What is Abolition?
Abolition is not primarily a negative strategy. It’s not primarily about dismantling, getting rid of, but it’s about re-envisioning, it’s about building anew. -Angela Davis
As abolitionists we dream of a world without harm, a world where no one is without a home, no one goes hungry and no one is thrown away or canceled. Abolitionists see people for their potential, not their past. We realize that harm is not done by crimes but by social systems that have failed people. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “Abolition requires that we change one thing: everything.” Some say what we are trying to do is impossible. What we are calling for however, is no different than climate activists who call for an end to climate change, which in order to get the climate to stop warming at 1.5 degrees (the Paris COP21 agreement) it would require the Western industrialized world to essentially be brought to an end and be recreated over. Is that impossible? Perhaps but human civilization depends upon it and as Black people in the USA our continued existence also relies upon our dreams of abolition to be brought to a reality.
Why Abolition?
The Black tradition of abolitionist started during slavery, our ancestors fought against enslavement but even after the Emancipation Declaration we never saw freedom because the 13th Amendment carried the clause that one can be enslaved as punishment for a crime. Immediately following the supposed end of slavery, you have the Black Codes which criminalized Black people for not having a job. They would either be forced to take unfair cheap labor or be arrested and put back on the plantation to work for free as punishment for their crime. Slavery never ended it just simply became renamed, we went from being called slaves to being called criminals. Fast forward to today the criminal justice system has ballooned into a Prison Industrial Complex, where there is a profit motive to lock people up and 1 in 3 Black men will go to jail during their life in the United States. There are now more Black people within the criminal injustice system, then there were enslaved. The USA is only 5% of the world’s population yet we have 25% of the world’s imprisoned people. That is why we see being anti-abolitionist to being pro slavery. Reform will not work, just like abolitionists did not call for a more humanitarian slavery, we cannot call for reforms to these violent institutions that have been corupt from the start. Instead, we work to redefine, redesign and recreate what safety is and how to create it.
As abolitionists we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, from Harriot Tubman and Sojurner Truth to Fredrick Douglas to Angela Davis. Abolition is not a movement new to Black people, abolition is a fight against slavery- of all forms- a fight we have yet to win since we were dragged onto these shores in America as enslaved people in 1619.
Resources:
If You’re New to Abolition: Study Group Guide: https://abolitionjournal.org/studyguide/#weeksix
Watch 13th to learn more about the Prison Industrial Complex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8
Critical Resistance has a toolkit of resources around abolishing the police: http://criticalresistance.org/abolish-policing/
Read Angela Davis’s book “Are Prisons Obsolete?”
Take Nikkita Oliver’s course and/or check out her recommended reading list:
https://www.nikkitaoliver.com/abolition-15-week-course
Read:The New Jim Crow Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness By Michelle Alexander
Listen to this podcast with ACLU and Andrea Ritchie:
https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/should-we-abolish-the-police/