That was actually her soon-to-be mother-in-law’s dog :)

I’m a friend of Justine’s and trying to do my part in keeping the focus on the culture of policing that leads to overuse of force, disproportionately harming black and brown and low-income communities. Further, I appreciated Hari Ziyad’s reminder that, as far back as James Baldwin, it’s been known that minority police…

I’ve talked about my friend Justine in other threads, but here I’d like to add an interview I did with the Guardian less than 24 hours after I learned of her death (the editors held it another day or two) and then, below that, a little piece I wrote about her for the studio where I work and where she was a client…

Something I wrote up right quick (typos and all) for the Six Degrees Uptown community that Justine was such a vital part of:

Sadly, I don’t actually know Don. Justine and I had become friends through the studio where I teach classes, and I never ended up having the chance to meet him — maybe I’ll make a new friend through this, too.

I said this in another spot, but trust that Justine would be livid about the difference in narratives about a blonde white lady victim vs. a black man victim. If she had more melanin, I reckon she’d be getting called an immigrant in the first line of most of these stories.

that’s one thing that struck me as i talked to the awesome rapid-response folks (activists and family and friends of other people killed by the police, who arrived quickly to provide help and talk to the media near justine’s home yesterday) — we all talked about how every time this happens, it happens to an awesome…

Here’s some prelim data on police killings plus teaching resources via sociologist Christopher Todd Beer https://thesocietypages.org/toolbox/police-killing-of-blacks/

Oh, and I said this in another spot, but trust that Justine would be livid about the difference in narratives about a blonde white lady victim vs. a black man victim. If she had more melanin, I reckon she’d be getting called an immigrant in the first line of most of these stories.

Believe me that Justine would be shaking her head and railing about the double standards, too. She’s not being treated to the “immigrant” narrative either. It’s all so disgusting.

So this. I can’t get over the idea that we can accept that police officers “do a dangerous job,” but they can’t seem to deal with the fact that their job is dangerous, so they need to be people who can keep level in a tense situation, who can *do better* than those of us who don’t have badges and guns.

More Justine fun facts:
She referred to herself as “Juzzy Wuzzy” (her maiden name is/was Rusczyk) whenever she was talking about “woo woo” stuff.

Justine was a dear friend who was horrified about police violence and committed to making the world better in every way. She had just picked out her wedding dress last week and was so excited to show me. She was texting me trying to get me to go to “dance church” with her on sunday morning, but instead I went to a…

1 (800) 255-5516 <—- Hasbro Customer Service line

One great book on the “secondary imprisonment” of family and friends: Megan Comfort’s “Doing Time Together.”

Actually straight-up adored Bad Moms, top to bottom. It was a high school party movie about grown-ass women! (Slinks out of the room in muttering shame)

The female officer on the left? That’s my face for this entire administration/long national nightmare. Everything is the worst.

All of their content is free and written by social scientists who actually want jr. high and high school audiences to be able to read their pieces!

Thesocietypages.org and thesocietypages.org/socimages

There’s a good little piece from The Society Pages on research around colorism and hierarchies among minorities that springs off the “Nina” casting: https://thesocietypages.org/trot/2016/04/0…. It’s called “Colorism and Divisions Among Black Women: There’s Research on That”