E38: State power and abolition
Current protests fueled by the murder of George Floyd represent a reckoning with the US’s long history of racism, settler colonialism, and oppression as codified in institutions of policing and governance.
In today’s episode, Calvin and Ben explore this fraught history as a way of contextualizing recent protests against anti-Black police violence in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. We begin by referencing academic conversations about the meaning of state power, as well as some useful genealogies of the US’s race-making institutions and their relation to systems of surveillance and visibility, before ultimately turning to present questions about police and prison abolition. In looking to the past, we discuss the connections between slavery, Jim and Jane Crow segregation, urban ghettoization of Black people through redlining and other public policies, and the current epoch of mass incarceration. Finally, we think through the work of scholars and organizers who have been reimagining systems of public safety, discuss the key differences between abolition and reform, and begin to consider how those of us in higher education are positioned to work toward actual, material change, rather than mere virtue-signaling.
Works referenced in this episode
Alexander, M. (2020). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press.
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford University Press.
Agamben, G. (2008). State of exception. University of Chicago Press.
Browne, S. (2015). Dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. Duke University Press.
Clément, P. (2018). Prisons and class warfare: an interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Verso blog.
Davis, A. Y. (2011). Abolition democracy: Beyond empire, prisons, and torture. Seven Stories Press.
England, J. & Purcell, R. (2020). Higher Ed’s toothless response to the killing of George Floyd. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Fassin, D. (2019). The Police Are the Punishment. Public Culture, 31(3), 539–561.
Mbembé, J. A., & Meintjes, L. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11-40.
Lowe, L. (2015). The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press.
Schmitt, C. (2005). Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. University of Chicago Press.
Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: on blackness and being. Duke University Press.
Vitale, A. (2017). The end of policing. Verso.
Wacquant, L. (2002). From Slavery to Mass Incarceration. New Left Review, 13, 41–60.
Further resources and reading
Petition to sign: CMU, Confront Racist Policing in Our Community
Duke University Press:
NYC DSA SFWG Prison Abolition Reading Group Syllabus
Resource Guide: Prisons, Policing, and Punishment by Micah Herskind
“Yes, We Literally Mean Abolish the Police” by Mariame Kaba
Critical Resistance’s chart for distinguishing reforms from steps towards abolition:
