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This article is part of Abolition for the People, a series brought to you by a partnership between Kaepernick Publishing and LEVEL, a Medium publication for and about the lives of Black and Brown men. The series, which comprises 30 essays and conversations over four weeks, points to the crucial conclusion that policing and prisons are not solutions for the issues and people the state deems social problems — and calls for a future that puts justice and the needs of the community first.
Movements against racist police violence and against entrenched racial injustices in this country’s jails and prisons can claim a history that is almost as old as the institutions themselves. Precisely because opposition and protests calling for reform have played such a central role in shaping structures of policing and punishment, the notion of reform has superseded other paths toward change. Ironically, many efforts to change these repressive structures — to reform them — have instead provided the glue that has guaranteed their continued presence and acceptance.
Both policing and punishment are firmly rooted in racism — attempts to control indigenous, Black, and Latino populations following colonization and slavery as well as Asian populations after the Chinese Exclusion Act and the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. Attempting to undo the harm of policing and prisons without attending to these immense embodiments of systemic racism is doomed to failure. The 20th-century militarization of the police has been further intensified by Islamophobia. More generally, the evolution and expansion of the police and the prisons are constant reminders that capitalism has always fundamentally relied on racism to sustain itself.
The insight that racism is essentially systemic and structural rather than individual and attitudinal — one repeatedly asserted by health care advocates and anti-police and anti-prison activists over many decades — finally entered mainstream discourse in 2020 under the pressure of Covid-19 and its disproportionate impact on Black and Brown communities. Its most popular expression in the slogan “Defund the Police” was disseminated during the mass mobilizations protesting the police lynching of George Floyd. For those who recognize the deeply conservative repercussions of equating “reform” with change, the call to defund the police manifested an abolitionist impulse to eschew the usual calls for punishing individual police officers and instituting some form of civilian overview of the department. Instead of habitual and perfunctory calls for “reform,” organizers began to think more deeply about pathways toward more radical change — in other words, change that would begin to respond to some of the root causes of why poor communities, and especially communities of color, are particularly vulnerable to the criminal legal system.
But for others, it had a jarring effect, conjuring up images of chaotic, crime-ridden (Black and Brown) communities, with no force in place to guarantee order. Some people, who live in so-called high crime neighborhoods, where they are preyed upon not only by the police but also by armed individuals and groups from their own communities and for whom the demand to defund the police was their first introduction to abolitionist ideas, were understandably bewildered. How would they survive at the mercy of malevolent groups who hardly care about the trajectory of stray bullets that have taken the lives of children and other bystanders? Their fears are real and not to be dismissed. But this is absolutely the moment to engage in the kind of educational activism that might help to encourage all of us, especially those of us who live in the most vulnerable neighborhoods, to purposefully rethink the meaning of safety and security.
This is the author:
Angela Davis
This woman is known for supporting Jonestown
Why Arguments Against Abolition Inevitably Fail
For centuries, people have been unwilling to grasp the concept that only by undoing the foundation can we build a new future
This article is part of Abolition for the People, a series brought to you by a partnership between Kaepernick Publishing and LEVEL, a Medium publication for and about the lives of Black and Brown men. The series, which comprises 30 essays and conversations over four weeks, points to the crucial conclusion that policing and prisons are not solutions for the issues and people the state deems social problems — and calls for a future that puts justice and the needs of the community first.
Movements against racist police violence and against entrenched racial injustices in this country’s jails and prisons can claim a history that is almost as old as the institutions themselves. Precisely because opposition and protests calling for reform have played such a central role in shaping structures of policing and punishment, the notion of reform has superseded other paths toward change. Ironically, many efforts to change these repressive structures — to reform them — have instead provided the glue that has guaranteed their continued presence and acceptance.
Both policing and punishment are firmly rooted in racism — attempts to control indigenous, Black, and Latino populations following colonization and slavery as well as Asian populations after the Chinese Exclusion Act and the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. Attempting to undo the harm of policing and prisons without attending to these immense embodiments of systemic racism is doomed to failure. The 20th-century militarization of the police has been further intensified by Islamophobia. More generally, the evolution and expansion of the police and the prisons are constant reminders that capitalism has always fundamentally relied on racism to sustain itself.
The insight that racism is essentially systemic and structural rather than individual and attitudinal — one repeatedly asserted by health care advocates and anti-police and anti-prison activists over many decades — finally entered mainstream discourse in 2020 under the pressure of Covid-19 and its disproportionate impact on Black and Brown communities. Its most popular expression in the slogan “Defund the Police” was disseminated during the mass mobilizations protesting the police lynching of George Floyd. For those who recognize the deeply conservative repercussions of equating “reform” with change, the call to defund the police manifested an abolitionist impulse to eschew the usual calls for punishing individual police officers and instituting some form of civilian overview of the department. Instead of habitual and perfunctory calls for “reform,” organizers began to think more deeply about pathways toward more radical change — in other words, change that would begin to respond to some of the root causes of why poor communities, and especially communities of color, are particularly vulnerable to the criminal legal system.
But for others, it had a jarring effect, conjuring up images of chaotic, crime-ridden (Black and Brown) communities, with no force in place to guarantee order. Some people, who live in so-called high crime neighborhoods, where they are preyed upon not only by the police but also by armed individuals and groups from their own communities and for whom the demand to defund the police was their first introduction to abolitionist ideas, were understandably bewildered. How would they survive at the mercy of malevolent groups who hardly care about the trajectory of stray bullets that have taken the lives of children and other bystanders? Their fears are real and not to be dismissed. But this is absolutely the moment to engage in the kind of educational activism that might help to encourage all of us, especially those of us who live in the most vulnerable neighborhoods, to purposefully rethink the meaning of safety and security.
This is the author:
Angela Davis
This woman is known for supporting Jonestown
