Abolition

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“...They just want you to perfume the sewers. They need artists to bring perfume to the terrible stench of their death. It isn’t doing the artist any good. There is no place to go except to the struggle of the people today. There is no place for the artist. There is no artist arising except from the struggle of the people. ...”

- They Want You to Perfume the Sewers

Abuse Thrives on Silence: The #VaughnRebellion in Context

A reflection on the Vaughn Prison Rebellion from Kim Wilson, who has two sons at Vaughn:

"... At a time when the federal government has targeted vulnerable groups of people in this country, the #VaughnRebellion should be seen as a signal that solidarity includes solidarity with incarcerated people.

The men of Vaughn are demanding better treatment, education, correct status sheets, and effective rehabilitation. They are telling society that they will not be disappeared and forgotten. They are saying, unequivocally, that they matter, and that they will not be denied their humanity even if it risks them more time or their lives. 

...

Abuse thrives on silence. I don’t believe that we can afford to ignore the #VaughnRebellion as some outlier event in an otherwise model prison (though prison officials and politicians will try to push this line---hard).  We don’t know who was involved in the #VaughnRebellion, but I stand in support with them and with everyone else at Vaughn that is subject to abuse. There are many inside that are legitimately afraid to speak up. There are also those outside who feel as though they can’t speak up because they worry that they will be banned from the prison. This is a legitimate concern, and I worry that I’ll be banned from seeing my sons for writing about the #VaughnRebellion.

This is how power and control work. 

This is how abuse works. In the struggle for justice, I can’t allow fear to stop me."

Stranger Things and the Upside Down Dawn of Donald Trump

In its first minute, Stranger Things had me. From the gasps of a scientist running for his life to the quiet manicured lawns of early-80s suburbia, I felt the vibe of Stranger Things on my skin and in my bones. Like its protagonists, I grew up in a tiny early-80s Indiana town, riding my bike to expansive patches of woods with friends and pretending to spy on the suspicious goings-on of adult people in big, protected buildings. But Stranger Things is not a masterful television show because it depicts the beauty and the bounty of a now-forgotten small-town America. No. What makes Stranger Things a modern classic is its relentless insistence that the terrors happening right now are being entirely missed, and mindlessly supported, by a sleeping, White, public – a strange parallel in the dawning days of Trump. … It is not time to unify behind Trump, or to stand behind his storm troopers of White Supremacy. As Malcolm X might say: the chickens have come home to roost. It is no longer appropriate for White people to sleep. It is time to slay the monster of White supremacy once and for all. People of color, Muslims and undocumented men and women, people who have been fighting White supremacy since the beginning, are already experiencing public outbursts of racist language and physical abuse. For all of us, the monster of White supremacy that has been conjured should be terrifying. But the monster that’s conjured is also the monster that’s exposed. And the monster that’s exposed is the monster that’s vulnerable. And the monster that’s vulnerable is the monster that can be killed. ...

Trump, Bannon, and Israel’s Anti-Semitism Problem

by Zaina Alsous

Anyone who seeks to defeat Trumpism should be extremely disturbed by U.S. and Israeli collaboration. Israel provides a model for the state that Trump wants to create: one forged in violent racial segregation, militarized policing, and white nationalist propaganda. … Now more than ever, we cannot cede the battle against anti-Semitism to Israel. 

The Fools of National Socialism: Thoughts on Antisemitism and the Fight Against Trumpism

by Dan Berger

The emerging opposition to Trumpism has rightly focused on the groups facing the most dire, most violent threats–people facing deportation, exclusion, and mob assault. Within this logic, antisemitism remains a powerful ideological trope that the now-mainstreamed far Right has projected onto its authoritarian platform. From the announcement of Trump’s campaign in June 2015, it was clear that his worldview was shaped by far right conspiracy thinking, in which antisemitism is never far removed: the notion that “Mexico sends their people” is a foolish framing of why and how migration happens. Yet it reveals the antisemitic structure of Trumpian racial logic.

Put simply, Trump’s antisemitism is not primarily about Jews. Rather, the antisemitism functions as a structuring apparatus for his racist political outlook. By antisemitism, I mean a right-wing populist ideological framework that is 1) steeped in conspiracy thinking 2) premised on a misplaced anti-elitism against a secretive, racialized cabal that 3) can only be understood in crude, patriarchal nationalist terms. This kind of antisemitism is evident in Steve Bannon’s recent claim that he is not a “white nationalist” but rather an “economic nationalist.” Antisemitism here combines the neoconservative desire for U.S. militarism to fight a global “clash of civilizations” with late-19thcentury tribalist race thinking under the banner of capitalist accumulation. As the independent scholar Chip Berlet wrote in 2012, antisemitism is a racializing logic that, since 9/11, has applied as much to Muslims as to Jews. Whether it is Mexico “sending their people,” Hillary Clinton’s “secret [meetings] with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty” (yes, he said that), or a host of other paranoid utterances by the now president-elect, Trump’s worldview is antisemitic. He understands geopolitics as a series of conspiracies that need to be met with violence. Race is his shorthand for describing whether someone is an agent of a global conspiracy or its victim.

America’s Electoral Apartheid: 30-40 million US residents excluded from voting

by Konstantin Kilibarda (11/14/2016)

[Photo: “Supreme Injustice” by Joe Brusky via Flickr]

A key component of an apartheid system is the ability to disenfranchise those populations that may tip the political scales. Currently in the United States there are between 30-40 million residents (including millions of US citizens) who remain systematically disenfranchised. The fact that the disenfranchised are primarily racialized or poor, underlines Charles W. Mills’ contention that America’s democracy continues to be premised on a hierarchically structured ‘racial contract.’ Below I’ve compiled a short list of groups in the US who can’t vote, despite living, loving, caring, participating, and working everyday in communities and neighborhoods throughout the country.

If those feeling perplexed by Trump’s rise to power want to build a strong (and lasting) coalition against the Republican politics of hate (and the accommodation of such a politics by some wings of the Democratic party), efforts to expand voting rights, narrow voter suppression, and fundamentally transform the electoral system will play an important role. Racialized communities most directly impacted by these policies have been at the forefront of these struggles since the beginning; it’s now time for those just recognizing these facts to also get involved. The following is a quick breakdown of some of the major groups who live under the US system – some with citizenship, some without – but are nevertheless barred from having a say in the choice of President. Any one of these groups if enfranchised could have made a decisive impact in the 2016 election. Taken together they represent a formidable group that could radically transform American politics. It is perhaps no wonder that Republicans (and some Democrats) are committed to sustaining and even expanding the scope of their disenfranchisement.

(1) 13.3 million permanent residents

Many countries allow permanent residents to vote, yet in the United States those who have attained this status are barred from exercising their franchise. In the rhetoric of the Republican Party, ‘legal’ immigrants are often compared favorably to ‘illegal’ (i.e. undocumented) immigrants. Nevertheless, the Republican Party and some Democrats continue to ensure that all non-citizens (regardless of status) are unable to participate in elections. It’s worth remembering that the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996, which was pushed forward by a Republican controlled Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, expanded the grounds on which people can be deported, including explicit prohibitions against and harsh penalties for non-citizen voting.

(2) 11.1 million undocumented residents

Current estimates place the number of undocumented residents in the United States at 11.1 million, including 8 million who are actively engaged in the labor force. While Trump (and other Republicans) portray these US residents as ‘criminals’ and potential ‘terrorists,’ the obvious fact is that the overwhelming majority make vital contributions to their communities (both in the form of informal wage-work, as well as unwaged care work that sustains their communities in the face of frayed social safety nets). In fact, 86% of undocumented migrants have been living in the United States for five years or more, demonstrating that the majority have already established strong roots in their communities. The US is, in fact, unique for relying so heavily on undocumented workers (as opposed to regularized temporary foreign workers) for labor performed by non-citizens. On-going struggles for immigration amnesties, regularization policies, and increasing pathways to citizenship for the undocumented are vital to a long-term electoral strategy.

(3) 6.1 million incarcerated or formerly incarcerated citizens

The most common form of systemic disenfranchisement targeting citizens is through the racialized politics of mass-incarceration that strip 6.1 millioncitizens of the right to vote. Again, many countries allow inmates to vote, with participation rates often comparable to those of the broader society they are a part of. As Michelle Alexander masterfully points out in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, imprisonment has been a primary means of disenfranchising African-Americans. There are currently 2.2 million individuals behind bars in the US (including those who haven’t been convicted but are unable to post bail), as well as 3.9 million former inmates. Of this number, 1.4 million are African-American males (13% of the African-American male population in the US). In effect, 2.4% of potential voters with citizenship are rendered ineligible to vote as a result of felony disenfranchisement. Again, prison abolition and prisoner justice movements throughout the country have been agitating to re-enfranchise these citizens. This is a crucial demographic of US citizens who have been stripped of one of their core rights due to policies that are systematically racist in their effects.

(4) 4 million residents of US ‘unincorporated territories’

While the US Federal government has extensive powers in governing its overseas unincorporated territories, those living in these jurisdictions have little to no power or say in who ultimately governs them in spite of being considered US citizens. This is a direct result of a long-history of US colonial ambitions in the Caribbean and the Pacific, an unequal relationship that was recently upheld by the Supreme Court. As a result, the unincorporated territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, the Northern Marianna Islands, and the US Minor Outlying Islands can elect non-voting members of Congress but cannot cast a vote for President. Most recently, the US Federal Government imposed an unelected Fiscal Oversight and Management Board on Puerto Rico to restructure the islands $72 billion debt through stringent austerity measures. Simply put, Puerto Ricans were not given a say in the matter despite the evident toll it will have on everyday life on the island.

(5) 2.5 to 3 million residents deported since 2008

Along with the above figures on undocumented and permanent residents, it’s also worth noting the 2.5 to 3 million individuals deported during the Obama administration (the highest number of deportations under any US President). It’s worth considering what would have happened if instead of being deported, these residents had been given pathways to citizenship.

(6) 0.5 million homeless citizens

Voting laws in most US states require a permanent home address. This requirement makes it difficult for the (at least) half-a-million homelessindividuals in the country to cast a ballot. While some states allow homeless residents to list a shelter as their address, access to information and other obstacles often impede the rights of these citizens to vote.

(7) Citizens under guardianship and those with disabilities

39 US states have laws that bar voting by those deemed to be ‘mentally unfit’ or under ‘guardianship’ by the courts. This includes 7 states that automatically bar anyone with this status from voting. It is hard to come by precise data on the total number of individuals affected by these provisions, since most states that have legislated these provisions do not keep systematic figures on those so designated. A 2008 estimate placed the number of pending guardianship cases in the United States at between 1-3 million. This is in addition to the everyday systemic obstacles to voting that face the 35 to 50 million Americans with disabilities. Many standard voter suppression tactics have a doubly negative deterrent effect on people with disabilities. These obstacles should be understood as a lasting legacy of a long-history of explicitly ableist legislationin the United States.

(8) Citizens affected by 2013 reversals of the Voting Rights Act (1965)

A key victory of the civil rights movement was the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Since then State legislatures have gone to great lengths to design policies that structurally disadvantage black, indigenous, latinx and other racialized voters. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, while at the same time Republican-controlled states have intensified gerrymandering efforts through the REDMAP project, allowing for significant Republican gains in a number of states in spite of shifting (unfavorable) demographics for the GOP. As many as 15 states have adopted voter-suppression laws since 2012. While it is hard to come by exact voter suppression figures, it is widely recognized that the deterrent effect is particularly strong on BIPOC communities disproportionately targeted by these policies. One recent study, found that: ““Democratic turnout drops by an estimated 8.8 percentage points in general elections when strict photo identification laws are in place, [compared to just 3.6 percentage points for Republicans].” Another study identified 868 fewer polling stations in states with histories of voter discrimination. Clearly, in a national election that was decided by statistically razor thin margins in a number of battleground states, this is more than an academic concern.

Finally, it’s worth noting that even if all these residents were enfranchised, political parties (and movements) will still have to work on winning the vote (or gaining the involvement of these constituencies) by presenting a palpable alternative to the current system. Civil rights are important and essential, but we’ve continuously seen how they can be undermined by the systemic violation of other social, economic, and cultural/community rights. Electoral reform is only one piece of the puzzle of longer standing social justice struggles in the US. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that America’s selective electoral apartheid helps reinforce the country’s foundational ‘racial contract’ in spite of sustained efforts to dismantle it.

Authoritarianism in America: A Call for Resistance

by Henry A. Giroux

Americans have now entered into one of the most sickening and dangerous periods of the 21st century. Trump is not only a twisted caricature of every register of economic, political, educational, and social extremism, he is the apogee of a warrior culture committed to rolling back civil rights, women’s reproductive rights, denying the threat of climate change, and mocking, if not threatening, all vestiges of economic justice and democracy.  As David Remnick pointed out in The New Yorker, “he is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.”[1]Actually, it gets worse. Trump is the fascist shadow that has been lurking in the dark since Nixon’s Southern Strategy. A ghostly reminder of the price to be paid when historical consciousness and public values are lost in a culture of immediacy, ignorance, and a flight from social and political responsibility.

Authoritarianism has now become viral in America, spreading its toxic ideology into every facet of American life. The threat of totalitarianism with its legions of alt-right political zombies has now exposed itself, without apology, knowing full well that it no longer has to code or apologize for its hatred of all those who do not fit into its white-supremacist and ultra-nationalist script.

The Pitfalls of (White) Liberal Panic

by Dylan Rodríguez

There should be no shock at the success of White Nationalist revival.  A fog of liberal-progressive panic seeps across the closest quarters, oddly individualizing what some inhabit as a normal and collective disposition of familiarity with emergency under conditions of constant bodily and spiritual duress.  In the living room, kitchen, office, school, cafe, park, dorm room, gym, and library there is a steady-sad din:  How did this happen, Why such hate, There are so many of them, What will happen to our country, Will I be threatened, My uncle and neighbor lied, What does the world think of us, I do not feel safe, What do we do now, Who will protect those people from them, How could this happen my god my god…

Wrapped up in the noise, it is worth reminding that this alleged descent into new chapters of state-induced racial and sexual terror is not reducible to the serial reprehensible (though completely unsurprising) tweets, assaults, and grandstanding of the new President-Elect.  There are some who understand, because their wisdom is inherited, that the terror he embodies is both long-standing and carried in the thrust of a Civilization’s futurity.  This guy was always here, he is the persona his predecessors possessed but disguised so well (though you never fooled me, you assholes), and many of those in the throes of liberal-white-people-panic know this deep down because their revulsion to him is driven by a hatred of the intimate, the familial, and maybe the same.

‘White Privilege’ Defanged: From Class War Analysis to Electoral Cynicism

by Zach Schwartz-Weinstein

Throughout the current election cycle, it has been striking to note the ways that privilege discourse has been deployed to demand loyalty to particular parties and candidates. “Either vote Clinton,” one widely-circulated tweet demands, “or admit you’re a privileged asshole.” Bernie Sanders refused to concede to Hillary Clinton because of privilege. Third party voters are privileged. “Ultraleftists” are privileged. Privilege has thus become central to a heavily moralizing language of civic responsibility which demands that the US electorate maintain a neoliberal bulwark against the far right for the putative good of the less fortunate. This use of the concept marks an appropriation, one which transforms privilege discourse fundamentally, from an analysis of white supremacy’s capillary and quotidian power into an individuating and deeply ideological mechanism of state discipline.

Hillary’s Baby, Donald’s Maybe? Reproductive Injustice in the Era of Electoral Politricks

“Black death and trauma remains central to the campaign of the Democratic Party. At the July 2016 Democratic National Convention, black mothers whose children had been killed by either police or white vigilantes, in the “Mothers of the Movement,” encouraged the public to vote for Clinton and thereby promoted her path for restoration and change. The assemblage of women who attested to Clinton’s “compassion and understanding to support grieving mothers” offers a profound illustration of the use of black female grief and trauma as a political strategy in solidifying Clinton’s connection to Black communities in general, and to Black women voters in particular.” - Jallicia Jolly

Abolitionist Democracy: Dispelling Fear and Loathing in the 2016 Campaign

by Joy James

The rivalries of candidates or parties define the political universe of US democracy. However, electoral democracy has always been in a heated contest to subdue or defeat its opponent— abolitionist democracy. Electoral democracy does not seek equity, i.e., the destruction of the master/mistress-slave relation; rather, it demarcates “winners” as free citizens from “losers” — those locked up or locked out of society and political power.  Abolitionist democracy seeks and in its most fierce expressions recognizes that structures of confinement serve as roadmaps on a fabled quest to transform the “nonhuman” or “anti-human” into the “human” citizen. That transformation of course is not what is referenced in calls to “Make America Great Again” or “Stronger Together” or assurances by the FLOTUS and POTUS that the United States still is “the greatest nation on earth.” Democracies are populated by humans (including those not fully recognized as such), hence compassion and ethics remain during election cycles. However, electoral democracy presupposes the “human” and agency to be fixed in the voter-as-citizen. Unlike electoral democracy, abolition democracy focuses upon the struggle for personhood to signify the limits of captivity and indignity, that is, it probes the boundaries of legal violence, or illegal violence enacted with general impunity. Electoral democracy maintains that the political will of the people is expressed in its elections. Abolitionist democracy can argue that the political will of (some) of the people is also expressed in police violence. Both are election campaigns and our policing campaigns are windows into national or factional political will and intent.

We Don’t Need No Education: Deschooling as an abolitionist practice

In this new essay, Sujani Reddy argues that those of us who want prison abolition must consider a call, simultaneously, to deschool society. To resist within and against education institutions, she calls for an approach of 'the undercommons': "We found ways to be in the institution but not of it, to not subordinate ourselves to its forms of recognition but instead to employ its resources in ways that were not legible or reducible to its designs or demands. We were not poster children; we were poachers."

“This photographer deserves a Pulitzer for this shot. Contrast "to protect and serve" with the reader board on the bus. #KeithLamontScott” - Matthew Robinson