The Prizefighters Doing A Donation Drive for Reclaim The Block on June 5th
Music News | Jun 4th, 2020
This Friday (June 5th), Minneapolis rocksteady/ska band The Prizefighters will be doing a donation drive. They will be donating and matching 100% of all music & merch sales on their Bandcamp site to Reclaim The Block. Reclaim The Block is Minneapolis organization dedicated to making our communities safer without an increased police presence.
Here’s the official statement from the band:
Hello from Minneapolis. We want to make it explicitly clear that police/state violence in all forms, to all peoples but especially our sisters and brothers of color, is the ugliest scourge holding up this country. Since America’s inception, we have built up upon tyranny committed against brown bodies. We have enslaved, but we have also redlined, gentrified, incarcerated, commodified….and we, as a “white” society have learned to accept this violence. We accept it in so many ways, but none more so than our cops and robbers fantasies about the function of police. We maintain this idea that the police must act as a security force; we’ve seen far too many Law and Order spin-offs, seen too many procedural dramas. We allow the police to become militarized because we have convinced ourselves that there is a constant enemy that we need to be protected from. Our complacency and steadfastness in this untruth has allowed us to far too long ignore the impunity and blank checks we have bestowed upon law enforcement.
But it’s time to cancel those checks, friends. It’s time to re-think what policing means, to re-think the means of violence, to question the institutions we have let stand so long that have punished so many lives. We are at a reckoning.
Already, the Minneapolis Public Schools have terminated their contract with MPD, including pulling all School Resource Officers out of campuses. The Park Board is working on terminating their relationship with MPD, including an overhaul of uniform and disarmament. A major law firm ended their service of prosecutorial assistance for low-level MPD cases. Most importantly, the City Council is exploring options on how to dissolve the MPD. This is what we need — a widespread denouncement of current policing, but especially where it counts: outside revenue.
We must defund the police if any true systematic change will occur.
This Friday, BandCamp is doing another day where 100% of sale revenue goes to the artist. THE PRIZEFIGHTERS will *donate and match* 100% of Friday sales to RECLAIM THE BLOCK, an organization doing tremendous work to defund the police.
Ska music is Black Music. Black Lives Matter.
Be sure to follow the band on Facebook as well.
