My Experience Observing Black August

Today's the first day of September, marking the end of Black August for 2024. The core tenants of studying, training, fasting and fighting were held up in some levels of pedigree by me. From reading books and papers on the ever-evolving world of prison abolition to maintaining a fitness goal, I'd say that I reached the objectives I had for this month pretty well.

Studying If you've been following along with my week notes, you'll notice that a lot of them for August were focused on the concept of abolition. I completed four books out of the six I hoped to get through. I was leaning on the fact that I'm unemployed to use the "extra time" to read. However, these books commanded my attention and the amount of time I spent looking into the sources to deepen the arguments made and addressed narratives took an additional afternoon for each book. This particular approach to reading, taking a collection of books on a shared topic and focusing on them for a period of time, reminds me a lot of reading assignments from high school. However, those were conventionally limited to a few chapters at a time and didn't have high encouragement for things like examining the notes or appendix of the book — they focused more on rote memorization and less on opinion and thought formation.

With that noted, I've contributed a lot of my thoughts and seminal quotes from the books I've read to a list on Bookwyrm. I've added my notes on each book as well as reviewed them on Bookwyrm with a syndication of that to OpenLibrary, in hopes of getting them bumped up in algorithmic discovery and to simplify my online conversations about them.

Training Falling into the cliche of a nerd, I'm not the brawniest of the brunch. I prefer to run, something that's met me with grace and pain. This month, I managed to hold a six-minute mile for two miles each week, a testament to my growing endurance. Ironically, my focus on building the such isn't necessarily for combat: it's to remain reliable for things like running interference during rallies or extending my stamina when doing community defense or outreach. One of the understated parts of being in the vanguard of community work is the physical exhaustion of it all. I'm quite proud of myself for this growth and aim to maintain it in the coming years.

I'm fortunate enough to have a fully equipped gym near where I live that I can access whenever I want. This affords me the ease of such training and it comes with no lack of understating that such privileges make a huge difference on one's health.

Fasting I took this concept of fasting to be quite literal and mirrored a bit of my past in practicing Ramadan to do so. I didn't eat or drink anything (outside of water) during sunlight. And I kept my meals very plain and simple: plant-based and tailored to support me as I was working out during the day. On a cost perspective, I spent no more than USD $50 for the month on food — given that it was mainly beans, potatoes, rice and firm vegetables, it makes sense. I was aware of the cravings that I had clung to and helped me wean off of them. Now, I'm one to cook and bake a lot so it's not to say that I won't indulge myself. But I do aim to practice some restraint as the cost of food, especially indulgent ones, are variable and upon reviewing finances from earlier in the year, contribute to excess in spending.

Fighting The complications on how fighting imperalism in the United States is a multi-faceted one. It ranges from the overwhelming fear of white liberals to challenge hegemony, which in turn, has them serve as a sort of civilian policing force against leftists, progressives and everyone in between. I wrote something about the difficulty of being a Black leftist that I've slightly betrayed due to the nature of news dominating public conversation. I'm hoping to stand more firm on this especially as I work to change how I engage social networks as a whole. Offline, I've been spending time helping fight isolation of incarcerated people by writing them postcards. It's sad that a few of the times, I'm not sure if said folks even get the cards; the amount of surveillance and content filtering deployed in Florida's penal systems rival that of an overzealous parental computer system.

Another fight that I've been continuing before Black August has been around apathy. In myself, I refrain from defining myself as a "single issue" person as that's a necessary component of hegemony maintenance. In the realm of labor organizing, I've been in more conversation with people on helping broaden the perspectives (when desired) of how labor tie into the broader spectrum of issues. It's known that in the United States, after a joint effort of liberal and conservative waves of deregulation of industries led to a lot of folks being booted from unions; on top of existing struggles like sexism, racism and xenophobia. However, after attending Labor Notes earlier this year, I was amazed to see so many workers of so many different backgrounds activated to fight not just for labor rights but for the rights of the workers across the industry. This is not easy, especially in the United States where individualism and surrendering to the State all forms of action, as it requires folks to think beyond themselves.

All in all, I found this month to be incredibly productive, all things considered and I'm eager to move forward in the fight to free everyone - from prisons, societal hegemony and the routine ills of capitalism and its allies.