Rising Up For the Law for Black Lives

FEATURING CHRISTIAN SNOW - Our nation and our world are overrun by billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, you’ll hear conversations with changemakers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week on Rising Up for Justice, Christian Snow, Executive Director of Law For Black Lives joins me. Christian is an organizer, political educator, trainer, and lawyer who has spent the last decade building political homes, shaping law and policy, and training people in the spirit of the Black Radical Tradition.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Your organization, Law for Black Lives, has been described as a Black-led, queer, abolition-minded, multiracial, feminist, and anti-capitalist movement lawyering organization. That's a lot of wonderful things. When you talk to people who aren't familiar with things like abolition-minded, for example, how do you explain what Law for Black Lives is and what it does? 

Christian Snow: Yeah. So when we talk to folks who may be unfamiliar, we just sum it up by saying that Law for Black Lives is dedicated to building people power for liberation. Being abolition-minded is with the understanding that anti-Blackness needs to be eradicated in order to achieve liberation, and that's anti-Blackness in all its forms, including topics like police and prisons. 

But for folks who are less politically tapped into those notions, we just talk about building people power with the understanding that it's going to take all of us if we're going to carve out a new vision for our society that's just and that's transformed.