Rising Up For Justice: Can the Law Work for Marginalized Communities?

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FEATURING CHAUMTOLI HUQ - Our nation and our world is overrun with 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, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week, we’re joined by Chaumtoli Huq, founder and editor of Law@theMargins, a law and media nonprofit that amplifies the perspectives of those marginalized by our legal and broader political and economic systems. 

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, we talk to people who are involved in organizations that are very big and very small, and although I understand that your organization has been around for nearly a decade, it is a nimble and small organization. How do you summarize the work that it does, to a national audience, and the main issues that you work on, your organizational goals, if you will?

Chaumtoli Huq: Yes, absolutely. So, you're absolutely right. We've been a nonprofit organization at the intersection of law and media and policy for about a decade. We are primarily a volunteer-driven organization, membership-based, working closely with organizations and individuals who are at the front lines of justice. 

And so, through our work over the years, we've conducted trainings, webinars. We've done, sort of, original reporting on social justice issues such as immigration, housing, national security around global issues, such as around Palestinian liberation, Rohingya genocide. And we have done this through a number of formats, through curated conversations, through original reporting.

And primarily, the role is to provide a counter narrative to some of the established sort of ideas around laws and the legal system and politics. And the goal is, by shifting the narratives, we're able to actually have an impact on the policies. And that's primarily has been our work for the last decade.