Abolitionist politics continue to evolve in response to the ways racial capitalism exploits, oppresses and commits violence through uneven racial development. As environmental relations have always been part of this, in this short essay, Nik Heynen starts to grapple with what an “abolition ecology” would look like.
– by Alexandre Publia –
Students in South Africa demanded that Rhodes Must Fall. They led nationwide protests for education and social reform. What must fall in California?
The Rhodes Must Fall collective (RMF), which is overwhelmingly led by marginalized, Black university students, has demanded more than institutional “transformation.” Instead, they have consistently demanded total “decolonization”: a radical abolition and re-imagination of entire social structures. Other university students, like those in CA and across the U.S., have much to learn from RMF.
– by David C. Turner III –
Critical Black Youth Politics takes all forms of resistance into account, & suggests that riots are just as important for democratic repair as nonviolent civil disobedience. … Black youth are engaging in forms of activism that deeply connect systems of oppression, especially how these systems are monetized, and no singular theoretical analysis can possibly capture all of it. Our youth are giving us new ways to re-imagine and think about the world: it’s about time we pay attention.
– by Ahmad Greene-Hayes –
Even as white liberals cry and lament Trump with more fervor than they would ever mourn Tamir Rice, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and Sandra Bland; or cry with and for our indigenous co-laborers in North Dakota; or even our Latinx kin who have been deported under Obama’s regime, what is undoubtedly apparent to those of us who have been living under white nationalism is that white tears will not save us, nor will white Jesus, nor will white liberals, nor will white Evangelicals. What will save us, though, is a doing away with whiteness writ-large.
– by Jaime Amparo Alves –
Trump’s election, as much as the Brazilian parliamentary coup, are not signals of democracy’s dysfunctionality, but rather quite the contrary. Trumpism is the product of democracy’s vitality, not its bankruptcy. If that is the case, the route to black liberation begins by giving up faith in liberal democracy. The abolitionist praxis would have to be translated into pedagogical strategies in the classroom, in the workplace, and on the streets to demystify the political establishment as inherently anti-black.
– 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.
– by Tryon P. Woods –
One of the reasons why the 2016 campaign and selection will be largely inconsequential to abolitionism and black liberation is that antiblackness is entrenched in the very places that present themselves as anti-racist and multicultural: Slave traders who rock the mic in Hamilton and Clinton apologies for mass incarceration.
– Tryon P. Woods –
The point of considering election season through the abolitionist politic of black studies is not the humdrum one that presidential candidates cannot be taken at their word, but rather that containing black self-determination remains essential to campaign cover stories into the twenty-first century. In 2016, once again, sexual violence and sexual racism hide in plain sight, with blackness the interstitial element.