The prison system and the policing practices that undergird it shape cultures of families in very particular and devastating ways. Incarceration can trigger permanent loss of parental rights not to mention being compelled to bear children while bound in chains suitable only for the coffle and the barracoon. Incarceration for many introduces and for others […]
Category: Abolition Statements
Abolitionist RealPolitik on a Womanist Platter: Ode to the SHEroes – Jallicia Jolly
[image: a Haitian cultural performance on coping with trauma, by dancer Veronique Ignace] From Lionheart Gyals and Downtown Ladies to ‘Welfare Queens’ and ‘Pappa’s Maybes’, I am directly from the lineage of revolutionary WOMANcestors. Bursting from delicate wombs of black goddesses, we rise with grace from trenches of despair. Birthing compassionate intolerance amidst dynamic dehumanization, […]
Notes against & beyond Our Carceral Regime: Erica Meiners on Abolition
Sex offender registries and community notification laws, like prisons, often mask origins or forms of violence. Yet the persistent response: What will be built to replace prisons? obscures the harm and ineffectiveness of our carceral regime. This question also demands from those who engage in critique a response or a “solution.” If not registries, then […]
Abolition Statements, A Collection
Here are all of the Abolition Statements published to date, in one place (by order published, as of 13 October, 2015): Long Live John Africa!: Mumia Abu-Jamal on Abolition The only moral response to slavery is abolition: Jeannie Alexander on Abolition In this struggle, art is my crucible: Amanda Priebe on Abolition 7 Lessons in 1 Abolitionist […]
I claim abolition as method and politic – Jasmine Yarish on Abolition
Growing up female in poor, rural, white, Appalachia Pennsylvania, I was taught to avoid politics. Going into my undergraduate education as a first-generation college student, I also had little exposure to philosophy and critical thought. My first real step towards abolition as a politics and an epistemology came during my third year at college in […]
I am not searching for perfection: Maisha Jahzara on Abolition
Abolition has brought me to become involved in helping those who are unable to defend themselves against those who by choice oppress individuals for their own fulfillment. Slavery and mass incarceration are examples of such oppression which is done whether a person is guilty or not. In some cases, those who were convicted of a crime […]
Prisons and universities are two sides of the same coin: Eli Meyerhoff on Abolition
Popular narratives portray society as made up of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people. Figures of the citizen, the worker, and the graduate are contrasted with the deviant, the criminal, and the dropout. For the safety of ‘good’ people, we are supposed to put ‘bad’ people in separate places. When they are younger, those stigmatized as ‘bad kids’—as […]
Dismantling the architectures of global apartheid: Konstantin Kilibarda on Abolition
In North America—where I live as a settler and guest in Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee lands—abolition means confronting settler-colonial realities, the prison-industrial complex, legacies of slavery, exclusionary migration regimes, and the violent bordering, confining, and ghettoizing practices that are part of this landscape. Coming from the Balkans, abolition also means challenging internalized nationalism, as well as […]
The production of freedom and liberation from within collective rebellion, insurgency, and community: Dylan Rodríguez on Abolition
Let us not sever abolition from the people who inhabit and constantly remake it, over the course of an apocalypse that remains uncontained. Abolitionists are the people who imagine, practice, wage, and thrill in the radical and irrevocable destruction of things for sake of something/anything else, whether it’s the end of things as we know […]
Fighting for freedom in ways we may have never imagined: Stefanie Gude on Abolition
Handcuffed in her own home by “border security” cops, the single mother of a baby girl who had five minutes to choose whether to bring her “citizen” child with her to jail or have her separated from her mama for the first time since birth. The Indigenous warrior and father of four, locked up for […]
Abolition is a call to throw ourselves full force into the struggle: Dan Berger on Abolition
Abolition and the Evolving Pursuit of Freedom Abolition reminds us to pursue freedom. It names the systems that thrive on a lack of freedom—white supremacy and settler-colonialism, patriarchy and heteronormativity, capitalism and debt. It critiques the violent forces that structure unfreedom—police and prisons, borders and the death penalty. And it pushes us to think and […]
Abolition is a praxis that never compromises the integrity of Black liberation: Damien Sojoyner on Abolition
Freedom. A freedom informed by the social vision of the Black radical imagination. Framed by the tenets of love, compassion and communal fellowship, the social vision of the Black radical imagination represents a path to undo multifaceted relationships to power and forge new connections. Such a social vision is centered in the practical and political understanding […]
These are the moments in which another world becomes possible: Lisa Guenther on Abolition
Abolition is both a negative process of dismantling oppressive structures and a positive process of imagining, creating, and sustaining the sort of relationships, practices, and institutions that would make oppressive structures obsolete. Abolition is not a telos, if by telos one means the end of a process that is eventually completed, once and for all. […]
We cannot reform away oppression. It must be abolished: Brian Lovato on Abolition
Abolition is both a way of seeing the world and a way of being in and acting in the world. For me, it means understanding the connections between settler colonialism, the carceral state, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, racialized capitalism, etc. But it is also a recognition of our responsibility to act upon these interconnected institutions of […]
Political imagination at work: Jaime Amparo Alves on Abolition
I see Abolition as both a social praxis and a utopian project. As a social praxis, it asks us the insurgent question of how to respond to state terror against black communities without making concession to the language of peace and rights that requires a loyalty to the state. As a utopian project, it requires […]
