EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry presented the next Pioneer Award to Malkia Cyril. McSherry described first meeting Cyril, founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice, at a rally organized at San Francisco City Hall “in the thick of the fight for net neutrality.” She described how Cyril continued a moving campaign joining communities and “explaining how the fight for net neutrality relates to the fight for racial and economic justice, and vice versa.” McSherry praised Cyril’s voice on varied issues including challenging surveillance and advocating for prisoners’ rights, and for being “equally dedicated to helpingothers speak.”
When Cyril got off a plane after a recent vacation, their phone lit up with the latest reports about young black men shot by police. “That’s what my life is like, who else has gotten killed today,” Cyril said. They went on to describe the passion to “dismantle the structure that views my blackness as a crime” and spoke of people of color being “legally enslaved through” gang databases and said high-tech policing, including so-called predictive policing systems which “succeed in only one thing: systematic discrimination against communities of color. That’s wrong. It’s up to us to make that change.” Cyril called for “dismantling these programs” and “abolishing the surveillance state.”
- Date Published:10/06/2016
- Original Publication:Electronic Frontier Foundation