| It’s been four days since the Supreme Court ruled that gay and trans workers are protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and just one day since it found that the Trump administration—too hungry and sloppy in its rush to cruelty—could not immediately proceed with its plan to end a program offering temporary legal protection to 700,000 immigrants brought to the United States as children. These were welcome if ambivalent rulings, existing in what Melissa Gira Grant described as an “unresolved tension: between movement work and impact litigation, between what the law can do and what justice looks like.”
This is the space where most of our current politics live, even as we articulate new ways out. The law has never been sufficient to protect workers from the whims of their shitty bosses, but extending its nominal cover to gay and trans workers remains an urgent correction. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals excludes millions of undocumented immigrants who do not meet its narrow requirements, but its end would have been catastrophic for hundreds of thousands of people and their communities. Speaking to this insufficiency, Movimiento Cosecha, an organization built around the demand of permanent protection for all 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country, celebrated the ruling while keeping its focus on the full fight: “We won’t settle for breadcrumbs.”
All of life is a version of this dance, but I think this idea of more—deserving it and getting it—feels new somehow, at least at this scale, even as these ideas are as old as they are true. At the risk of sounding corny, which I am, I feel regularly transformed by the possibility of more and the tenuous expressions of it that are materializing every day. It’s a fast-slow process of assessing what’s in front of you in terms of what it might mean for what comes next: The Minneapolis City Council has moved to disband its police department. Will it play out as a shift to reformist surveillance that re-entrenches the power of policing, or will it mark an early cracking open that leads to the end of a malicious and failed system?
Critical Resistance calls this distinction “reformist reforms” versus “abolitionist steps.” The former is a circle, the illusion of progress; the latter is a path to greater justice that gets built, step by step, in real time. It’s collaborative by necessity, and each new move creates more room to move and think. We remake ourselves and each other as we remake the things around us. New things happen that couldn’t have happened otherwise. And while I don’t know what it all looks like, I know that it looks like more.
—Katie McDonough, deputy editor | 