A Fighter for the Working Class

Journalist Linda Tirado is dying after being shot by cops while covering the George Floyd protests. Her work told the story of poverty from the inside out.

BY ALISSA QUART JUNE 21, 2024

Linda Tirado is a fine writer. And as a result of police brutality against journalists, she is now dying in her early forties.

It started when Tirado covered a George Floyd protest in Minneapolis in 2020. She was shot in the face with a rubber bullet by a police officer. While rubber bullets, law enforcement assures us, are nonlethal, the force of a shot can fracture skulls.

Tirado lost her sight in one eye, and over the last few years the full extent of her injury became clear. She also had brain damage and it was getting worse. And now, as her recent co-authored Substack informs us, “she is dying. Slowly, painfully, and with none of the dignity she’s earned and all of the TBI-induced dementia that’s stealing her limited time left with her kids.”

SNIP
My late colleague and friend Barbara Ehrenreich first met Tirado after the latter wrote a 2013 piece about her life as an IHOP cook in Utah. In that 2013 viral HuffPost essay, Tirado explains how systemic poverty forces financially struggling people to make “bad” decisions—from what they eat to why they smoke. After it ran, Tirado received 20,000 emails in a week. Barbara was impressed, so she decided to support her work, including her book Hand to Mouth, which she called “devastatingly smart and funny … Tirado is the real thing.”
https://prospect.org/civil-rights/2024-06-21-fighter-working-class-linda-tirado/