights organizations working to advance reparations. Support for federal reparations legislation is escalating under the leadership of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who has generated more co-sponsors to H.R. 40 than ever in history. President Biden must take heed and expeditiously bring its objectives into existence via executive order.

Rep. Cori Bush has also recently introduced a comprehensive Reparations NOW resolution that addresses issues of systemic inequality. California passed legislation establishing a state-wide commission to study and develop reparations proposals, and has issued a comprehensive report for consideration. Cities across the country are establishing commissions and task forces, looking into abuses in their own backyards.

Leaders across the country are taking notice: The U.S. Conference of Mayors, the Players Coalition of professional athletes, coaches and owners across leagues, Amalgamated Bank, and many more have picked up the banner to endorse reparations. White allied groups are also committed to truth-telling. Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream has issued a call to corporations to collectively use their power and privilege to reckon with the past.

The Virginia and Princeton theological seminaries are addressing reparations, and dioceses of the Episcopal Church in several jurisdictions have committed financial restitution as a moral acknowledgment of the church’s historic complicity. The financial backers of many of the country’s top universities were wealthy slave owners, an ugly truth that can no longer be pushed aside. Georgetown University, which stands today because of the sale of Black people owned by its founding Jesuits, has announced a $100 million commitment towards a foundation for descendants of those that saved the university from bankruptcy. Harvard University has dedicated $100 million to begin to atone for its extensive ties to enslavement and perpetuation of racial inequality. And in Virginia, a reparations bill was passed by the state legislature in 2021 that targets five schools with ties to slavery, including the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary, all of whom owe their foundational success to the forced labor of enslaved human beings who helped build and run the institutions in their early days.

Caskets are opening across the country, revealing burgeoning evidence of racial atrocities, lynchings, and massacres. Past damages are being uncovered and redressed: In California, the state has acknowledged the governmental theft of the lucrative Black-owned Bruce’s Beach property, and passed legislation to return it to its rightful owners. There are current efforts for redress from Ocoee, Florida’s 1920 election day bloodbath, and the 1919 terrorism that ravaged Elaine, Arkansas’ Black community.

The land housing the unimaginable horrors of Atlanta’s Chattahoochee Brick Company, which perpetuated slavery through convict leasing, is being reclaimed by the people, and displaced families in Palm Springs, California are seeking compensation and atonement for the callous razing and eviction of an entire community.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, renewed litigation is underway to achieve reparatory justice for the violent massacre of Black Wall Street. Recommendations from the commission formed in 2000 and charged with investigating the 1898 racial insurrection and coup d’état in Wilmington, North Carolina still await passage by the legislature. In 2019, remnants from the slave ship Clotilda were discovered, which in 1860 illegally transported Africans to Mobile Bay, Alabama — more than 50 years after the slave trade was abolished. Today, their descendants are exploring amends.

The role that federal, state, and local governments; corporations, industries, religious institutions, educational institutions, private estates, and other entities played in supporting the institution of slavery and its living legacies can no longer be ignored, dismissed, or swept under the rug. It’s a new day, with new energy and new possibilities. The fruit that we see today emanated from historic seeds that were planted and watered for generations. Reparations is no longer a stretch of the imagination or an unattainable goal but, very likely, a reality, and achievable in our lifetime.