I want to bring on my friend, Poppy Liu,
who's been doing some great work with reproductive justice.
She's an actor and an activist.
Please welcome Poppy.
Hey Poppy!
Hi!
It's so good of you to take some time out
from your schedule as a smash hit sitcom star.
Yeah, the cult classic, Sunnyside,
right up there with Donnie Darko.
It really is the Donnie Darko of sitcoms.
It really is.
It's the only way to describe it.
And you are the Jake Gyllenhaal of indie comedy,
is what everyone says.
I keep saying that to Deadline.
They keep sending me the same cease and desist.
Thank you for being here.
I wanted to talk to you because
you're doing something cool with this time,
and maybe you can tell us a little bit about
some of your activism work.
You can probably explain it a little bit better
than I can, but it's around reproductive justice,
which is a very important issue right now
and is getting even more serious
because of our recent Supreme Court woopsie-daisies.
Yeah.
So I sit on the board of a really incredible
organization called SisterSong,
SisterSong women of color reproductive justice collective.
And it is entirely led by Black, Indigenous,
Latinx, and Asian Pacific Islander women of color
and queer, trans people of color
with the idea that with need to be
centering the most marginalized communities first
if we're trying to create the liberated world
that we are dreaming of.
And the reason why it's reproductive justice
is because kind of prior to this
the movement around abortion was very much
like a white second wave feminist framework of it,
in terms of pro choice and anti choice.
That's how abortion was talked about
and that was sort of the extent of the conversation
about body autonomy and rights,
but the idea here is that you don't really have
choice actually, if you don't have access.
You don't have choice if you're facing state violence.
You don't have choice if you're undocumented
and you're fearing deportation.
You don't have choice if you're incarcerated.
So, this is more about access.
It's about meeting communities and people where they're at
and it's really shifting the conversation
into a way that's looking more wholistically at,
SisterSong says it really great.
They're like, it's about people's right
to have children if they want to,
not have children if they don't want to,
and to raise their families in safe
and sustainable environments.
That's the organization.
They're the best, they're so great.
More recently during quarantine,
I started a campaign within SisterSong
called Asians for Black Births,
which is in support of the work that
Deputy Director Leah Jones at SisterSong is doing.
That's called the Birth Justice Care Fund,
which is just providing direct funds
for right now primarily Black mamas
and caregivers in Georgia,
just support around birth, postpartum,
labor, doula needs, midwives, et cetera.
And so, this campaign, Asians for Black Births,
is really rallying my Asian American
and Asian Pacific Islander communities
to be supporting this work.
And it's not just a fundraiser.
We're hoping that we're using this
to actually kind of share information
with Asian American communities
who historically have been very complicit with whiteness,
have not really examined their own proximity to whiteness,
have not always shown solidarity
with Black and brown communities,
and really asking ourselves during this moment
to be like, we need to look at our own histories
and our complicities to understand
how we show up as migrants in this moment in time.
Okay, so as far as the organization goes,
it's helping people with actual resources,
or some of the money is going towards
just supporting some of these?
Yeah, so the Birth Justice Care Fund
is direct monetary support for people that are giving birth,
but SisterSong at large, they do all sorts of things,
including court cases.
Well, you're doing really great work,
and you're honestly making us look bad
for not doing the same.
So if people want to support SisterSong
and the work you're doing,
which you've already raised a lot of money,
where can people find you if they want to help out?
For Asians for Black Births you can go to
@asiansforblackbirths on Instagram.
There's a link that goes to the GoFundMe,
and yeah, learn more about SisterSong.
They're on Instagram @sistersong_woc
and sistersong.net.
So go there.
Go there.
Okay, thank you so much for talking with us
and educating us and letting us know
what we can do to help,
because there's honestly so many things out there,
that just to narrow it down is great.
Love you, Moses!
Thank you!
Love you too!
Thank you so much.
It's good seeing you.
Poppy Liu, everyone.
The organization is SisterSong.