Join the fight against increased profiling, harsh sentences, and demonizing media coverage of queer youth of color in our community.
Participate in a dialogue and panel discussion moderated by Kazembe Balagun, with speakers; Reggie Gosset of Critical Resistance, Bran Fenner Co-Director of FIERCE, Renata Hill's mother Mollie Brown, and other family and friends of the Jersey4.

Panel Discussion: Criminalization of Queer Youth of Color
November 17th @7PM - Free
Bluestockings Bookstore and Activist Center
172 Allen between Stanton and Rivington
(JMZ/F Essex Delancey or 2nd ave F/L.E.S.)

Activists, family members, and allied community members will discuss
issues of racial, class, and sexual orientation based bias surrounding
the incarceration of the Jersey 4; including police profiling in the
gentrified west village, slanted corporate media coverage, unduly harsh
sentencing in this, the Jena 6, and other cases.

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PANELISTS 7-10 minutes each

Reggie Gosset Has been working with Critical Resistance to stop
the Dept of Corrections from building 2 new jails, one of which is a
jail for women/infants. Part of his work with CR is organizing Queer/
Trans/Gender Non Conforming Communities around issues of state
violence, specifically the Prison Industrial Complex as part of a
Soros Justice Fellowship. He is also a welfare rights
organizer at Queers for Economic Justice, connecting the state
violence of poverty with the state violence of policing.

Bran Fenner, Co-Director of FIERCE, Fabulous Independent Educated
Radicals for Community Empowerment has battled to maintain safe spaces
for queer youth of color around the Christopher street piers for years,
and is coordinating support for the Jersey4 and their families.
www.fiercenyc.org

Renata Hill's mother, Mollie Brown is an AG living in Newark New Jersey.
Her daughter Renata Hill, and several of her friends (the Jersey 4)
were arrested after they defended themselves against a homophobic attack
by a man in the west village last August.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=91&ItemID=13196

Moderator-
Kazembe Balagun is a writer, educator, and theorist living in New York
City. A former member of the Student Liberation Action Movement and a
current member of Estacion Libre, his writings cover the cross-sections
of Marxism, anarchism, Black liberation, queer theory, movement history,
and popular culture. Kazembe was awarded an IAS grant for his
work-in-progress "Queering the X: James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and the
Third World." Currently, he is the outreach coordinator for the Brecht
Forum.

screening Sakia Gunn Film Project trailer 12minutes Chas Brack's
documentary on Sakia Gunn.
Sakia Gunn was a friend and classmate of several of the incarcerated
women at West Side High School in Newark, NJ.
In 2003, Sakia was a fifteen year old AG, murdered while waiting for a
bus with friends for a bus near Newark's Penn Station returning home
from a night out in the west village with her friends. Sakia Gunn's
murderer, Richard McCollough, first came on to the femmes in their
group, then attacked Sakia when she told them she was a lesbian, and not
interested.
Dwayne Buckle's assault on the Jersey 4 is strikingly similar to that of
Gunn's attacker, however in the Jersey4 trial, the Assistant DA tried to
keep the important context of Patrice, Venice, Terrain, and Renata's
relationship to Sakia Gunn and her chilling murder out of the trial.
www.sakiagunnfilmproject.com