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† Criminal InJustice is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, and author of The School-to- Prison Pipeline: Education, Discipline and Racialized Double Standards, is the Editor of CI. Kay Whitlock, co-author of Queer (In)Justice and Considering Hate, is co-founder of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.
Translation/Abolition
editor’s comments from nancy a heitzeg
I originally wrote these words and linked Davis’ work two years ago — when the heat of frenzied hashtags and so many names and so many calls for prosecution seemed overwhelming:
The Personal is Political they say, and so, at root, it is. But this truth is not self-evident; the individual stories must always lead back to the structures that collectively oppress.
And this requires:
Exposition. Connection. Translation.
And this is still true. I was drawn again to these words and the long haul view of systemic change by the accelerating social media hydraulic that produces branded clicks for the same stories/same solutions, the slow grind of court cases that split hairs over degrees of cruelty, the early and inevitable failure of “reforms” such as body cameras. and the uprising in Milwaukee that is met with recycled rhetoric from 1992.
Still, if you log off and look hard, there are signs that the terrain is shifting, that collectives – in real and virtual space – are demanding justice outside the system, not from it. Abolition has become more possible, at least the consideration of it is no longer dismissed off hand as taboo. Just yesterday — and so much more often — No BackSpace: The Case for Abolishing the Police:
If the police as an institution are descended historically from the enforcement apparatus of slavery, as KRS-1 reminded us, then the historic response to that problem, abolition, shouldn’t be off the menu at least as a guiding principle. It’s hard to dismiss the nonstop parade of police brutality videos, federal consent decrees and corruption scandals. Police, as an institution, has in many ways proven itself unreformable. This is of course a frightening and politically-charged strain of thinking for many, including more mainstream reformers. But perhaps that’s the point. In order to shake ourselves out of the cyclical routine of outrage-followed-by-reform, it’s time to think much more radically and fundamentally than ever before.
Exposition. Connection. Translation.
And #Onward.
Angela Davis – How Does Change Happen?
Angela Davis speaks about the habits of thinking and imagination that have historically constituted social movements and social change. She encourages people to adopt a “critical posture” towards the tools, concepts, vocabularies and organizing practices that characterize landscapes of struggle – including the conditions under which leadership develops and victories are achieved; the erasure of community organizers, particularly women, from narratives of progressive social change; the dangers of heroic individualism; and weak notions of “diversity” that leave structures of injustice and inequality intact.
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