Nasty Work: The Unbearable Whiteness of Deciding Who Belongs

Silja Talvi has spent decades describing herself as a champion of the incarcerated, the oppressed, and the colonized. She has written about prisons, about racism, about the suffering of Black and Brown people ground up by a carceral system designed from its inception to subjugate them. She has built a career — and an identity — upon that suffering. Upon information, Talvi immigrated from Finland to the United States. Meaning she owes her previous presence in the U.S. to the historical labor, advocacy, and freedom movement of Black and Indigenous people. Yet there is a distinction that has always escaped her, and it is a foundational one: like her predecessors-she was never invited. No marginalized, colonized, or oppressed community asked Silja Talvi to speak for them, to lead them, or to determine who among their advocates was worthy of trust. Hers is a colonizing presence. Her role, at most, is that of an ally — and the first rule of allyship is that you do not make yourself the center, the authority, or the arbiter. What the record shows instead is a white woman of Finnish-Roma and Jewish background who leveraged the documented suffering of imprisoned Black, Indigenous, and poor women to build a journalistic platform, and who, the moment she was denied access to the story she wanted, turned that platform into a weapon against the very people doing the work she claims to revere.

The object of that access was a high-profile political prisoner whose case has long commanded the attention of civil rights communities across the country. The gatekeepers between Talvi and that access were his legal team and advocates — a group that is, collectively, Black, Jewish, Trans, formerly incarcerated, and movement-committed. The record is unambiguous: Talvi pressured these individuals to violate federal law, prison regulations, and the most basic rules of attorney ethics — to secretly record privileged legal calls, to manipulate the prisoner's federally monitored contact list, and to produce confidential medical records and other materials. When they refused, as law and ethics required them to do, she did not simply walk away. She published. She declared publicly, as confirmed fact, that the lead attorney's career was "largely ... fabricated/distorted, and that she was "in the employ of the FBI" — infiltrating Black and Native communities on behalf of the federal government. These are not critiques. They are the particular accusations that have historically been used to destroy Black women who rise to positions of power and authority: she is a fraud, she is untrustworthy, she cannot be believed. The insinuation that a Jewish attorney — a queer movement lawyer — cannot be trusted, is not investigative journalism. It is a very old, very ugly trope dressed in the language of accountability.

What Talvi did next is, perhaps, the most dangerous thing in this entire record, and it must be named plainly. She criminalized advocates by telling Native communities — communities whose justified terror of federal infiltration was written in blood at Pine Ridge, at Wounded Knee, across generations of COINTELPRO operations designed to murder their leadership — that the attorney representing the most prominent Indigenous political prisoner in American history was, in fact, a federal agent. She broadcast to the public that this attorney had been "charged with infiltrating Black & Native 'radical' & anarchist groups" and was "work[ing] w/ CIs to report back to feds on his activities." She knew exactly what she was doing. She knew, because she has written about it for decades. She knows that Black and Indigenous communities carry a wound around federal informants that never fully heals — a wound that has gotten people killed. Perry Ray Robinson, a Black civil rights organizer and AIM member, was murdered at Wounded Knee in 1973 in part because of precisely this kind of infiltration, suspicion, and the violence it unleashes. His story is documented here. To weaponize that trauma — to deliberately trigger the survival instincts of communities that have learned, at enormous cost, that federal plants are real and dangerous — in order to punish an attorney who would not break the law for Talvi, is not journalism. It is not advocacy. It is the work of someone who understands exactly how much power she does not have in these communities, and has decided to borrow the violence of the federal government to exercise it anyway. That is not allyship. It has a different name entirely.