Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom

The systems responsible for our oppression cannot be the same systems responsible for our liberation.

Most Black people I know trust the police—they trust them to be exactly what they have always been: violent.

Abolition, I have learned, is a bigger idea than firing cops and closing prisons; it includes eliminating the reasons people think they need cops and prisons in the first place.

Capitalism fosters sexual violence by creating categories of people who cannot leave abusive relationships, classrooms, and jobs because they do not have resources to sustain themselves.

Police manage inequality by keeping the dispossessed from the owners, the Black from the white, the homeless from the housed, the beggars from the employed. Reforms only make police polite managers of inequality. Abolition makes police and inequality obsolete.

I was inspired by their intergenerational relationships and annoyed that in the US, many of our elder Black liberals in the mainstream media condemned our music for its profane language, and young Black people too easily dismissed the messy yet rich traditions that made us possible. For many of us in the beginning, “Black Lives Matter” was a response to violence or a non-indictment; South Africa demonstrated that we deserved much more. I felt completely politically undone and inadequate. I’d been reading so much history but had not quite yet developed a political analysis connected to any tradition of organizing. I was getting smarter, not necessarily getting free.

Slavery started threatening the profits in the North’s industrial sectors and had to be stopped. Northern industry’s promise of expansion prevailed over slavery’s proven longevity, and large capitalists wanted to abolish slavery so that they could exploit the labor of free Blacks alongside poor and working-class whites. It was more profitable for companies if they hired workers and paid them a wage because workers sell their labor for income, and then use that income to purchase goods and services. Slaves had no income and could not purchase anything. Black people were a reservoir of laborers and potential consumers.

I think about capitalism as a political and economic system that categorizes groups of people for the purposes of exploiting, excluding, and extracting their labor toward the profit of another group. Those categories can consist of race, gender, disability, sexuality, immigration status, and much more.

Constitutional policing is a problem too. As the legal scholar Paul Butler explains, the overwhelming majority of police violence is constitutional. Stops, frisks, and most of the police killings that turn our stomachs are protected by Congress and the Supreme Court. I believe that people began chanting “defund the police” precisely for these reasons. Reforms cannot fix a policing system that is not broken.

Jesus and the Disinherited,

The difference between what’s legal and illegal is not the behavior of the lawbreaker; it is the interests of the powerful people who create the law /and/ have control of the police to enforce it.

The difference between what’s legal and legal is not the behavior of the lawbreaker; it is the interests of the powerful people who create the law and have control of the police to enforce it.

Campus police and street police are different strands of the same supremacy that plague our resistance.

Policing is among the vestiges of slavery, colonialism, and genocide, tailored in America to suppress slave revolts, catch runaways, and repress labor organizing.

White people in America love telling Black people to ‘go back to Africa.’ I might let these racists start fundraising to send me.” He laughed and answered, “Please keep it a secret. The first white people who found out about its beauty did not leave.

Marques was one of the few people who would run toward the fires to help others. Because of courageous people like Marques, I stopped praying to be fearless and started praying to be relentless, so that even when I am afraid, I try to move to closer to freedom.

The elder Vashon was the first Black graduate of Oberlin College, an abolitionist, and the first African American to practice law in New York.

The Department of Justice issued more than $750 million to police agencies which paid for almost seven thousand additional school cops between 1999 and 2005.

After Missouri required the police to suppress educational and religious gatherings for enslaved and free Black people in the 1840s, Black Baptist minister John Berry Meachum moved his freedom school to a steamboat on the Mississippi River where the police lacked jurisdiction to enforce state

The people who chose the police were the same people who drafted the Constitution, who started the wars, who owned slaves, who possessed property, who had the most to lose if oppressed people ever decided to revolt: wealthy white men. And rather than unifying and organizing against the concentrated wealth of this class, the rest of us have been tricked into demanding that the police protect us, too. They cannot.

Rather, police and rangers participated in mass genocide and war against Indigenous people in creating artificial borders called “states.

By solely focusing on a single alternative, we fail to examine and eradicate the harm that gives rise to what we fear. And, we deserve options. “Option” stems from the Latin optare, meaning to “choose.” Police and prisons—the default responses today—are woefully insufficient because they don’t solve harm, they simply react to it.

but I know it when I feel it. It’s the immeasurable and forced removal of our body parts, ideas, and emotions that accompanies capitalism. It’s forcing someone to work fifteen-hour days picking cotton so that you can spend your time doing what you wish. It’s the two-hour public bus rides that Amazon factory workers take so that the owner, Jeff Bezos, can travel between cities in an hour by a private jet.

Ironically, slavery became a tense debate among capitalists because slaves performed work that white people could have been paid to perform. But instead, poor white people were paid to manage enslaved Black people, as overseers, slave patrols, police, wardens, sheriffs, and prison guards. Today, the criminal legal system continues to manage people who are excluded from labor markets, education, health care, and quality housing—all of the things we need to reduce harm, and all of the things that cities and the feds choose not to fund when we can.

This is an invitation to share what I have been pushed to learn in developing the politics of abolition; this is an invitation to love, study, struggle, search, and imagine what we have around us to make this possible, today. This book’s purpose is to share the freedom dreams and real contradictions of a movement that I, that many abolitionists, hold dear, and to share how those dreams and contradictions and opportunities inspire me.

becoming abolitionists started to think about it as an invitation to create and support a range of answers to the problem of harm in society, and, most exciting perhaps, as an opportunity to reduce and eliminate harm in the first place.

After each video of a police killing goes viral, popular reforms go on tour: banning chokeholds, investing in community policing, diversifying departments—none of which would have saved Floyd or most other police victims.