Abolition 101

Our host, Lamarra, leads you through an introduction to abolition. Abolition 101 will lay the groundwork for our episodes to come! 

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Podcast beats were produced by Marcus Moore. Check him out on Instagram at recklessg4b. 

Transcript

Welcome to all abolitionists, those who are new to the topic, those who are well-practiced, and those in between. This is Imagine Black’s inaugural podcast series: “Imagine Black Presents: Abolition Learnings.” Imagine Black is a non-profit based in Portland, Oregon. Our mission is to help Portland’s Black community imagine the alternatives we deserve, build our political participation, and support leadership to achieve those alternatives. You can check us out at imagineblack.org. You will find a link to the website and corresponding social media pages in the show notes.

This is Episode 1. Let’s think of this episode as an introduction to abolition. My name is Lamarra, my pronouns are she, her, and hers. I work at Imagine Black, as an advocacy manager with a focus on abolition. I came to abolition several years ago through community organizing, reading, and witnessing. I will be your host.

The beat you heard at the top of the episode, and all our podcast music was produced by Marcus Moore, a Portland-based artist, and producer. His moniker is Regular Marcus, and his Instagram handle is @recklessg4b. His social media info will also be in the show notes. Alright, let’s get into it! 

“Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions”

• Ruth Wilson Gilmore

“We teach life after they have built their settlements and apartheid walls, after the last skies. / We teach life, sir.” 

• Rafeef Ziadah 

Abolition requires learning, practicing, and struggling in community. I have garnered insights from the works of adrienne maree brown, Dr. Angela Y. Davis, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. I have learned from the poems of Rafeef Ziadah, the prose of Toni Morrison, the organizing of Alyssa Pariah, and the unnamed truth seekers and speakers in my family who were lost to The depths of the Atlantic, those who struggled in the yolk of bondage under the sweltering Jamaican sun, and those who escaped establishing independent communities. 

During the summer of 2020, the national and global uprisings for Black Lives hurled the word abolition into the mainstream lexicon. A word that many people had only ever associated with the abolition of chattel slavery had now been reanimated outside the pages of dusty textbooks. But the question still lingers -- what does abolition mean in today?

Before we dive into the meaning of abolition in today’s world, I want us to get rooted. Rooted in understanding the history of chattel slavery and abolition in the U.S. As I previously mentioned, for most of us who went to school here in the United States, we often associate the term “abolition” with the ending of chattel slavery. This association isn’t wrong, but it tells an incomplete story.

Charlene Carruthers, a Black, queer feminist community organizer, and author teaches us that incomplete stories create incomplete solutions that prohibit us from connecting current struggles to their predecessors. The struggle for the abolition of chattel is connected to today’s struggle for the abolition of the Prison Industrial Complex or PIC. Critical Resistance, a national organization struggling for the abolition of the PIC describes the PIC as  “the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social, and political problems.” We will revisit the PIC later on in the episode.  

The dominant narrative in the United States asserts that after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, the institution of slavery ended. However, this is a falsehood in many regards, folks who celebrate Juneteenth know what I am talking about. 

Juneteenth is a holiday celebrating the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. Juneteenth is celebrated annually on June 19th, which corresponds to June 19th, 1865, the day the Union Army made it to Galveston Texas, announcing the end of slavery and freedom for all who were enslaved, 2 years 6 months and 18 days after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. 

Vice’s documentary “The Slavery Detective of the South,” highlights the work of genealogist Antoinette Harrell who is sometimes called the “Slavery Detective of the South.” Harrell finds and investigates cases of modern-day slavery and abusive labor practices that happened after the Civil War. Antoinette’s first case was of Ms. Mae Louise Miller, who, along with her family were enslaved until 1961, almost a 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. It is important to note the Miller family were held against their will and subject to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and murder at the hands of the white folks who insisted they were still property. The Miller family’s story is all too common across the rural remote areas of the deep South. 

Maybe you are thinking “Well after the Emancipation Proclamation, Congress passed and then ratified the 13th Amendment. So, obviously, Lamarra, the country abolished slavery.” Yes, this is correct, however, even though the 13th amendment, ended the formal institution of chattel slavery, it created an exception.

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

So, what was freedom for the formerly enslaved in a country that wanted to eradicate Black people if they could not be under the yolk of bondage? In the words of W.E.B Du Bois, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” Across the South, new laws, called Black Codes, were passed by state legislatures to ensure that Black  people were still in a position of peonage even without the formal label of “slave.” Black Codes were remixed from their predecessors, slave codes.

At their core, Black Codes were intended to continue the availability of free labor to the state, white plantation owners, and corporations (when I say “the state”, I am referring to the government and the services it provides or does not and the frameworks used to provide those services). Slave codes were created to enshrine into law the inferior status of enslaved people in contrast to their free counterparts; under the law enslaved people were considered property rather than full human beings. Slave codes ensured that the offspring of an enslaved woman would always be enslaved, despite the caste status of the father. Enslaved people could not own land. Their testimonies in court were inadmissible against white people. The brutal, traumatic, and systematic separation of Black families was codified into slave codes. 

Like slave codes, Black Codes varied from state to state. Under Black Codes formerly enslaved people were prohibited from owning certain types of property and prohibited from working certain jobs. In court procedures, the testimonies of Black people were only admissible in cases concerning other Black people. Mainly Black Codes targeted vagrancy “crimes” like homelessness and joblessness  They also continued the brutal separation of Black families. For example, a Black person arrested for, say loitering, could be arrested, taken to court, and imprisoned. Imprisonment meant back-breaking labor under dehumanizing conditions. If the arrestee had children in their care, “apprenticeship laws” allowed for these children to be rented out as laborers. 

I use these examples to show you that after the abolition of chattel slavery in the United States a different system of subjugation developed. After the abolition of chattel slavery, state legislatures created and implemented laws that continued to exploit the labor of formerly enslaved people. We begin to see thousands of Black people barred from democracy bound to labor camps, prisons, and plantation life. Over time, Black Codes would develop into Jim Crow laws.

Given the material reality (an aside when I say material reality or material outcome I mean the visible, tangible, real impacts). Material realities influence how our societies function and influence our histories, present, and future. The material reality of chattel slavery included laws that ensured that enslaved people and by extension Black people could be and were violated, maimed, sexually exploited, tortured, and traumatized. This abuse occurred to control the labor of enslaved people , again, and by extension Black people. This abuse was systemic with no legitimate avenues for recourse. As a society, we tend to think that our ideals are what create our historical understanding and present reality. For example: as a society, we often think that bad people do bad things and so they are arrested and go to jail. However, by using a historical materialist perspective we have learned that crimes and criminality are not dictated by how “good” or “bad” someone is. In reality, the desires of the state to control populations plays a major role in dictating what is considered a crime and who is considered criminal. 

Since material realities create the historical context we live in, which further influences the present we must understand abolition on a material and historical continuum. Although systems of subjugation have never encompassed all Black people (even during chattel slavery there were free people), we must acknowledge that as long as an unjust system subjugates one person that is one person too many. 

We are going to take a little music break before switching gears. In the second half of the pod, I want us to get into and dissect two main things: 1) the incorrect notion that policing is a response to violent crime and 2) the ways that policing and specifically the War on Drugs have adapted themselves to create a modern-day set of Black Codes. 

Now that we have been rooted. Let's revisit the definition of the PIC or Prison industrial complex. Critical Resistance describes the PIC as  “the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social, and political problems. PIC abolition is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance while creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.” 

Ooof, that is a big definition. If you are newer to the abolitionist struggle the definition may bring up feelings of confusion or resistance, which is normal. We have been told incomplete stories and in many cases we have just been lied to. Stories in which policing and prisons are society’s answer to rising levels of violent crime and the need to “protect and serve,” we, the people. In reality, policing in the United States was born from the need to control the labor of enslaved African people, and to expel Indigenous people from the America envisioned by European colonists.

Okay, now we are ready to dissect the prevalent, albeit, false, claim that policing and prisons were created as a solution to rising levels of violent crime. 

In her seminal work “The New Jim Crow,” Michelle Alexander shows us that mass incarceration in the United States, like slavery, Black Codes, and Jim Crow laws before it, continues a system of subjugation, criminalization, and marginalization of primarily Black people. In “The New Jim Crow,” Alexander explains that although violent crime has been declining since the 1970s, policing and the prison population continues to increase. The War on Drugs, which started in the 1970s and is still ongoing, led to an explosion of incarceration rates in the U.S. Out of the so-called War on Drugs, emerge paramilitary units to fight this war - Special Weapons and Tactics or SWAT teams. In Portland, the Portland Police Bureau, or PPB, has their SERT team, Special Emergency Reaction Team which functions as a SWAT team they just use a different acronym.

According to a 2006 report from the Cato institute “the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU reported that 7 percent of SWAT deployments were for hostage situations or barricaded shooters. In short, the majority of the time SWAT teams are violently raiding homes mostly for nonviolent offenses. In the process of these raids they destroy property, often kill pets, and sometimes injure or kill people 

This material reality interrupts our idealist understanding of policing and the militarization of police departments across the country. Folks who have been in Portland or have seen Portland on the news, over the past year with the uprisings for Black lives, definitely have an understanding of what a militarized police force can do. The reality is that these paramilitary units are creating violent situations as opposed to interrupting violence.

The United States accounts for 4.4 percent of the world’s population. Disturbingly 25 percent of the world's prison population resides in the United States. Even in contrast to more authoritarian regimes, the United States incarcerates more of its population and more of its racial minorities than any other country in the world. According to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP: in 2014, African Americans made up  2.3 million, or 34%, of the incarcerated population. However, African-Americans comprise only 13% of the United States population.

The numbers don’t add up. With an idealist perspective, we may be inclined to believe that Black folks have a propensity for crime. When we take a material perspective, which is also an anti-racist perspective, we realize that white supremacy and anti-blackness have produced a system in which Black people (and other people forced into society's margins) are deemed criminal and constantly having to contend with the predetermined label of “criminal.” 

You may be wondering how police departments are able to commit so much harm and not face accountability. Our prisons reflect a huge racial disparity. So what’s the deal? Again, we point to the material reality. 

Going back to, “The New Jim Crow,” Michelle Alexander explains that after the wins of the Civil Rights movement, the country still desired to subjugate Black people. However, the overt racism of segregationists had fallen out of favor. The need to create new laws, essentially new Black Codes, was realized. These new Black Codes would continue to mostly target Black people. As we hashed out earlier, the so-called War on Drugs served as a vehicle for the subjugation. Police departments serve as the first-line enforcers of a War, primarily waged against Black and poor folks. Policing doesn’t explicitly target Black people, like there are no “Black codes on the books, but the material outcomes do. Black people being arrested at higher rates, incarcerated for longer than folks from different racial groups when they have committed the same or lesser offenses. The material reality shows us that anti-Blackness runs rampant, even after decades of criminal justice reform. 

Let’s jump back in time. Under slave codes, enslaved people, who were always Black under the institution of chattel slavery, were not people but property, machines made to labor, they had no protections under the law could be abused with no recourse, it is hard to seek recourse when your exploitation is sanctioned by the state.

 Under Black Codes, Black people were almost always in violation of some law, in particular vagrancy laws. Under these laws, thousands of Black people were arrested and sentenced to prison labor via the convict leasing system. Under the convict leasing system, prisoners were rented as laborers (essentially slaves) sometimes to the plantations that had formerly been their place of bondage as well as, corporations, brickyards, sawmills, and other state and private entities. 

When Black folks assert that they built this country, it is because every faction of enterprise in the United States has exploited Black labor to reap its profit and product. In the early days of the nation, slave labor was used to build and expand roads and other infrastructure, shout out to Harvard and Yale. In the midst of the CoronaVirus Pandemic, prisoners, most of whom are Black, have made hand sanitizer and personal protective equipment or PPE. Items that our society has desperately needed. Even though prisoners do not have access to these items. Hand sanitizer, because it contains alcohol is considered contraband in most prisons and jails across the country. The United States has a history of calling on the labor of prisoners when it is needed and a history of never seeking restitution for the damages it has caused to the communities who have been impacted by the carceral system

In his book “One Dies, Get Another”, Matthew J. Mancini describes the horror of the convict leasing system highlighting that its brutality rivaled that of chattel slavery. As the title implies if a laborer died they could easily be replaced by another. Because the state constantly criminalized Black bodies, laborers were always available. 

Black Codes gave way to the system of Jim Crow and the continued subjugation of Black people. From chattel slavery to Jim Crow the violence of the state against Black bodies was always coupled with white vigilante violence. The state often worked in conjunction with white vigilantes. For instance, in Portland, OR, in the 1920s, a time of great economic disparity (similar to now) between the wealthy and the poor, Portland Police Bureau deputized 100 Klansmen, effectively making them police officers. This trend happened across the country. 

We have collectively seen the rise of white supremacists and white nationalist vigilante violence in the past 4 years. On January 6th the United States Capitol was sieged. White nationalist groups, like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, as well as off-duty police officers, military veterans, active-duty military, and firefighters participated in the siege. Here we see a present-day example of folks who represent the state colluding with white nationalism and supremacy.

In our current “post-racial” society, hopefully, you can hear the sarcasm in my voice, we do not inhabit post-racial anything, slave codes, Black Codes, and Jim Crow laws no longer fit into our collective sensibilities. But through things like the “drug courier profiles'' utilized by the Drug Enforcement Agency, or DEA, and local law enforcement agencies stopping Black people who look suspicious, whether they are simply standing on a sidewalk, driving a car that is too nice or too beat up, or walking too fast or too slow, is justifiable. Disproportionately the people stopped and surveilled under these profiles are Black, Indigenous, People of Color. The people stopping and surveilling them are police officers.  

So, now we know that the abolition of the PIC includes obvious targets like policing and prisons. And perhaps less obvious ones, like our idealist thinking of policing and prisons and institutions we associate with being caring, for instance, schools. A commitment to an abolitionist framework requires us to question our own need to be punitive, Why is it our default response to remove other human beings from the community? 

• Why is it our default to isolate a misbehaving child from the family unit?
• Why do our schools disproportionately penalize the laughter and curiosity of Black and Brown children, removing them from the classroom? Sending them to the principal's office, suspending them from school, arresting them, teaching them, essentially, that schools are not a safe place for them, but a place in which they can be sent on a trajectory towards imprisonment. 

There are many “whys.” From what we have covered earlier in the episode we know that one “why” is white supremacy and another is anti-Blackness, which work in conjunction. Another is the need to control labor. Black feminist thinker and scholar belle hooks would label the major “why” as, imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. In the past 5 years Black trans actress and activist, Laverne Cox, has expanded on hooks’ phrase to encompass gender and sexual oppression making the major “why,” heteronormative, imperialist, capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy. 

If the words sound complicated, that’s okay we are going to break them down. 

• First, heteronormative is the belief that heterosexuality is the default or normal expression of sexual orientation. It asserts that there are only two distinct and opposite genders, man and woman. Heteronormativity also conflates sex with gender. Arguing that if you are born with certain genitalia you are assigned to a certain gender for the rest of your life. We know that sex exists on a spectrum as well as gender. For instance, numerous Indigenous societies from Africa to the Americas recognized, revered, and honored members of society who were outside of the European gender binary of man and woman. 
• Two, imperialism. Imperialism refers to the policy and practice of extending rule over peoples and other countries. For instance, the imperialism of the United States is embodied in military presence across the world. According to Politico, the U.S. has 800 military bases in over 70 countries and territories. In contrast, Britain, France, and Russia have a combined total of 30 foreign bases. This is an example of hard power. Imperialism can also be embodied in soft power; an example of soft power is the idea that the U.S. is the best country in the world and as such has the right to interfere in the political affairs of other countries. The U.S. has played a key role in destabilizing numerous nations. Iraq, Chili, Haiti, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to name a few. 
• Three, capitalism. Teen Vogue's 2020 article “What 'Capitalism' Is and How It Affects People,” by Kim Kelly gives a comprehensive definition of capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system in which a country’s trade, industry, and profits are controlled by private companies, instead of by the people whose time and labor powers those companies. Let’s use chattel slavery as a way to understand capitalism. Under chattel slavery the time, labor, and expertise of enslaved Africans powered plantations, which were essentially private companies. Enslaved people were prohibited from owning the means of production (i.e. their labor which produced profit for the plantation owner). A more current example, let’s say a CEO of a company, for instance, they do not perform the labor that leads to the profit of the company. Jeff Bezos isn’t the one delivering our packages, nor is he the one sorting the packages in the warehouse, yet he reaps the greatest profit from the company, although his labor is not the labor that keeps the company going. 
• Four, white supremacy. White supremacy is the belief that white people are the superior race and should be able to dominate and exclude others. White supremacist exclusion happens to varying degrees, depending on how close or far away certain groups are to the ideal of whiteness. It is worth noting that people within the same racial group are impacted by white supremacy in nuanced ways. Here’s a basic example, under white supremacy a dark-skinned person of African ancestry is further away from the ideal of whiteness than, say, a lighter-skinned person who is also of African ancestry. Both people are excluded under white supremacy and the ways in which they are excluded and experience that exclusion will be nuanced. 
• Five, patriarchy, quoting bell hooks, patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that people assigned male at birth are inherently dominating and superior to those who are deemed weaker than them (i.e. women, children, and nature, which under white supremacist patriarchy is gendered as “woman”). Patriarchy functions within the gender and sexual binary and also violates transgender, gender non-conforming, and queer people in general. 

Now that we have defined the “whys” let’s talk about what abolitionists are doing to challenge the PIC, which functions out of heteronormative, imperialist, capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy. 

Over the past year, you may have heard calls to defund the police hashtag, defund the police (#DeFundThePolice). The defund movement that gained steam last year is an example of an abolitionist strategy. Sparked by the police murders of George Floyd, Breona Taylor, and Tony McDade and continued police violence during a pandemic that is particularly devastating to Black people due to medical racism. Community organizers, activists, organizations, like Imagine Black, and individuals began calling for the defunding of police bureaus across the nation. 

Abolitionists focused on the defund movement because we understand that police interaction is often the first step for folks to enter the criminal justice system or the criminal injustice system. In Portland we demanded a $50 million cut to the Portland Police Bureau's budget, we won a $15 million cut. We also got School Resource Officers (just a fancy way of saying cops) out of our public schools. If you visit Imagine Black’s website, imagineblack.org, you will see a list of our demands and a list of some of the things we won. 

But, and, the struggle continues. Many people say “well, you can’t just abolish the police, there has to be something there.” Let’s remember that this is a recycled talking point, often used by people who want to continue the status quo of subjugation. It was used by proponents of chattel slavery to deter abolitionists from struggling to end the institution and it was also used by segregationists to deter folks from struggling to end Jim Crow. 

Abolitionists have always advocated for places where police funding can be reallocated. For example, the “Defund Police” movement in Portland advocates for cutting the Portland Police budget and using those funds for our schools, mental health crisis response teams that do not carry weapons and are trained in trauma informed and culturally responsive ways , they also call for programming and infrastructure that permanently houses people. We advocate for life building and life-affirming institutions. Abolitionists, we teach life. 

According to a City of Portland presentation, 78.1% of Portland Police Bureau’s core patrol services does not address “criminal” activity. This paired with PPBs continued abuse of overtime, brutalization of protestors indiscriminate use of tear gas especially during BLM protests (note that protests led by Proud Boys and other white nationalist groups have not been met with the same level of force) (also note this is not a solicitation for increased police to violence, I am simply highlighting a double standard), the Gun Violence Reduction team’s history of racially profiling Black Portlanders, the fact that the top paid officer of 2019 to 2020 is a known Nazi sympathizer grossing over $100,000 for that pay cycle, and PPB’s low clearance rates (clearance rates refer to how many crimes a police department actually solves, so how many crimes they clear). In 2018, the Willamette Week reported that the PPB only cleared 18 percent of their rape cases. 

Based on the material outcomes produced by PPB, we see that we have a case for abolition. 

As, abolitionists know that as people we commit harm against other people. We have found ourselves in a place where we solve that harm by locking people away and removing them from community. When they return to community they are continually ostracized and othered. Transformative justice practices argue that more times than not we can address harm in ways that are healing, transformative, instead of carceral. 

In Portland, our public schools disproportionately suspend, expel, and punish Black and Indigenous students. The effects of criminalization for Black and Indigenous students in schools makes them more likely than their white counterparts to drop out and get sucked into the criminal justice system, a  phenomenon called the school to prison pipeline. If a child is undocumented being caught up in the criminal justice system can lead to their deportation, this phenomenon is called the school to prison to deportation pipeline. 

I emigrated to Portland, OR at the age of 7, from Kingston, Jamaica. I attended grades three to 12 in Portland Public Schools. As a college student, I worked in different schools, sometimes with the same teachers I had myself. I saw first hand how  Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students were punished more severely than their white counterparts for the same or lesser offenses. A 2018 to 2019 Oregon Department of Education report grading public schools indicates how often Black Oregonians are viewed as troublemakers before they reach adulthood—they are disciplined at twice the rate of their white counterparts while attending K-12 schools. 

It seems that our schools are ripe for opportunities for practicing transformative justice. 

As we move through the rest of this podcast series, we will further explore abolition through the lens of our schools. The first episode, this one, was about laying a wider historical framework for abolitionist struggle and getting us to start thinking more like abolitionists. 

Remember to visit Imagine Black at imagineblack.org and check out our social media pages. The show notes will include a link to those pages.

Our next podcast episode airs on Thursday, March 25. In the next episode, you will learn more about Imagine Black, our mission, programming, and what brought the organization to an abolitionist perspective. 

Remember, abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions, as abolitionists we teach life.

Thanks so much for listening. 

Peace.