We want to make it clear that we are no longer affiliated with the non-profit organization Black and Pink, aka Black and Pink National. While up to this point we have retained the name and logo from when we were affiliated, this situation may change, and up to now has remained the same only for the sake of continuity with our community inside prison.
We originally began discussing disaffiliation following the launch of a union of Black and Pink workers who were vocal about a workplace culture that featured stark pay disparities, racism, tokenization, weaponization of identity politics, retaliation against calls for accountability, and other harms (see links below for more info). We were angry to hear about these practices that sounded more like a bad capitalist job than they did a culture of care connected to liberatory and abolitionist values. We were also deeply concerned to read the insider perspective that National was deprioritizing support for queer and trans incarcerated people — the demographic at the center of the organization since its founding. This observation squared with our own experience of hearing from a large number of people inside about occasions where they wrote to National and never heard back. What made this dynamic worse is the fact that Black and Pink National controlled far more resources than the chapters who were putting in the most work to support people inside.
We decided to disaffiliate because we no longer felt there was an alignment in values or a shared mission between us and National. We were clearly not the only ones to feel this way, as a number of former Black and Pink chapters also disaffiliated around this time and have continued work as independent organizations. During this time of large-scale disaffiliation, many of us doing this work around the country attempted to have a conversation with the Board at Black and Pink National in order to directly address harm and work toward repair. However, National agreed only to meet with groups that were remaining chapters and refused to meet with any representatives of groups that had disaffiliated. For us, this was a hard boundary and we all refused to meet on these terms. This disagreement reflected another discrepancy in values. While for us, the key point connecting us was a shared commitment to liberation for queer and trans prisoners, National's decision suggested that an individual or group's formal relationship to one non-profit organization was more important than that shared commitment.
The separation in our values and analysis again became clear as their silence on the genocide of Palestinians lengthened. Only upon pressure from groups including ours did they finally release a statement several months after October 7th. Their embarrassing statement did not even say Palestine by name. We recognize that the abolition of prisons in the US is connected to the movement to free Palestine, in the form of shared repressive technologies the movements face, rationales of white supremacy used to justify both kinds of oppression, and a common thread of settler colonialism. We have no fear that by saying Free Palestine we will alienate any committed participant in our struggle, because the value of any such participant’s contribution is not in what they do for us as an organization but what they do for prisoners, for Palestinians, and for people generally.
Because the commitment to liberation for queer and trans prisoners is what binds us together, we separated from Black and Pink National in 2022. Since then we've had our heads down continuing our work with people in prison. But we realized that it is worthwhile to make this information public, and so we decided to issue this statement.
accounts of former workers with Black and Pink National: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OFIcji9nVjtr8OmEQ8zO1TM39czf5IZnUnkooLuVles/
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