URGENT! Save Black Trans Activist with MS from Eviction! Help Boost
Hey Fam, Sis, Bruh, Unc, Auntie, Cuzzo, & Gangstas Young and Old
It’s ya boi, Dean. A regular degular schmegular Black, Trans boi from the the A! As some of you may know I have been long time Activist and organizer here in Atlanta, fighting for my communities.
In June, I was diagnosed with MS (Multiple Sclerosis). I eventually had to stop organizing and leave my job to focus on my health. For the last six months, I’ve been overwhelmed by numerous doctor visits and the weight of high-priced medical bills. I do not have medical insurance and was denied Medicaid. And now my housing is in jeopardy.
I am in anotherdesperate situation. I have been notified by my landlord, that if I am unable to my rent by January 21st, that I will be evicted. Many of you may not understand how I can be in this position, but being fo Trans is expensive. Having a incurable auto-immune disease is expensive. Being Black is expensive.I have 10 days to raise $950.00.
HELP ME KEEP MY HOME!
If I can just 100 people to donate just $10. I will reach my goal. Whether it’s $10, $5, or .99, your donation will help prevent another Black Trans person from kicked out of their home and forced onto the streets.
I absolutely believe non-white people when they say that race was involved.
First of all, I am white, therefore I realize that I have absolutely no say in what is and is not racist. Secondly, I have never experienced racism, so my understanding of racism is obviously limited, so any opinion I would hypothetically offer, would be from a place of white privilege.
Anyway, I am certain that almost all white people question whether race was ‘really’ involved when the murder of a person of colour has taken place. Maybe you’re thinking they shouldn’t have stolen, or maybe they shouldn’t have committed whatever crime.
But! I have found a fool-proof way for white people to see the racial components to crimes.
When I see a Black kid executed for stealing cigars (which he didn’t even fucking do), no matter what the police say happened, I think to myself :
If I had been caught stealing cigars, would I be dead? The answer is no. The cops wouldn’t even have been called.
If I was playing with a B.B. gun, would I be dead? No, I would have not ever even been approached.
If I literally shoved products into my pockets and walked out the door without paying, would anyone have suspected me?
If I held a gun to someone’s head, would I be executed, or would they send a team of people to talk me down?
If I tried to steal a bike and the owner caught me, would he call the police or just execute me.
If you wouldn’t be dead? It’s because you are white. It is because I am white.
An 18-year-old Saudi woman who said she is fleeing abuse from her family has been granted asylum in Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confirmed Friday.
Thailand’s immigration chief Surachate Hakparn said Rahaf al-Qunun has left Thailand for Canada on board a Korean Air flight.
“Canada has granted her asylum,” the Thai official told Reuters.
In four days, federal employees will suffer their first missed paycheck
since Trump’s border wall shutdown; it’s hard to say who will be worst
hit: the employees who are furloughed will never see that money (but who
may have been able to pick up some other work while they were off the
job to cover their bills); or the “essential” federal employees who’ve
had to show up for work every day without pay, but who will, someday,
get a paycheck to cover their forced labor.
In the latter group are 51,739 TSA “officers” (TSA screeners aren’t
cops, but they’ve adopted the “officer” honorific in a bid to secure
flyers’ obedience while they confiscate their apple-pie filling). Since
the shut-down began, TSA officials have insisted that screeners were not
staging “sick outs” (for example, to avoid daycare expenses by staying
home with their kids) and that the extra waiting time that passengers
were suffering through (53 minutes in Laguardia!) was the result of
heavier than usual travel.
But after Friday, TSA screeners will have to decide whether they want to
stay on the job without pay, and it’s a sure bet that lots of them will
stay home, and there’s not much the TSA can do about it. A TSA walkout
would cripple the nation’s businesses and strike directly at
higher-income Americans (that is, the people who supported Trump as he
used racist wall promises to secure the votes needed for a
two-trillion-dollar tax giveaway to the wealthy).
What happens next is anyone’s guess. Trump’s probably right that giving
in on the wall will lose him any chance of re-election as discouraged
racists stay home from the polls (as they had done historically, until
Trump gave them something to vote for), and deliver victory to Democrats
who have a small but meaningful chance of taxing the shit out of
looters and oligarchs. But the patience of looters and oligarchs – with
the exception of a few long-term thinkers like Charles Koch – is in
notoriously short supply. If Trump loses the racists, he won’t be able
to help the billionaires. But if he loses the billionaires, he won’t be
able to afford to court the racists.
What Native people say about the use of sage: you can use sage, but you cannot smudge as nothing you are doing (waving sage around) is actually smudging. Smudging is a ceremony and you are, we promise, not smudging. Please buy sage from either us, or someone who sources the sage from us. White sage may not be considered endangered by the US government but corperate sourcing is making it difficult for us to source sage for our own religious purposes. Let alone to sell it.
What white people hear: never use sage ever, don’t ever buy it, don’t own it, don’t even look at it.
Look, y’all. There’s a couple of facets to my talk today.
1) Yes! You can buy sage! You really, truly can! Buy it from either native sellers (go to a powwow! Eat our food, buy our stuff, watch some dancing!) Or buy it from a seller who sources the sage from native people. Pick one. And no, buying it from 5 Below doesn’t count.
2) you CANNOT smudge. This isn’t just you “shouldn’t”— this is a YOU ARE INCAPABLE OF SMUDGING. Waving a sage stick around your doorways IS NOT SMUDGING. It is smoke clensing. Smudging, depending on the tradition and tribe, could easily have dancing and drums involved. You, as a white person, do not have the cultural BACKGROUND to even know how it works. At all. Period.
3) please, for FUCKS SAKE, stop making posts here on tumblr where you tell other white people about cultural appropriation and what they can and cannot do. Please stop, your license has been revoked because none of you bother to get the facts right. We native people are FULLY CAPABLE OF DOING IT OURSELVES. Consider instead: a) reblogging our posts where we talk about it! We’re here! We have made posts!! b) Making a post that states what we said and then LINKS BACK TO US. Screenshot with a link if you must. Stop centering your own voices in these conversations. You are already centered in everything, stop centering yourselves in a native space.
This is the October 2018 edition of this post, and hopefully the final version.
Dessie is now ten years old. Yay!! For the last two years, she’s held steady at 22% total kidney function, in Stage Four Chronic Kidney Disease. At her last nephrologist visit, her creatinine has gone up. She says she’s tired all the time.
We think she’s tipping over to Stage 5 CKD/End Stage Renal Disease. Her next visit to the nephrologist is in December, and I’m expecting to get the diagnosis then. If not, great! But I’m not hopeful.
I think we’ll need to make another trip to Seattle Chikdren’s Hospital then, so they can run their own labs and make her active on the deceased donor transplant list. Normally, I’ve been told by them, once a child is active on the last, they typically receive a donor kidney within six months to a year. So I think 2019 will be her year of the transplant. Possibly dialysis before then — I know her local nephrologist wants to avoid it if we can.
The transplant itself requires we stay in Seattle for three to four months, with frequent follow ups afterwards. (First every month, then every two months, then every three months.). Each trip by car takes 6.5-8 hours each way, and usually two tanks of gas. Special Mobilty Services can help with gas, and lodging, if we can give them two weeks notice.
The transplant will be a journey in every sense of the word. I would love it if this could be fully funded before then.
If you have a spare kidney and want to try to be her living donor, here’s the Donors need to between 21-45, in reasonably good health, and O+ blood type. No smoking or drinking alcohol, not even occasionally. If this is something you’re interested, please contact the University of Washington’s living donor program at 206-598-3627, and mention you’re interested in donating to Dessie McAdams. That begins the process.
I’m a single mom, with three kids. To deal with my hideous finances which have put us in the negative regularly since May of 2017, to get us back on our feet, we are moving in with my mother for at least the next year. Perhaps longer; she hasn’t put a deadline on it. I think I’m going to have to declare bankruptcy to get our from under, which will tank my already bad credit score. So I’m not sure of our prospects afterwards; if I could, I’d rather buy a place than rent, but even renting will be hard, with bad credit and high rents.
In the most immediate future, we need about $300-500 through October to either rent a dumpster or hire a junk hauling service to clear out the backyard, garage, and basement. There’s a lot of heavy stuff my mom and I can’t handle.
This move to my mom’s also gets us away from my ex and his family, and Imbin the process of getting the parenting agreement modified to supervised visitation. He molested Dessie, by her account, sometime while we were married, around when she was 4-5. (I reported it to CPS and the police as soon as I learned of this, but as it was some years after it occurred, there was no evidence and they did nothing).
He’s also verbally and emotionally abused all of us.
His family may decide to bring in a lawyer for him with the requested change in parenting plan; I don’t know.
I guess what I’m saying is, once we move we’ll be doing better than we have in a long while. But help is still needed. A miracle, even, if it could be so, to get us through her transplant and from there to a safe place to live independently. Please get this fully funded (or more) as soon as possible, if it can be done.
If you don’t want to use the GoFundMe, that’s fine. We also have
PayPal.me/kerryren
Venmo@KerryRen
SquareCash $KerryRen
And CirclePay at kerryren@yahoo.com
If using these, please let me know who you are and if you’d like to be publicly thanked. Not all the apps are conducive to interactions, I’ve noticed.
We are incredibly grateful for all the help we’ve received through tumblr so far. You guys have literally helped keep us alive.
If you can’t donate, don’t worry about it. If you don’t want to, don’t bother me about it. Boosts and reblogs still help, though!
Here, have a cute pic of Dessie with a plush kidney a mutual sent her!
½/19 update: again, she’s now consistently below 19% total kidney function, so low officially in CKD Stage 5/End Stage Renal Disease.
Her doctor and I have contacted her transplant team at Seattle Children’s Hospital to get her on active status on they’re deceased donor list. They are supposed to get back to me on Monday. Once she’s active, we could get the kidney call any time.
