Reallocating police budgets towards education, social services, and dismantling racial inequality
Crowd-source made tools for emailing government officials to reallocate police budgets towards education, social services, and dismantling racial inequality. Source code available for each site/effort …
A big part of understanding the current protests is examining the relationship between the country’s Black people and the police/prison system. The criminalization of Black existence post-slavery, how it affects laws, why poverty and survival is criminalized, and how these laws criminalize Black people, Latinxs, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, and poor white people affects everyone regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexuality, or religious affiliation. The idea of defunding and abolition is not new and has been argued for decades. Whether you agree with abolition or not, we must understand that the discussion of Black Lives Matter and police brutality is about dismantling systemic violence that affects us all. I hope these readings serve as a stepping-stone to understanding what we can do to change a system that is clearly broken.
We are angry, frustrated, and in pain because of the violence and murder of Black people by the police because of racism. We are in the fight AGAINST RACISM. George Floyd was murdered, his life stolen. The Adafruit teams have specific actions we’ve done, are doing, and will do together as a company and culture. We are asking the Adafruit community to get involved and share what you are doing. The Adafruit teams will not settle for a hash tag, a Tweet, or an icon change. We will work on real change, and that requires real action and real work together. That is what we will do each day, each month, each year – we will hold ourselves accountable and publish our collective efforts, partnerships, activism, donations, openly and publicly. Our blog and social media platforms will be utilized in actionable ways. Join us and the anti-racist efforts working to end police brutality, reform the criminal justice system, and dismantle the many other forms of systemic racism at work in this country, read more @ adafruit.com/blacklivesmatter
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
