Juneteenth: A Marxist Perspective

By Scott Cooper

Republished from Left Voice.

The United States, like all of the Americas, was built on the backs of enslaved labor, by the labor of people ripped from their homelands and brought to stolen lands. On Juneteenth, we celebrate the emancipation of the last of the enslaved Black people in the United States, as well as remember and commit to fight against the legacy of slavery. In the midst of the current uprising, this is more important than ever.

Socialists have a long history of fighting against slavery. Karl Marx, who wrote extensively about the Civil War and slavery in the United States, made it abundantly clear that enslaved Black people in North America had to be free before all the wage slaves of the working class could be free of exploitation.

Marx and the Abolition of Slavery

The materialist conception of history developed by Marx explains that human society progresses through different stages that are characterized by the material conditions of production. The Union states represented a more progressive stage in which capitalism was developing the productive forces and in which Black people were not held in bondage. The Confederacy remained in a backward stage, with vestiges of property relations that had long been overturned in Europe. The capitalists waging a war to free slaves from their bondage, with the support of the Northern working class, was to Marx, therefore, progressive.

In a letter from London dated December 10, 1861, Marx made clear that the “slavery question” was “the question underlying the whole Civil War.” Marx was a staunch supporter of a Union victory in the Civil War, and not because he supported the Northern capitalists. He argued against those who advocated simply letting the South’s secession stand and letting the Confederacy constitute itself as a new country. Marx vehemently opposed the Southern slavocracy, which profited from the hyper-exploitation of Black people and worsened conditions for workers and oppressed people as a whole. Slavery’s place was the dustbin of history. To Marx, there could be no emancipation for the proletariat while slavery continued to exist. 

Marx also made clear that the fight to free enslaved Black people in America was inextricably linked to the fight to free the entire working class from what he called wage slavery — working people having to sell their labor for 8, 10, 12 hours a day in order to survive. The fight to crush the Confederacy, for Marx, was not about the “dissolution of the Union,” but against what he saw as the true objective of the slavocracy: 

[R]eorganization on the basis of slavery, under the recognized control of the slaveholding oligarchy … The slave system would infect the whole Union. In the Northern states, where Negro slavery is in practice unworkable, the white working class would gradually be forced down to the level of helotry. This would fully accord with the loudly proclaimed principle that only certain races are capable of freedom, and as the actual labor is the lot of the Negro in the South, so in the North it is the lot of the German and the Irishman, or their direct descendants.

Revolutionary socialists view Juneteenth through the prism of Marx’s analysis. Abolishing slavery was a revolutionary act to free Black people from the most brutal bondage. It was also a victory for the working class as a whole. Marx said it directly:

The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labor. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side-by-side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.

Marx saw the defeat of the slave system as a prerequisite for building a revolutionary struggle to overturn capitalism. If humanity was to advance, a social and economic order based on slavery had to be destroyed everywhere.

The Road to Juneteenth

Before the Civil War broke out, there had already been numerous slave rebellions and insurrections in the United States. Documentary evidence suggests at least 250 uprisings or attempted uprisings involving 10 or more slaves, beginning in the 16th century. In 1800, an enslaved man by the name of Gabriel (now known as Gabriel Prosser) planned a large slave rebellion in the area of Richmond, Virginia — but news got out and he and 25 of his followers were hanged. Prosser had learned to read, and the Virginia legislature henceforth prohibited educating slaves who might, like Gabriel, be inclined to use their skills for similar purposes. Another enslaved man in Charleston, South Carolina named Denmark Vesey was executed in 1822 for planning a slave revolt in that city. In 1831, a rebellion of fugitive slaves led by Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia, killed more than 50 white people but was put down after a few days; Turner went into hiding but was discovered more than two months later. Some 21 of the rebels were hanged and another 16 were sold away from the region.

Such slave insurrections were a prelude to the Civil War. The war itself was full of Black soldiers and sailors. In fact, by war’s end, roughly 179,000 Black men had served as soldiers in the U.S. Army — accounting for about 10 percent of the total forces — and another 19,000 served in the Navy. The Civil War took the lives of nearly 40,000 soldiers, three-fourths of whom died not in combat but from infections or disease.

These combatants served bravely and were clearly a vital component of the Union war effort. Among them were the enlisted members of the famous 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Many enslaved Black people who ran away from Southern plantations to Union encampments enlisted in the Army to fight against their former owners — with weapons supplied to them by the U.S. government. These actions by Black slaves forced President Abraham Lincoln’s hand. Originally, Lincoln insisted the war was not about slavery — despite every document of the Confederacy making clear the exact opposite — but an effort to save the Union. But as former slaves rose up against their masters and joined the war effort, Lincoln could either embrace them as allies in the war or continue to risk both a bloody war and a more widespread slave rebellion. Due to the actions of runaway slaves, Lincoln chose the former. 

Over a year into the war, on September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which would go into effect on the following January 1. It declared that enslaved Black peoples in the Confederate states were free. If they escaped across Union lines or were liberated by the advancing Union Army, they were permanently free. Of course, the Union went on to defeat the Confederacy — at the cost of between 620,000 and 750,000 lives. 

The proclamation wasn’t a full emancipation, even formally. It applied only to the 3.5 million slaves in the 10 states of the Confederacy and to all segments of the executive branch of the U.S. government, including the Army and Navy. It excluded the border slave states. It left a half-million enslaved people in bondage. But the fact that the proclamation was issued encouraged all those in slavery to rise up and fight, as well as to join the Union forces. This depleted the Confederacy’s labor force, which hurt the production of arms for the South’s rebellion.

The Emancipation Proclamation also brought to a halt the Confederacy’s campaign to win recognition from European countries, particularly England and France — both countries that were officially anti-slavery. But English textile mills needed Southern cotton; consequently capitalist pressure to recognize the Confederate States of America and open full trade was strong. Lincoln’s proclamation made it impossible for anyone to pretend that the war was about anything other than slavery, and the mill owners were forced to back down.

Put simply, the Emancipation Proclamation was a public commitment by the United States to end slavery. It killed the Fugitive Slave Laws and outlawed the return of escaped slaves to the South. It was a manifestation of the slave revolt, with Northern support, the South had always feared.

Of course, enforcement depended in large part on Union advances through the Confederate states — which brings us to Juneteenth.

June 19, 1865

Texas was the westernmost part of the Confederacy, having been stolen from Mexico just 20 years before. Its geographic isolation largely shielded it from the battles of the Civil War, and over the course of the war Texas filled with slaveholders who moved to escape the fighting across the Deep South. They brought their human property with them — some to work on newly acquired or established farms, but others to be domestic servants in cities such as Houston and Galveston. There were about 250,000 people in enslavement in Texas by 1865.

It took many weeks for news of the April 9, 1865 surrender by Robert E. Lee to reach Texas, and even longer — until June 2 — for the Confederate Army of the Trans-Mississippi to surrender. On June 18, 2,000 U.S. troops arrived at Galveston Island to occupy Texas for the federal government, under the command of Union Army General Gordon Granger. The next day, he stood on the balcony of the Ashton Villa and read aloud General Order No. 3:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

This was the first news of the Emancipation Proclamation that those enslaved in Galveston had heard. Likely, few if any Texas slaves had heard that they had been officially freed more than two years earlier. A celebration broke out, and the next year, in 1866, the freedmen of Texas held on June 19 what became an annual celebration — Jubilee Day. These early celebrations became political rallies centered on registering newly freed slaves as voters. They helped spark the advances of the Reconstruction Era.

The Civil War had not, obviously, destroyed racism. White Texans, for instance, did everything they could to keep these June 19 celebrations from happening. Landowners would interrupt with demands that their laborers return to work. Cities and towns would bar Black people from using public parks, for instance, which were segregated. So, freed slaves across Texas began to pool their resources and purchase land where they could celebrate Juneteenth. Emancipation Park, 10 acres of land in Houston purchased in 1872 by a group of Black ministers and business owners, is one such location still in use today. It was established expressly for the city’s annual Juneteenth celebration.

Black people taking control of a part of their lives that the racists could not take from them — including just celebrating Juneteenth — so upset the white power structure that they created whatever obstacles they could devise. Eventually, between 1890 and 1908, every one of the former Confederate states, Texas included, passed new laws or revised their constitutions to disenfranchise Black voters, exclude them from public facilities, and enshrine the racist Jim Crow system as a new form of the old plantation.

Since then, Juneteenth has been associated with many of the struggles of Black people against racist and economic oppression. And it has taken up broader social issues as well. In 1968, for instance, the Poor People’s Campaign — organized by Martin Luther King, Jr. and then carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy after King’s assassination, raised demands for economic and human rights for all poor Americans. As part of that campaign, Juneteenth was designated Solidarity Day, and 100,000 people — including many whites — marched in Washington. That day, Coretta Scott King spoke out against the Vietnam War.

Today, with the urgency of the fight against racism as strong as ever, Juneteenth stands as a reminder of the emancipation of slaves and the destruction of the South’s backward socioeconomic system. It is also a reminder of how much more work there is to do. While U.S. military bases are named for Confederate officers and statues to “heroes of the Confederacy” dot the Southern landscape, efforts to make Juneteenth a national holiday in the United States have been thwarted every time. 

Racism Cannot Be Eradicated without Eradicating Capitalism

This year, Juneteenth comes just as the fight against racism in the United States and around the world has taken a new turn. The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis cops has sparked an uprising against the structural racism that was begun in 1619, when the first Africans were brought as slaves to Virginia. This structural racism was not resolved with the Civil War.

For weeks, in the midst of a global pandemic, the streets of cities across the country have been filled with people of all races, ages, genders, and socioeconomic statuses, demanding change. These protests, by calling the police as an institution into question, are questioning a key component of capitalism  — since the police are the armed force of the capitalist state and serve to uphold capitalist property relations.

Capitalism is inherently racist. In the United States, structural racism is the direct legacy of slavery. Once slaves were freed, the Southerners who were no longer able to enslave people legally, as well as the Northern industrial capitalists, began a systematic recreation of Black oppression to guarantee their profits throughout the United States. Black people became the bottom rung of a growing working class. They were unable to unionize, paid the lowest wages, and kept out of key jobs. Attempts at Black capitalism were systematically crushed, like the Tulsa white supremacist uprising that burned Black small businesses.

After the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was enacted in 1865, formally abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude in the entire United States (and thus going further than the Emancipation Proclamation), Black Codes, state-sanctioned white supremacist violence, and the growth of the Ku Klux Klan all began. Black people were subjected to involuntary labor throughout the South as states and their cops refused to enforce statutes meant to prevent such circumstances. And then there are prisons.

The United States incarcerates more people than any other country, and more than one-third of the prison population is Black people — who are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites. Capitalism uses this imprisoned population as slave labor, doing all sorts of work at pennies on the dollar or for no pay at all to feed the capitalist profit-making machine.

Racism is a tool the capitalists wield with great skill; they enforce it with laws and the police. As long as capitalism exists, the capitalists will seek to elevate some people and denigrate others, sowing divisions to deflect attention away from a common enemy.

Thus, the fight to eradicate capitalism is inextricably linked with the fight against racism, and vice versa: the anti-racist struggle is the struggle for socialism. 

Lenin saw the Civil War as a revolutionary war. In a “Letter to American Workers” in 1918, he wrote words that resonate with as much relevance today as they did less than a year after the Russian Revolution. He began by celebrating the “revolutionary tradition” of the American proletariat, and pointed to “the immense, world-historic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65!” And like Marx before him, he explained that the fight against the enslavement of Black people in the United States is linked to the fight against wage slavery.

The representatives of the bourgeoisie understand that for the sake of overthrowing Negro slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the slaveowners, it was worth letting the country go through long years of civil war … But now, when we are confronted with the vastly greater task of overthrowing capitalist wage-slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie — now, the representatives and defenders of the bourgeoisie, and also the reformist socialists who have been frightened by the bourgeoisie and are shunning the revolution, cannot and do not want to understand that civil war is necessary and legitimate.

The American workers will not follow the bourgeoisie. They will be with us, for civil war against the bourgeoisie. The whole history of the world and of the American labor movement strengthens my conviction that this is so. 

We can honor Juneteenth in 2020 by taking deliberate steps to liberate humanity from capitalism and the institutional racism that feeds its profits.

On Police Abolition: Decolonization Is The Only Way

(Photo taken by Jordan Gale for The New York Times)

By John Kamaal Sunjata

The United States is a project of both anti-Blackness and racial-colonial power. From the founding of this white supremacist settler-colonial state, Black people have endured 250 years of slavery, ninety years of Jim Crow, sixty years of “separate but equal” legal doctrine, and thirty-five years of explicitly anti-Black housing laws among other insidious forms of de jure and de facto racial discrimination. The racial capitalist state and its policing functionaries employ state violence as a means of containing and controlling the working-class, especially racialized and colonized domestic peripheries. The late political prisoner and revolutionary ancestor George Jackson (1971, p. 99) writes the following:

The purpose of the chief repressive institutions within the totalitarian capitalist state is clearly to discourage and prohibit certain activity, and the prohibitions are aimed at very distinctly defined sectors of the class- and race-sensitized society. The ultimate expression of law is not order—it’s prison. There are hundreds upon hundreds of prisons, thousands upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social order, no social peace. …Bourgeois law protects property relations and not social relationships.

The United States is a punitive carceral state with 25 percent of the world’s population behind bars despite comprising only 5 percent of the world’s population (Collier, 2014, p. 56; Hayes, 2017, p. 17). The American criminal so-called “justice” system holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile prisons, 3,134 local jails, 218 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. settler-colonies (Sawyer & Wagner, 2020). U.S. incarceration is disproportionately racialized, targeting Black and brown people who represent 60 percent of the incarcerated (Marable, 2015). If Black and Latino people were incarcerated at the same rate as whites, their imprisoned and jailed populations would decline by almost 40 percent (NAACP, 2019). The problems are not rooted in crime but policing itself which constructs, (re)produces, and institutes white supremacy and anti-Blackness through racial capitalism. The police have been waging asymmetric domestic warfare on Black people, encircling, and capturing their prospects for self-determination and self-actualization. From the Greensboro Massacre of 1979 to the murder of Marcus Deon Smith of 2018 to the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the only solution for Black liberation is abolishing the police and freeing what is essentially a semi-colony of peripheral peoples.

This essay has five sections. This first section discusses the problems of policing. The second section explains the history of U.S. policing and its development. The third section lays out the failure of liberal reforms to grapple with policing as an institution. The fourth section argues the case for police abolition. The last section concludes.

The History of U.S. Policing

The earliest origins of policing in the United States evolved from directly slavery, settler-colonialism, and brutal control of an emergent industrial working-class (Vitale, 2017, p. 34). The organization of police forces within the United States was modeled after that of England. In the early colonial forms, policing was informal and communal, which is referred to as the “Watch” or private-for-profit policing, also known as the “Big Stick.” These policing models had little with fighting crime and more to do with “managing disorder and protecting the propertied classes from the rabble” (Vitale, 2017, p. 35). Strike-breaking and labor surveillance were among the most important services provided by private-for-profit policing, the Pinkerton’s were among the more notable agencies (Spitzer, 1979, p. 195). The “Big Stick” dissolved when 1) company towns declined, 2) labor costs grew more socialized, 3) organized labor grew in its militancy and strength, and 4) major changes happened in U.S. socioeconomic infrastructure (1979, p. 195).

The watch system was not particularly effective at halting crime as watchmen were often drunk or asleep on duty (Potter, 2013, p. 2). As a method of process improvement came the implementation of a system of constables—official law enforcement officers—who were normally paid according to the warrants they served (2013, p. 2). Informal policing models persisted until 1838 when Boston implemented a centralized municipal police force based on the London Metropolitan Police force and New York followed suit in 1845 (Vitale, 2017, p. 36). The main functions of the London Metropolitan Police Force were “protect property, quell riots, put down strikes and other industrial actions, and produce a disciplined industrial work force” (Vitale, 2017, p. 36).

In Southern states, modern U.S. policing developed from the “Slave Patrol” (Potter, 2013, p. 3; Vitale, 2017, p. 46). Slave patrols were tasked with developing terroristic infrastructure designed to prevent slave revolts (Hadden, 2001, p. 20; Vitale, 2017, p. 46; NAACP,  2019). They were vested with the power to “ride from plantation to plantation, and into any plantation” taking up slaves who did not have a ticket from their masters (2001, p. 20). The slave patrols could forcibly enter any private property[ii] solely on the suspicions of harboring runaway slaves (Vitale, 2017, p. 46; NAACP, 2019). The slave patrols had three primary functions: 1) chase, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners; 2) organize terror squads to deter slave rebellions, and; 3) maintain legal and extralegal disciplinary measures for slaves who violated plantation rules to produce desired behavior (Potter, 2013, p. 3; NAACP, 2019).

White people had “tremendous social anxiety” about large groups of unaccompanied slaves and free Blacks intermingling. The police responded by regulating their behavior through the “constant monitoring and inspection of the [B]lack population” (Vitale, 2017, p. 47). After the Civil War, slave patrols were replaced by modern Southern police departments who controlled freed slaves who were now entering the workforce which was primarily agricultural (Potter, 2013, p. 3). The work of the modern police force included enforcing Jim Crow segregation laws and denying Black people equality de jure and de facto (2013, p. 3). The primary concern during this period was forcing Black people into sociopolitical docility (Vitale, 2017, p. 47). More than a response to crime, the police are for instituting a social order that is safe for capital penetration for the sake of capital accumulation, especially from the Black masses (Marable, 2015, p. 94). Capital accumulation requires a stable and orderly workforce for a predictable order of business (Potter, 2013, p. 4). The racial capitalist state, therefore, absorbs the costs of the private sector, protecting its enterprises. The environment must be made safe for capital through an organized system of social control (Potter, 2013, p. 4; Vitale, 2017, p. 34; Marable,  2015, p. 95). Under a system of racial capitalism[i], Black people are among the most brutalized by the carceral state.

The Failure of Liberal Reforms

Liberal efforts at reforming the police have largely been adject failures mostly because liberals misunderstand the role of the police. They ignore that policing itself is an inherently anti-Black institution that is premised on the repression of the domestic Black periphery for the purposes of capital penetration for capital accumulation. The role of the police has served to protect white supremacy and wealth creation for white people while denying Black people essential human rights (Vitale, 2017, p. 33). In the face of 400 years of anti-Black policing institutions that have, through every evolution, maintained a systemic logic of settler-colonialism that relegates the Black masses to a semi-colony within white America, liberals have proposed more training, more diversity, and community policing (Vitale, 2017, p. 33; Samudzi & Anderson, 2018,  p. 13; Rodríguez, 2021, p. 45).

The push for more police training is well-intentioned but it misses the point. Whenever a Black person is killed by police, a common refrain from liberal reformers is “improve use-of-force training.” If these same reformers were around during slavery, there is no doubt they would have called for slave masters to employ more ethical whip deployment techniques. Despite the racial bias training that many officers have undergone, researchers have found that outcomes remain unchanged with respect to racial disparities in traffic stops and marijuana arrests (Vitale, 2017, p. 8). Racist policing is not merely a matter of individual bigotry but institutionalized racism. Asking for increased training of police so police learn “restraint” ignores how the police already exercise restraint against populations that are not marginalized and not targeted. The Capitol Hill riots were illustrative of the police’s ability to show remarkable restraint. The mostly white rioters were not subjected to nearly as much force as Black protestors are for nominally peaceful protests (Henderson & Alexander, 2021). Any training that justifies the institution of policing will only strengthen its white supremacist and anti-Black logics, even if there is a rhetorical shift from “Warrior mentality” to “Guardian mentality.”

Another common liberal reform to policing involves diversity hires, in hopes this will result in communities of color being treated with “greater dignity, respect, and fairness” (Vitale, 2017, p. 11). There is no evidence that diversifying police forces affects, much less reduces, their use of force (Friedrich,  1977; Garner, Schade, Hepburn, & Buchanan, 1995; Brown & Frank, 2006;  Lawton, 2007). This tactic of reform is even more insidious because it is a method of counterinsurgency through promiscuous inclusion (Rodríguez, 2021, p. 45). Through political warfare against the domestic Black periphery, the racial capitalist state seeks to (neo)colonize its colonized subjects within their own communities.

Diversity is a tool for manufacturing credibility, increasing external institutional legitimacy without dramatically changing internal institutional formations or technologies of repression (2021, p. 45). Diversity changes the presentation of the white supremacist order, but it does not change its outcome: domestic warfare (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 13; Rodríguez,  2021, p. 51). White supremacy is a multicultural enterprise: just because the beneficiaries of the racial-colonial order are primarily white does not preclude the use of semi-colonized peoples to accomplish white supremacist ends. Diversity hires will not solve the problems of policing, but they will ensure the white supremacy runs through a sepia filter.

Liberal reformers may present “community policing” as possible reform and prima facie, it sounds reasonable. Who would not want neighborhood persons, known and respected by the communities they live, as officers? The answer to that question maybe someone who understands the role and the institution of policing. Police are tasked with criminalizing disorderly conduct, using up to and including lethal force, and responding to populist resistance with state-sanctioned assertiveness. This is well illustrated in the city of Greensboro, North Carolina by its City Council. At a Greensboro City Council meeting from July 31, 2020, the members of the City Council spoke favorably of community policing. Councilwoman Marikay Abuzaiter is on record saying, “[I]f we ever did consider incentivizing [police officers to live in the neighborhoods they work]. I would think the Chief would need a big raise in his police budget because you are looking at money there.” In the same session, Councilwoman Sharon Hightower said:

In reading articles about ‘community policing,’ it never emphasizes resident, it always talked about relationships. And we can start to build relationships, so we can eradicate this distrust in my community because right now, a lot of people I talk to in my community see a police car and their hair stands up on their neck. So, let’s start to work on that. Build that trust, and if somebody moves in the neighborhood? Great, that’s fantastic. …Let’s spend our resources where we get the most bang for our buck. As community talks about more investment in community problems, let’s do that.

It was certainly admirable that Councilwoman Sharon Hightower wanted to “eradicate distrust” and “build relationships,” but the solutions to the problems for the domestic Black periphery of Greensboro are rooted in anti-Black racism and racial capitalism more broadly, not a lack of police presence. What tools do the police possess for “community”? Punitive enforcement actions such as arrests and ticketing (Vitale, 2017, p. 16). Community policing is only possible as a solution if the police do not have police powers. Attempts at community policing, as demonstrated by the Greensboro City Council members, prioritizes giving more resources to the police to live in neighborhoods than giving resources directly to the marginalized members of the communities. Community policing does not empower the domestic Black periphery, but it strengthens the tools of repression and suppression on the part of the police by increasing their proximity to the territories they occupy.

Recently, the #8CantWait campaign has gathered significant support from liberal reformers who wish to address “police brutality.” It is a set of ideas from the nonprofit Campaign Zero, with policy proposals such as ban chokeholds, change reporting standards for use of force incidents, require police officers to warn before they shoot, and more (Murray, 2020). The #8CantWait campaign is not trying to solve racist policing, it is trying to reduce police killings by 72 percent (2020). Mayor Nancy Vaughan endorsed the #8CantWait proposals (Greensboro City Council, 2020):

I have been looking at some resolutions, I have been looking at one from the city of Memphis who is codifying the #8CantWait, we are looking at making it for the City of Greensboro. It has not been finalized but I would like the City Council to look at, once we get it all written up for the City of Greensboro, passing a resolution for the #8CantWait. I don’t want to wait until [the] next meeting because it’s quite a ways [sic] out, so maybe we could have a meeting and a work session because our next meeting is quite a ways away and the #8CantWait and I don’t think we should wait.

After a similar comment from Councilwoman Sharon Hightower, Greensboro Police Chief Brian L. James responded, “In reference to the #8CantWait and looking at that, we are almost there with some of the things that I have recently [done] and some of the things that I did previously as well as our regular policies and there’s one on the #8CantWait that I would like to have some conversation with y’all around the specific wording…” This underscores not only the uselessness of the #8CantWait campaign but the overall failure of liberal reforms to produce meaningful structural change.

The Argument

The concrete historicity of the United States’ state-imposed, state-promoted, and state-tolerated anti-Black racial-colonial violence and white supremacist domination has perpetuated a consistent and persistent situation of Black devalorization, disinvestment, devastation, destruction, and dislocation. White supremacy articulates and structures the American polity; race as a social construct articulates and structures every social relation and institution. This reality produces a domestic Black periphery, an underclass—a subproletariat—that exists as mere residents of a settler-colony (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 6). The Black community itself exists as semi-colony within the United States wherein the police are an occupying army (Allen, 1969).

The police have consistently represented (and erected) institutional barriers to Black agency, equality, self-determination, and political expression. That is because policing within the United States is inherently white supremacist and extends the logics of racial-capitalism and anti-Blackness throughout the political economy. With the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865, slavery was only abolished as “except as punishment for crime [emphasis added]” (Gilmore, 2020). Black people have been subjected to targeted police surveillance, coercion, force, and incarceration. Slavery was never abolished, it was reformed.

For the domestic Black periphery, the American carceral state and its functionaries have always been in a state of permanent asymmetrical warfare against them (Vitale,  2017, p. 27; Burden-Stelly, 2020, p. 8; Rodríguez, 2021, p. 42). James Baldwin compared policing Black communities to settler-colonial occupation (Baldwin, 1966):

And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover—even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity—quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty. … Occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered, and it is axiomatic, in occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of the occupying forces.

Black people are not citizens, we are residents of settler-colonial occupation. Black lives do not matter under a regime of racial capitalism and ironically enough, Black people were at our most valuable (i.e. most insulated from public executions and imprisonment) when we were legal chattel. In that sense, doing irreparable damage to property-in-chattel was bad for business and few slave patrollers wanted to foot the bill (Marable, 2015, p. 97). A citizen would have a Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial, but the residents of the domestic Black periphery can be legally and extralegally murdered by police with impunity (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 14; Briond, 2020).

The regime of racial capitalism has at its heart, private property ownership, an institution fiercely protected by the carceral state and its settler-colonial agents in policing. Racial capitalism reproduces and buttresses itself and the white supremacist order through a series of supposedly race-neutral policies (Stein, 2019, p. 44). Race-neutral policies themselves have been used to both “discredit and rationalized practices that perpetuate racial stratification” (Siegel, 2000, p. 106). Hence why white supremacy and the anti-Black order it entails can “coexist happily with formal commitments to objectivity, neutrality, and colorblindness” (Harris, 1994, p. 759). The earliest origins of property rights are rooted in racial domination and the interactions between race and private property have played a critical role in subordinating the domestic Black periphery within the American political economy (Harris C. , 1993, p. 1714). Whiteness itself, as a historized social and legal construct, marks power and domination over non-white others (Mumm, 2017, p. 103). Whiteness is valorized and private property ownership is an expression of whiteness; thus, property ownership is conflated with (white) personhood under racial capitalism (Safransky, 2014, p. 238; Bhandar & Toscano,  2015, p. 8). That is why in American society it is perfectly acceptable for white people to kill Black people in defense of private property; however, the domestic Black periphery can never destroy private property in response to the murder of a Black person. Blackness itself represents powerlessness, enslavement, and dispossession (Burden-Stelly, 2020).

The domestic Black periphery exists at the nexus of indispensability and disposability (Burden-Stelly, 2020), subhumanity and superhumanity. The technologies of white supremacy and their accompanying legal strictures and structures reify white supremacist ideologies into the carceral state. Black people represent 28 percent of all people killed by police in 2020 despite being 13 percent of the United States population (Sinyangwe, 2021). Black people are three times more likely to be killed by the police than white people are, and Black people are 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed as well (2021). This demonstrates that “[a]t any given time our government can utilize and maneuver the boundaries of legality and illegality as applicable to the material interests of the ruling class” (Briond, 2020).

Freedom for the domestic Black periphery poses an existential threat to white supremacy as a political economy within the United States because “free[ing] Black people necessitates a complete transformation and destruction of this settler state” (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 13). The United States cannot exist without the predominant systems of domination and oppression of Black people; it cannot exist without the hyper-policing and hyper-regulation of Blackness. For an internal semi-colony to be free across a geospatial territory, it must be decolonized. For an enslaved people to be free, they must not reform slavery’s conditions but abolish it in its totality. Police abolition is but one step, but a necessary step, in the Black liberation struggle.

Conclusion

The domestic Black periphery can never know freedom so long as policing exists within this settler-colonial state. So long as the Black masses exist as mere residents, citizens in name only, as a semi-colony of white America, constantly surveilled and brutalized by arms of the state, the United States will exist. The United States as a carceral nation begets anti-Black oppressive systems and institutions and that is best exemplified through the police, who act as an occupying army in Black territories, rather than guardians within Black communities. The ideological resistance to police abolition within Greensboro is in part informed by the “racialized colonial logics of the biologically determined criminal, slave, and savage” (Briond, 2020).

There is a Hobbesian assumption that the domestic Black periphery will descend into “the state of nature” unless they are constantly patrolled, surveilled, and policed according to the logics of settler-colonial occupation. The underlying fear has been a constant feature of white supremacist anxieties, a justification for ceaseless instances of anti-Black violence by police who see Blackness as a synthesis of subhumanity and superhumanity incarnate. The amazing feat of political economy has been the militarization of police, the multiculturalism of white supremacy via diversifying the police force, and the escalation of wanton violence against semi-colonized subjects. The central contradiction of the United States is settler-colonialism, the structural location of the domestic Black periphery as simultaneous indispensable and disposable. If Black masses are semi-colonized, the solution is decolonization. If slavery was merely reformed, slavery must be abolished in all its iterations. The U.S. police are the representation and manifestation of modern-day slave patrols. For these reasons and others, the police must be abolished in their entirety and other carceral institutions as well.

Bibliography

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Baldwin, J.   (1966, July 11). Report from Occupied Territory. Nation, pp. 39-43.

Bhandar, B.,   & Toscano, A. (2015). Race, Real Estate and Real Abstraction. Radical Philosophy, 8-17.

Briond, J.   (2020, June 6). Understanding The Role Of Police Towards Abolitionism: On   Black Death As An American Necessity, Abolition, Non-Violence, And Whiteness.  Clifton Park.

Brown, R. A.,   & Frank, J. (2006). Race and officer decision making: Examining   differences in arrest outcomes between black and white officers. Justice quarterly, 96-126.

Burden-Stelly,   C. (2020). Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism: Some Theoretical Insights. Monthly Review, 8-20.

Collier, L.   (2014, October). Incarceration nation. Monitor on Psychology, p. 56.

Friedrich, R. J.   (1977). The impact of organizational, individual, and situational factors on   police behavior. University of Michigan: PhD Dissertation.

Garner, J. H.,   Schade, T., Hepburn, J., & Buchanan, J. (1995). Measuring the Continuum   of Force Used by and Against the Police. Criminal Justice Review,  146-168.

Gilmore, K.   (2020, June 19). Slavery and Prison — Understanding the Connections. Social   Justice, 195-205. Retrieved from HISTORY:  https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/thirteenth-amendment

Greensboro City   Council. (2020, July 31). City Council Meeting. Greensboro, North Carolina, USA.

Hadden, S.   (2001). Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Harris, A. P.   (1994). The jurisprudence of reconstruction. California Law Review, 741-785.

Harris, C.   (1993). Whiteness As Property. Harvard Law Review, 1710-1791.

Hayes, C.   (2017). A Colony in a Nation. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

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Jackson, G.   (1971). Blood In My Eye. Baltimore: Black Classic Press.

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Marable, M.   (2015). How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society. Chicago: Haymarket.

Mumm, J. (2017).   The racial fix: White currency in the gentrification of black and Latino   Chicago. Focaal, 102-118.

Murray, O.   (2020, June 17). Why 8 Won't Work: The Failings of the 8 Can't Wait   Campaign and the Obstacle Police Reform Efforts Pose to Police Abolition.   Retrieved from Harvard Civil Rights - Civil Liberties Law Review:   https://harvardcrcl.org/why-8-wont-work/

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Rodríguez, D.   (2021). White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide.  New York: Fordham University Press.

Safransky, S.   (2014). Greening the urban frontier: Race, property, and resettlement in  Detroit. Geoforum, 237-248.

Samudzi, Z.,   & Anderson, W. C. (2018). As Black As Resistance. Chico: AK Press.

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Sinyangwe, S.   (2021, March 31). Police Violence Map. Retrieved from Mapping Police   Violence: https://mappingpoliceviolence.org

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[i] Racial capitalism does not describe a distinct permutation of capitalism or imply there exists a non-racial capitalism, but rather emphasizes that, in the words of Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines.” As a system of political economy, it depends on racist practices and racial hierarchies because it is a direct descendent of settler-colonialism. It is a translation of the “racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional” antagonisms of European feudal society, reconstituted for the American context. It profits off the differentiated derivations of human values, non-white people are especially devalorized and their exploitation is a justifiable and profitable enterprise (see Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

[ii] Private property is not the same as personal property, which is almost exclusively wielded for its use value, it is not a personal possession, it is social relation of excludability. It is the ownership of capital as mediated by private power ownership that removes legal obstacles for one’s existence and provides an unalloyed right to violence. It is “the legally-sanctioned power to dispose” of the factors of production and “thus dispose of [labor-power]: property as synonymous with capital.” Toscano, Alberto, and Brenna Bhandar. “Race, real estate and real abstraction.” Radical Philosophy 194 (2015): 8–17.

The Tragedy of the American Carceral System

By Aneesh Gogineni

On January 31st, 1865, abolitionists countrywide celebrated as the 13th amendment narrowly passed in the 39th Congress of the United States. Taught in American schooling systems through a very whitewashed, watered-downed version of history, most Americans view the 13th as the ultimate blow to slavery set us on track to the illusion in which we live now, where conditions seem equal for all on the surface level. Similarly, many Americans believe that legal segregation stopped after the Civil Rights act. However, both of these conclusions indirectly forwarded to the population by American schooling are far from the truth.

The 13th amendment provided a loophole to maintain and mask the subjugation deemed necessary by capitalism to exploit labor and prevent class solidarity by removing any perception of a problem with capitalism but rather shifting it to criminals. Section 1 of the text of the 13th amendment reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The text rules slavery and involuntary servitude illegal in all instances EXCEPT that of punishment for convicted criminals. In this new era of Reconstruction, white capitalists needed a new method of legal subjugation of black people to distract white workers and continue implicit racial biases. And thus, the Prison Industrial Complex was born.

Since its inception, the Prison Industrial Complex has not served to protect our communities but rather has served to protect property and subjugate minority populations. Through the Jim Crow era, the prison industrial complex did what it does best — incarcerate large populations of black people. However, heading into the 1970s and 80’s as policies were becoming more progressive, prison populations globally and domestically were dropping. Crime rates and the need for law enforcement/imprisonment were very low. Incomes arguably the worst president of the 20th century — Ronald Reagan. As Reagan introduced trickle-down economics and the drug war, prisons were built in California although the crime rates were dropping. As Reagan criminalized marijuana, crack cocaine, and all drug “abuse”, he was able to drastically alter our incarceration rates. Through methods like supporting the Contras, a far-right drug organization stopping socialist change in Nicaragua through having them SELL DRUGS TO BLACK COMMUNITIES IN LA. This is one example of the true impact of the War on Drugs. It justified Reagan and the CIA intervening throughout Latin America, exploiting the resources and labor of workers in the Global South, and then incarcerating millions of black people in the US. Through laws like the 3 strikes law, America was able to justify its mass incarceration of predominantly black people and low-income workers throughout the US.

The 13th amendment has allowed slavery and Jim Crow to manifest themselves within the prison industrial complex. Prisoners work for hours a day with almost no pay. They live in horrible conditions and have no true education or rehabilitation. They have no true chance of re-entering society with a second chance. Reminiscent of Jim Crow, released felons cannot vote, don’t have access to the same housing benefits, job benefits, unemployment, etc. This essentially screws them over and incentivizes them to commit more crimes. Therefore, the US has the highest reincarceration rate in the world, nearing 50%. This has become an industry (thus the label “Prison Industrial Complex” as a critique of the system). With private prison corporations like CoreCivic (formerly the CCA) teaming up with the Drug Enforcement Administration to imprison black people, these corporations have capital incentive to imprison people. This results in tragedies like judges being paid to sentence black teens to longer sentences so that the corporations can make money. The problem extends farther than just carcerality, but also within our capitalist systems that lead to inevitable exploitation of workers subjugated in these conditions. This system justifies these carceral systems within the US.

This rotten system has evolved and maintained its dominance through “acts of purity.” By enacting superficial police and prison reform like body cameras, this reform has justified and legitimized the system without attacking the true roots of the system. Thus, we must aim for more radical means to infiltrate/abolish the system than simple reform. Abolitionist justice involves more than attacking carceral systems head-on, but rather dealing with the root cause of this very problem. Through wealth redistribution, education, and programs like AdvancePeace or CureViolence, Abolitionists must engage in these radical means as a method to reach ultimate abolition of these systems. Social programs and services must also happen simultaneously as abolition as a means of empowering the workers of the world to reach the ultimate end goal of communism/socialism.

Notes

For more information and in-depth analysis on issues of carcerality, these two books are wonderful sources.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of ColorBlindness— by Michelle Alexander.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e0185311e0373308494e5b6/t/5e0833e3afc7590ba079bbb4/1577595881870/the_new_jim_crow.pdf

Are Prisons Obsolete — by Angela Davis

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/angela-y-davis-are-prisons-obsolete.pdf

"Defund The Police" is Not Abolition

By Greg Hampton

The demand to defund the police has become a central narrative responding to the graphic killing of Black people. Black organizers must now discuss if this strategy can move us closer to community control of public safety and unpoliced Black neighborhoods.

The defund demand has a number of important branches but at its root it is a call to mobilize community energy towards winning votes at local budget hearings. This effort is not just about the vote but reflects a firm belief in U.S. democracy, which at this exact moment may be the most mistaken political stance possible. During the Jan. 6th meeting at the U.S. Capitol we witnessed a show of strength that could not have happened without deep police collaboration. Misleadingly called an insurrection, this was a public service announcement of the vertical integration of the police from the various classes of the right wing grassroots to the very top of the U.S. government. The police are now part of the formal or informal leadership of both political parties. We very well may have witnessed the last presidency of the united states of america because there are guns pointed at the gears of the U.S. political system. So to get significant Black support, defund the police campaigns will have to explain why we should fight for votes in a country that does not have a democracy.  

What Jan. 6th brings into view is a foundational principle of Black abolition, rooted in the philosophy of George Jackson, which defines the U.S. political system as already fascist especially in regards to Black people. In fact George Jackson argued that "...fascism-corporativism did indeed emerge, develop and consolidate itself into its most advanced form here in Amerika." So when defunders define abolition as mobilizing people to win budget votes they are in opposition to the tradition shaped by George Jackson as they march us back into the burning house Martin Luther King Jr. lamented. 

The myth of U.S. democracy is even more pronounced at the local and state level, where defund must win if they are to set the stage for abolition. How the strongest defund efforts fare in places where they should have a number of progressive allies and resources, is revealing. In Minneapolis the death of George Floyd led to a precinct burning down. Then advocates mobilized the community to win a budget fight. They won the vote to defund the police in order to "dismantle" the department. This was an incredible victory that was quickly rolled back by an unelected city commission. To mask the complete lack of democracy the elected leaders of the city then placated defunders with an $8 million police cut, while adding $11 million in future hires. This cut moved already civilian staff to other departments and the main budget cut really came from police overtime. Minneapolis police surpass their overtime budget and just this summer received 37 times their overtime budget when they repressed the mobilizing from George Floyd's death. If this is evidence of things to come the entire defund the police movement may find even maintaining current police levels as a victory. 

In Los Angeles, Peoples Budget LA, a defund campaign led by BLM Los Angeles managed to cut 8% or $150 million from the LAPD budget. Maintaining this pace every year would completely defund the infamous LAPD in a little over 12 years. Except that the $150 M cut may not actually come out of the LAPD budget. And the $97 Million that is supposedly directly cut from the police budget actually comes from overtime spending, which the LAPD can still get in the event of an emergency. Given the current state of the country, emergencies are inevitable. The defund cut itself simply replaced a planned LAPD budget increase of the same size. 

In some cities the system is so undemocratic and corrupt the police don't bother to hide how they use intimidation to directly control politics. When Baltimore residents pushed a defund the police effort along with Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle they were faced with liberal Black leadership. You can clearly see how that even a campaign this strong is frustrated on all sides by the police union and the undemocratic municipal procedures and committees. They detail that John Hopkins University alone has the ability and desire to maintain their own police force. In some cities this dynamic has collapsed into political theatre. So again and again the strongest defund the police coalitions are faced with undemocratic, untransparent, complicated political systems that regional power players manipulate with ease. This is why Black abolition is a divestment from U.S. democracy and an investment into Black sovereignty. A key difference between abolition for Black liberation and the defund demand, is that defund asks for permission and abolition does not. 

The defund argument also assumes that public support for the police is rational. But the support for police is non-rational. We know this because police funding increases even when crime goes down. The US has always been willing to fund the police even as the rest of the public infrastructure crumbles. This means if all defunders have is data and well researched talking points it wont be enough. Police are supported whether it makes budget sense or not because Black people must be watched, and Black revolt must be kept down. This fundamental role of US police is independent of any budget. You can defeat it but you can not defund it. 

Now in community spaces and corporate media, the call to defund the police rests on a core contradiction. On the one hand defund is presented as a demand housing a set of mandatory budget votes leading up to abolition then at the same time defund the police is the same thing as abolition. Critical Resistance and some of the most well thought out defund campaigns argue that while, "a lot of people are trying to say there's a difference between police reform, defunding the police and abolition. And the call to defund the police is abolitionist. It's a step towards abolition. It is not a separate, moderate or watered-down thing." But this contradiction is what allows reforms and reformists to then present themselves as abolitionists. So if defund the police was the same thing as abolition there would be no need to add it to the original call to abolish the police. And by redefining abolition as winning votes at budget hearings then that means defunders like Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley are also abolitionists fighting to place the public safety of Black neighborhoods under the community control of Black people with no police.

They are not. 

Defund democrats are pro-police and gave Trump record-breaking support for the U.S. global police forces that represss Black uprisings around the world. This support for defund comes from a belief, that it actually would never lead to community control of public safety and unpoliced Black neighborhoods. Besides on the federal level, defunders like the squad may have already defeated the aspirational budget goals of local defund the police efforts. Because by getting behind tax cuts, the CARES ACT and the federal COVID-19 response  they have put together a record breaking transfer of wealth to the same class whose property the police guard.

Right now, U.S. state and local governments spend roughly $115 Billion on local and state police. If defund campaigns completely won and cut 100% of police funding tomorrow, Jeff Bezos alone could cover the loss and still be one of the richest men in the world. The 1% also has direct investment in the killings we see on the news. Starting as a slave market, Wall Street now makes money whenever police kill someone. This is dangerous because even though private funding for local law enforcement is low, if cities were forced to cut the police's public money stream, municipal governments could use any number of private financing mechanisms to refill their coffers. 

While wholesale financing of local police through private funds may still be a bridge too far, the police simply have a wealth of resources at the local level to quietly frustrate defund budget votes. Perhaps the most common feature of U.S. democracy is that laws supported by most people do not pass because of the money defund democrats pass to elites. Even within the current funding guidelines, police foundations can buy time by forcing campaigns to wade through sophisticated budget manipulations, sapping movement energy. The 1% already directly support the army who protect their property through a complicated international network of police associations, drug running operations, unions, foundations, government agencies, and right wing formations. This is the police network that was made even stronger with record level tax cuts and the CARES ACT's huge wealth transfer. The police can also adjust for losses in man power by continuing the expansion of  fusion centers, a national surveillance system that merges local and federal law enforcement. After decades of extorting cities the 1% have developed plenty of local financial instruments to help the police cover losses, play number games, and frustrate defunders with fake victories until they finally figure out how to defeat those campaigns.

But this summer we saw a shift in national consciousness after decades of mobilizing around Troy Davis, the state led horror of Hurricane Katrina, the theft of water in Flint and many other communities, the killing of Miriam Carey and countless more. For a brief moment this summer most U.S. citizens supported the burning of a police precinct. So in light of this history of fascism and our current climate, the belief that the police answer to the votes of city officials is a faith statement only non-Black believers in U.S. democracy can really afford. The only way police will leave Black neighborhoods is because Black people took community control of public safety and opposed police presence. 

Ultimately, what sets the stage for Black liberation isnt policy campaigns but the grassroots organizing that lives in every Black neighborhood. But defund the police paints a linear process for us to follow. This approach starts with protests that force a vote, then the police are defunded. And it makes perfect sense why defunders believe that by "reducing police budgets, communities are able to make autonomous decisions about how to use resources that would otherwise go to surveilling, arresting, and incarcerating them." But whenever a critical mass of people are agitating and taking action, this is the long reform process that is placed in front of the goal of abolition without any explanation of why this detour into the U.S. political system is mandatory or even necessary. In this vein, Working Families Party argues that "the only way to stop police violence is to defund the police and instead create, uplift and fund the community services that keep Black people safe, healthy and free." 

The vote is not the road to Black liberation. That debate has been repeated and is settled just by the fact it still needs to be held. To unpolice our neighborhoods Black people will need to work with each other through families and neighborhood networks. Now when defund gained mainstream prominence most of the people who mobilized on the street and in media were non-Black people. This created a discussion between politicians and non Black groups that may cloud how we currently understand defund the police. So as always its important to bring discussions back to the material conditions of your particular community. Now since Black liberation must be community driven you may assess that defund the police is a useful tool to begin community discussions about abolition. Or you may decide defund the police is a good way to reveal US fascism and the absence of democracy. If that is the case defund presents key questions for Black organizers.

Black abolition views U.S. democracy as a myth, and U.S. fascism as already present. How do you negotiate a call to defund the police that keeps Black politics within the U.S. political system when Black abolition calls Black people to leave that behind? You will also have to determine how you can divest from the police and invest into social services that other Black liberation efforts are working to abolish. As you build, discuss what the role of defund's rational budget campaign when public support for the police is non-rational. Black organizers will also need to discuss the contradiction in the popular stance that defund is the same thing as abolition and also the road to it. After this you will have to navigate anti-abolition defunders who actually oppose putting public safety in organized Black hands. 

Now since Black abolition holds that fascism is already here and that the vote is too small of a room for Black politics, where do Black politics live? While the current defund conversation may currently be between non-Black people and the state, Black abolition requires faith in organized Black communities. Whatever your level of participation and reflection, if you move in that spirit you will be able to find political demands rooted in that practice. Campaigns focused on abstract policy will only connect to Black people as characters they write about, history they theorize or clients their non-profit and contract work services. Black abolition organizers must put into practice tangible outlines of how you and your family can be abolitionists amidst the real violence you face. We see this immediately in community conversations, because Black people routinely shoot down any abstract discussion of unpoliced neighborhoods. Its not enough to just describe the problem of violence, prisons and police. We will have to be disciplined and repeatedly explain abolition in clear creative ways. 

Black politics lives within and among Black people in your neighborhoods, associations, cultural spaces, and families. You wouldn't be here if you didn't come from something, and you do not come from an incompetent people. We are entering a war over the terms and conditions of the next era. "At this stage, how can anyone question the existence of a fascist arrangement?" What happened at the U.S. capitol was only the beginning of what is coming. Even with a democracy, the U.S. has no problem maintaining, "simultaneously a dictatorship over black Americans." Look within your immediate family friends and social circles. You will be surprised at the wisdom you will find there along with first hand accounts of similar times. Trust the work of your elders and the previous movements that hidden within arms reach are all the resources you need to create the cultural practices and institutions that will nurture and sustain a new Black liberation movement. Tap into the best of your ancestral traditions and hone a sharp analysis of the current conditions. Get your team together and get to work. The only way we can establish Black community control of public safety is by making community wide moves and building the bricks and mortar of whatever we need to make abolition a reality on our terms.

A Brutal History: Slave Patrols and Building a Racist System with Political Power

By Kaity Baril

In the US, the modern context of ruthless policing or oppressive social control originated as far back as the 1790s. The Charleston City Watch and Guard controlled the movement of the slave population at the time. The Guard was armed with swords and pistols, and it imposed a nine o’clock curfew for Black residents of the city. White slave owners wanted to prevent uprisings and revolts. Patrols closely monitored those in captivity, especially when they were working outside of the sight or the control of the enslaver. 

The creation of the first publicly funded police force, in Boston, was in the 1830s. By the 1890s, every major city in the United States had a police presence, born from racist, slave patrols in the era of slavery and relied on through  Black Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era. 

Now, rather than upholding slavery, cops enforce laws and policies similarly meant to control the lives and movement of Black people. The late 1960s and early 1970s was a period of enormous social turmoil that raised the possibility of revolution. All fundamental institutions of society—the government, the “free” market, the military and war, the police, the nuclear family, white supremacy and others—were challenged. The elite, white, ruling class responded to these direct challenges to their power with Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Crime,” followed by Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” which were jumping off points for subsequent administrations to maintain their preferred social order. The “War on Drugs,” renewed with vigor by Ronald Reagan, still rages, and the U.S. has had the highest incarceration rate in the world since at least 2010. The increase of law enforcement in schools creates a “school to prison pipeline,” in which out-of-school suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests are increasingly used to deal with student misbehavior, especially for minor incidents, and huge numbers of children and youth are pushed out of school and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Not surprisingly, children of color (as well as children with disabilities and children from other vulnerable populations) are disproportionately targeted with these punitive measures.

During the 1980s, the ideology of “zero tolerance” school discipline originates from the “get tough on drugs and crime” policies of that era. This was also the dawn of mandatory minimum sentencing laws — fixed sentences for individuals convicted of a drug crime, with no judicial leniency allowed.  More than 1.6 million people are arrested, prosecuted, incarcerated, placed under criminal justice supervision, and/or deported each year on a drug law violation. “Three-strikes” laws, now in place in 28 states after first appearing in 1994, require anyone previously convicted of two or more violent crimes or serious felonies to receive a life sentence upon a third felony conviction,, regardless of the circumstances or, as in California, sometimes even the severity of the offense (e.g. felony petty theft).  

The Clinton Administration’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was the largest crime bill in the history of the country. It provided 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons, and $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs.

The “War on Terror,” following the September 11, 2001 attacks, was a catalyst for the use of military grade weapons on protestors, most conspicuously in Ferguson in 2014, following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown. So began the Black Lives Matter movement. 

Cops are Tools of Class Oppression and Mass Incarceration

For decades, starting in 1966, school districts across the country employed the “Officer Friendly” program that brought cops into local Elementary classrooms. Their goal was to indoctrinate children with the belief that the police are an indispensable part of society, who not only uphold the law but protect them. Perhaps this is because the police were established to protect the interests of the wealthy. Racial violence has always been a part of the mission to protect private, crooked institutions.

The institutions that the State has endowed with the most direct power over people’s lives, and a disproportionate share of tax dollars, are the police, prisons, courts, and the military. These enact forms of legalized punishment and repression under the guise of neutrality by being “bound to laws.” In reality, the laws primarily serve one class: the wealthy. Cops are the primary line of defense for a small fraction of the U.S. population – a handful of private corporate owners. A clear example of this is the role police played in the housing crisis. 

The number of empty, unsellable homes far exceeds the number of homeless. Based on currently available numbers, there are about 31 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S. If policing served the people, cops would have arrested the bankers and the white collar criminals who made enormous profits by manipulating the housing market, even after their schemes created a massive global recession in 2008, and a spike in homelessness. Cops would be helping to seize homes to end, not create, homelessness. Yet evictions continue on a daily basis.

Who does policing target? Police are typically deployed to criminalize poverty, concentrating their efforts on criminalizing those with dark skin, forcing millions of people – primarily people of color, people with mental illness, and those in poverty – into the prison system, depriving them of voting and employment rights, and thereby preserving privileged access to housing, jobs, land, credit, and education for whites. Police are used to break strikes and assault picket lines, where workers are struggling for basic human rights and better conditions. Protests and uprisings during the Black Lives Matter movement have resulted in the use of military crowd control techniques. The political aim of the police is seemingly to silence the demonstrators and curtail their constitutional right to free speech and freedom of assembly, especially Black, Brown, Indigenous folks, and communities of color.

The Violent Military Industrial Complex Leaks into the U.S. Police State

The Military Industrial Complex is directly connected to policing and the Prison Industrial Complex in this country. American policing has become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized, in large part through federal programs that have armed state and local law enforcement agencies with the weapons and tactics of war, with almost no public discussion or oversight. The U.S. already acts as the police force of the world, enforcing authority through drone wars, proxy battles, and meddling. Black liberation is a global struggle, and there is a link between racial oppression internationally and domestically. A militarized police is only equipped to escalate situations.

Throughout US history, the police (including federal policing agencies like the FBI) have attacked and undermined social justice organizations and efforts, at home and abroad, through various forms of surveillance, infiltration, sabotage, and assassination. The political function of the police destroys any form of revolution, so it’s no surprise that in the 10 years of anti-establishment social unrest between 1965 and 1975, the number of police officers grew by roughly 40 percent nationally. In 1974, $15 billion was spent on criminal justice, 57 percent going directly to police expenditures4. With this increase of spending, the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO “neutralized” political dissidents and threats, like the Black Panther Party, through subterfuge and extreme violence. In league with local police units, the FBI declared war on radicals and groups from nationally oppressed communities. Then, the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams were first formed in Los Angeles in 1968. Fifty years later, the US still holds these political prisoners captive, like Mumia Abu-Jamal. The Free Them All Campaign continues to advocate for their release, even as the police continue to use these tactics against protestors today

Using federal funds, state and local law enforcement agencies have amassed military arsenals to wage the failed “War on Drugs,” disproportionately in communities of color. Aggressive enforcement of this mandate from decades ago has lost its public mandate, as 67 percent of Americans think the government should focus more on treatment than on policing and prosecuting drug users. Aggressive drug arrests and prosecution has impacted millions of lives , disproportionately in communities of color, though drug use rates are quite similar across race and class. Law enforcement agencies’ routine use of heavily armed SWAT teams to search people’s homes for drugs is the same hyper-aggressive form of domestic policing that killed Breonna Taylor.  

The militarization of American policing is evident in police officer training, which encourages them to adopt a “warrior” mentality and view the people they are supposed to serve as enemies. It’s also evident in the equipment they use, such as battering rams, flashbang grenades, and APCs. The 1033 Program transferred surplus military equipment to civilian police departments. Only 45 days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Congress effortlessly passed the Patriot Act , which George W. Bush signed less than a month after the United States invaded Afghanistan, as part of the “War on Terror”. It broadly expanded law enforcement powers to search, surveil, investigate and indefinitely detain people. Among its effects, the Patriot Act has been used to expand the racist war on drugs. 

Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security, created in 2002 to coordinate government intelligence gathering in order to improve counterterrorism efforts,  has set up centers with the FBI and local police that have been used to spy on protest movements, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter. More than 7,000 people were arrested during the Occupy movement over the course of just a few months. These arrests, alongside incidents of police brutality, were intended to stamp out a movement that took aim at the face of class oppression from the rich, elite of Wall Street.

Since May 2020, the uprising spurred by the police lynching of George Floyd, has intensified the militarized mobilization of law enforcement. The police forces are equipped in full riot gear and use weapons designed for war. Black and Brown activists in the United States, especially during the Ferguson protests, have described domestic police departments as “occupying forces,” much like those in Afghanistan or Yemen or Palestine. In fact, allowing Israeli forces and U.S. participants to learn from each others’ violent practices and tactics results in the violation of the human rights of Black and Palestinian people, but there are efforts to end this through a campaign called, “End the Deadly Exchange.” Our police, at the behest of local government, wield not only military arms, but what they’ve learned from the military’s formal joint training, tactics (both street combat and psychological operations), and other means of  suppression. At least 200 cities in the U.S. had imposed curfews by early June, while more than 31 states and Washington, D.C. activated over 75,000 National Guard personnel, arresting over 10,000 people. Yet widespread police brutality and the mobilization of military law enforcement tactics, like kidnapping protestors, have only furthered massive civil unrest. 

The Case for Revolutionary Optimism: A Path towards Abolition

So, how do we fight an institution doing what it has been designed to do, one that’s protected by government leaders and employment contracts, and is therefore incapable of reform?  The problems of punitive, racist policing are cultural — ingrained in our society — and cannot be solved by merely identifying a couple murderers or “bad apples,” if you will. 

Given how corrosive policing has historically been and continues to be, it shouldn’t be surprising that with alternatives, our society could flourish without cops. Policing could, and should, be defunded and abolished.

A society that prioritizes human needs ahead of profit means communities that have sufficient housing, food, health care workers, prisoner re-entry services, and community practices that hold all of its members accountable for any harm and enact restorative justice. Mutual aid, rather than one-time giving events, would allow us to share our skills collectively and all contribute. 

It may seem implausible or unreachable. It requires divesting from police, prisons, and the military, and instead, investing in communities of color and supporting the public policies that encourage, not inhibit, family-sustaining wages, job development, education, and the equitable distribution of resources. We cannot accept corporate, private interests to define our way of living. The ruling, capitalist class is in power, controls our government policies, and we must not capitulate to the world they want us to live in. It is one with an illegal slave system that is the Prison Industrial Complex. A society with an abolitionist as a focus will not be built on the violence of a capitalist state designed to defend property and capital, but one in which the people are empowered to provide for each other. 

We must build class unity and solidarity through organizing within our communities to protect one another. There are few tools within the system to fight the State’s abuse politically and legally, but we can ask for the immediate release of inmates in this country’s tortuous prison system; the end of three strikes and overly harsh sentencing guidelines; changing the 13th Amendment to eliminate the clauses that allow for slavery and “involuntary servitude” for people who are convicted; the end of qualified immunity for officers; the repeal of federal programs that send military equipment to local police; the end of “Broken Windows” policing tactics, including stop-and-frisk and other police harassment tactics; the prohibition of no-knock entry; and laws that make it harder for the police to obstruct free speech activity. 

While these are only reforms, we can also strengthen community accountability models that critique punitive systems that maintain repressive, colonial ideology.  Together, we can connect movements, groups, and individuals to transgress the boundaries of institutions. These alternatives must include continuing critiques to improve social conditions, as well as provide accessible, sustainable levels of resources that are consistent with anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism principles. This is how we can transform and empower communities towards justice and abolition.

Challenging Neoliberal Complacency: The Future of Leftist Organizing

By Mahnoor Imran

Republished from Michigan Specter.

The lesser evil has prevailed. President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have defeated the demagogic megalomaniac in the White House otherwise known as Donald Trump. However, in the middle of a mismanaged pandemic that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, nationwide protests against the epidemic of police brutality, and the looming threat of climate change, Biden’s insipid promise of returning to some semblance of normalcy feels uninspiring. A return to the pre-Trump status quo will not actively transform the material conditions of the working class, and a massive shift in the political paradigm is desperately needed.

Although their win has prompted celebration, there is something to be said about the failure of establishment Democrats to provide compelling narratives that take on Wall Street, insurance companies, and the fossil fuel industry. Though progressives and leftists are frequently vilified for expressing concerns about the incoming Biden-Harris administration, both Biden and Harris have problematic records that warrant criticism about their vision for the future.

Last year, Biden assured his wealthy donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he were elected, once more reminding us that elite centrists will always prioritize the interests of the ruling class. Despite having an atrocious record of racist tough-on-crime policies, Biden operated his campaign under the assumption that people of color were obligated to vote for him simply because he was not Trump. In addition to these things, many resistance liberals have conveniently forgotten about him leading support for the Iraq War, the Obama-Biden administration carrying out mass deportations that ripped families apart, his inappropriate displays of unwanted affection toward women, and credible sexual assault allegations against him. As Attorney General of California, Harris fought hard to keep the wrongfully convicted in prison, withheld evidence that would have freed incarcerated people, criminalized and imprisoned parents because their children were truant, and received criticism from the transgender community for denying gender-affirming healthcare and banning forums that sex workers use to protect themselves.

In the next four years, the Biden-Harris administration will continue to champion neoliberal governance and imperialist interests. Their transition team is filled with wealthy corporate executives and lobbyists from companies like Uber and Amazon who are entirely disconnected from the struggles of the working class. The team also comprises Obama administration alumni like Cecilia Muñoz, President Obama’s top immigration advisor who continually justified harsh immigration enforcement policies and rationalized the separation of parents from their children.

Though centrism may have won at the top of the ticket, it proved to be electorally shaky. In fact, many moderates lost their seats or came dangerously close to losing their seats. Although Democrats tried to blame the Left for their own shortcomings, progressive organizers, many of whom were people of color, were the ones who helped secure Biden’s win in swing states. Black communities, indigenous communities, and Hispanic communities did the heavy lifting for a democracy that never worked in their favor. Representative Rashida Tlaib, who represents one of the most impoverished districts in the country, recently told Politico that “If [voters] can walk past blighted homes and school closures and pollution to vote for Biden-Harris, when they feel like they don’t have anything else, they deserve to be heard.” Instead of paying lip service to social issues and defaulting to vague bromides about unity, the incoming Biden administration owes these communities more than just a nod of thanks. They deserve a bold vision for the future of America.

The reality is that our nation’s current modality of political and economic operation is committed to half-hearted incrementalism and assumes that anything other than that is impossible. This concession to pragmatism inhibits real progress. The pursuance of middle-ground politics paves the way for excessive globalization at the expense of developing countries, corporate tax breaks paid for through austerity, and rhetoric about civility at the expense of communities of color.

Neoliberalism is degenerative. It allows for oligarchs to dictate our political agenda and influence our political process. It launches wars based on lies and makes billions in profits by selling arms to repressive regimes. It tries to convince us that the levers of the capitalist market are capable of producing equity and sustainability. It fuels a for-profit healthcare system that burdens people with thousands of dollars in medical debt. It maintains an egregious carceral system that disproportionately harms and kills black, indigenous, Hispanic, immigrant, mentally ill, and disabled communities. It deceives us into believing that individual hard work is the key to amassing wealth and achieving the American Dream. It generates cult-like infatuations with billionaires who would be nothing without government subsidies and the workers whom they underpay and exploit.

When governments abandon their obligation to transform socioeconomic outcomes for the better, political efficacy diminishes. This points to the inextricable link between neoliberalism and the triumph of Trumpism. In four years, we may have hard-right candidates try to take the presidency again. In that terrifying prospect, the pullback might be stronger than the push forward. The only way to prevent this is for the Democratic Party to muster the moral and political courage to get behind popular movements and policies like the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and defunding the police.

Unfortunately, both Biden and Harris have spent a considerable amount of energy contemptuously distancing themselves from progressivism and denouncing socialism. Although the word “socialist” is used pejoratively by Republicans to lambaste any Democrat with a pulse, the more that Democrats try to distance themselves from progressivism and socialism as if they were inherently bad, the more it legitimizes GOP framing.

Instead of waiting out an interregnum in our political history, we must continue to fight for progressive policies that are actually popular among rural, urban, and suburban voters. The future for leftist organizing and movement building is far from bleak. In fact, 67% of Americans support increasing the minimum wage to $15, 69% support Medicare for All, and 63% support free public college.

Furthermore, 26 out of 30 of the Democratic Socialists of America’s nationally endorsed candidates won their races. All four members of “The Squad” — Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Presley, and Ilhan Omar — have won their reelections and will be joined by progressive insurgents Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. Every single swing-seat House Democrat who endorsed Medicare for All won their race and 99% of Green New Deal co-sponsors won their races in this cycle.

Although Biden’s win has undoubtedly exacerbated neoliberal complacency, this is a critical moment to push for an unapologetic agenda that promotes justice, challenges structural racism, combats climate change, increases political accountability, dismantles institutions of oppression, and radically redistributes wealth. We can continue to organize by supporting indigenous sovereignty, fighting for police and prison abolition, developing ecosocialist frameworks for promoting environmental justice, and creating mutual aid networks. When we build community power and cultivate solidarity, we can rise above the forces of oppression, marginalization, and vituperation that threaten to destroy us. The horizon of a liberated future is within our line of sight. We just have to keep moving forward and pushing left.

We Need More: On Police Brutality, Reformism, and '8 Can't Wait'

By Justin Yuan

Republished from Michigan Specter.

“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” — Angela Davis

At this point, I’m sure everyone reading this is well aware of the uprisings that took place across the country and around the world following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. I’m sure you’ve all seen your social media feeds filled with a slew of heartfelt proclamations that Black Lives Matter, personal stories of discrimination and loss, as well as ways to move forward from these tragedies, enact change, and achieve some measure of justice for those murdered by police. Chief among the many campaigns that have been circulating is 8 Can’t Wait, a project by Campaign Zero.

Since COVID-19 threw a wrench in my summer plans, I spent break commiserating with friends and comrades, watching police beat and arrest protesters, and endlessly doomscrolling through Twitter. But in the weeks and months after the grisly video of cops slowly killing George Floyd was released, I noticed more and more posts across social media from friends, family, and strangers alike all repeating the same phrase: “8 Can’t Wait.” Tentatively hopeful, I dug in.

Was an abolitionist project finally breaking through to the wider public? Was Angela Davis involved? These were my initial thoughts, but as I dug further and learned more about this social media phenomenon, my hopes shattered replaced only with the same numbness I felt freshman year when my roommate told me, without a hint of irony, that if every police officer were made to watch the Green Book — starring Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen — police violence would plummet. Now I hope I shatter your hopes as well.

8 Can’t Wait was launched in early June in response to the killing of George Floyd and quickly gained steam on social media and in the news. Fawning think pieces and op-eds everywhere from Vox to Rolling Stone to GQ to Variety accompanied glowing endorsements from high-profile political and cultural figures such as Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Ariana Grande, and others, lauding the project’s “succinct and clear message” and potential to save lives. At the core of the effort are eight “data-driven” reforms that Campaign Zero claims would decrease police killings by an almost unimaginable 72%. At first glance, the reforms look promising:

• Ban Chokeholds and Strangleholds

• Require De-escalation

• Require Warning before Shooting

• Exhaust all other means before Shooting

• Duty to Intervene

• Ban Shooting at Moving Vehicles

• Require Use of Force Continuum

• Require Comprehensive Reporting

Think of all the deadly encounters that could be avoided if police were required to de-escalate. Or the lives that could be saved if chokeholds and strangleholds were banned across the country. However, the assertion that widespread implementation of these eight policies would result in anything close to a 72% drop in police killings is misleading at best. Countless cities, townships, and states across the country have already enacted many of the reforms 8 Can’t Wait prescribes. Many large cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia already have at least half of them. In fact, Campaign Zero confirmed both Tucson and San Francisco have all eight policies in place. While claiming to reduce police killings by 72% certainly grabs attention, in reality, many cities would only see a fraction of that reduction, and that’s assuming that 8 Can’t Wait’s analysis of the data is reliable. Chicago, a hotbed of police brutality, witnessed 76 police killings over the past 7 years, 56 of them black. The city also already has seven of the eight reforms listed by 8 Can’t Wait, so the people of Chicago will have to look elsewhere for jaw-dropping reductions of police killings.

Unfortunately, Campaign Zero’s supposedly “data-driven” policies aren’t exactly as clear-cut as they claim. In their own study, they allege that the average police department, out of the 91 that they analyzed, already had three of their eight recommended reforms. Right off the bat, that finding throws their fantastical 72% reduction of police killings out the window for the majority of cities, and those with only one or two policies aren’t guaranteed anything close to a three-quarter reduction in police killings. The aforementioned 2016 study that Campaign Zero conducted and based 8 Can’t Wait on contains methodological issues that seriously undermine the bold claims that it’s being used to support. It compiles data from just 91 police departments over only an 18-month period.

It’s well documented that police departments and officers get away with heinous violations of human rights and civil liberties all the damn time. As things currently stand, police, as individuals and as an institution, enjoy nearly limitless legal protections.

For example, in July 2016, police officers brutally attacked and arrested Shase Howse, who was looking for his keys in front of his home, after he replied “Yes, what the fuck?” when asked if he lived in the building. Ludicrously charged with multiple felony counts, Howse lawyered up and the charges were dropped.

If, like me, you wondered how Howse’s attackers got away with physically assaulting an innocent man then lying about what happened, it’ll probably make you as angry as I was to learn that police lying not only in their post-incident paperwork but in court and in affidavits is so common that cops themselves have a word for it — “testilying.” In fact, it’s so ridiculously bad that even the quintessential conservative (and fucking creepy-ass weirdo) himself, Alan Dershowitz, has said that “Almost all police lie about whether they violated the Constitution in order to convict guilty defendants” and that “All prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges are aware of [that].” As bad as all that sounds, don’t worry. It gets worse.

Justifiably upset at what happened to him, Howse tried to sue the officers in federal court for excessive force. He lost. As it turned out, those officers are protected by qualified immunity, a legal doctrine affirmed by the Supreme Court that protects government officials from civil liability unless they violate a “clearly established” right. In essence, Howse, along with every other individual in the country, has no clearly established right to not be assaulted on his porch. Qualified immunity is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the astronomical number of “get out of jail free” cards that cops have. So you can rest easy knowing that cops can do basically whatever they want, especially if you’re poor and a minority, and get off either scot-free or with a slap on the wrist.

The issue that liberals like those behind 8 Can’t Wait are either unable or unwilling to grasp — and that abolitionists have been calling attention to for decades — is that police brutality is a matter of power. So long as police are empowered to impose their will violently on the very people they claim to protect, injustice and suffering will continue, and no amount of pinky swears or promises will curtail that power. While projects like 8 Can’t Wait appear well-meaning in their focus on police killings and how to reduce them, the oppression of poor and marginalized communities does not begin or end with a single statistic. 8 Can’t Wait is hampered by statistics that lack geographic, political, and historical nuance and, instead, tries to simplify the systemic issue of policing down to specific, personal, lethal encounters.

Any successful attempt at beating back the tide of police killings must reckon with the whole of the issue, which means recognizing and challenging police militarization, the prison-industrial complex, and our cruel, predatory criminal (in)justice system. In other words, abolition is the only sustainable, truly effective way forward. Applied to the realm of police killing, the abolitionist theory of change demonstrates that the only way to permanently end the violence at the hands of police is to dismantle the entire rotten system such that police officers and departments don’t have the tools or ability to deal out death and suffering. The tepid reforms Campaign Zero puts forth with 8 Can’t Wait do nothing to shift power away from police, and their failure to address the near-complete lack of accountability and oversight that police departments across the country enjoy seriously compromises the potential effectiveness of the already-limited policies that 8 Can’t Wait is pushing.

The frustrating thing about incrementalist reform projects like 8 Can’t Wait is that there’s no need to wave around in the darkness searching desperately for any way forward. The abolitionist movement has been around for decades, created and led by black scholars and activists, such as the black queer women of the Combahee River Collective. From the modern carceral state to American policing’s origins in slave patrols and explicitly discriminatory night watches, abolitionists such as Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor have spent years illuminating the fundamental cruelty of police and prisons as an institution and, more importantly, blazing a path toward an alternative future where our response to crime is not to incarcerate and punish but to rehabilitate, strive for restitution, and address the underlying causes of crime, such as poverty and a lack of social welfare programs.

While there is no single, concrete path to abolition, there are clear next-steps that abolitionists have emphasized for years — ones that would actually challenge the power of police, shrink the carceral system, and put an end to state-sanctioned violence, incarceration, and suffering. In fact, as a result of the infuriatingly shallow demands of 8 Can’t Wait, abolitionists from across the country have come together to form 8 to Abolition, a campaign focused on prison and police abolition that eschews the nitpicking incrementalism of 8 Can’t Wait, calling the project “dangerous and irresponsible” for “offering a slate of reforms that have already been tried and failed, that mislead a public newly invigorated to the possibilities of police and prison abolition, and that do not reflect the needs of criminalized communities.” Their demands are:

• Defund police

• Demilitarize communities

• Remove police from schools

• Free people from jails and prisons

• Repeal laws that criminalize survival

• Invest in community self-governance

• Provide safe housing for everyone

• Invest in care, not cops

A commitment to abolition in line with the demands set forth by the activists behind 8 to Abolition is absolutely imperative. The ultimate, guiding vision of the resurgent socialist Left must be one of abolition. The moral gravity of having a system of unaccountable arbiters of death and violence, enforcing a racist legal code of class oppression, throwing people in pens to be the slave labor of the modern capitalist economy makes the cause of abolition a necessary one. The fascist Right sees the role that the police and carceral state play in the perpetuation of white supremacy and bourgeois class domination. They think it’s great. The liberal Right throws its hands up in exaggerated shock, tosses a pack of Band-Aids to the dead and dying, and calls it a day. It is up to the working-class movement of the Left to fight like hell because, until all of us are free, none of us are.

We're All Living in a Future Created by Slavery

[Art by Alex Williamson]

By Ameer Hasan Loggins

This article is part of Abolition for the People, a series brought to you by a partnership between Kaepernick Publishing and LEVEL, a Medium publication for and about the lives of Black and Brown men. The series, composed of 30 essays and conversations over four weeks, points to the crucial conclusion that policing and prisons are not solutions for the issues and people the state deems social problems — and calls for a future that puts justice and the needs of the community first.

When I was 19 years old, I was arrested.

Instead of a dungeon, I was held in an overcrowded holding cell. Instead of being shackled and transported across the ocean on a floating prison, I was handcuffed, sitting shoulder to shoulder with another young Black male being hauled across the county on a prison bus.

During intake, I was stripped of my clothes, forced to stand naked as officers stripped me of both my pride and my dignity. I tried to cover my genitals. It was my last grasp at holding onto my humanity. I was commanded by officers to remove my hands. They had guns. I had nothing. I complied. The officer barked, “Lift up your nut sack.” I had no choice. I was ordered to “squat down and cough.” When I was finally handed a pair of state-issued boxer shorts, I was so desperate to have on anything to cover my exposed body that I did not give a damn that the underwear had been passed down, circulated among others who had been stripped naked before me.

Author and scholar Saidiya Hartman once wrote, “I, too, live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it. It is the ongoing crisis of citizenship.” I echo her pain as I think about — and live through — the ongoing crisis of carcerality and those affected most by its existence.

I think about the African diaspora. I think about my family. I think about myself.

In the summer of 2017, I visited the continent of Africa. While there, I basked in the beauty of the lively Ramadan nights in Morocco. I stood in the searing sun of Egypt. I took pictures with the great pyramids as my backdrop, mimicking Malcolm X during his visit in 1964. When I made it to Ghana, I visited the final resting place of Kwame Nkrumah. While standing at his tomb, I thought about Nkrumah writing, “All people of African descent whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean or in any other part of the world are Africans and belong to the African Nation.” I stood there thinking about the divide between being identified as African and being of African descent. I was in the homeland of my ancestors, and yet I knew none of their names or faces.

But I did know why they were forced to leave. I had reached a point where I could not return home to the United States without experiencing the carceral castles on Ghana’s Gold Coast.

My feet were firmly planted, affixed to the weather-beaten ground of the Castle of St. George in Elmina. I stood in front of a cell, designated for incarcerated Ashanti, Mandinka, Hausa, Wolof, Fula, and Susu from various kingdoms who had been deemed as deserving of death because they fought to live in freedom. I stood there in front of a thick black wooden door hauntingly marked by a human skull and a set of crossbones carved into stone.

Behind that door was a darkness I never experienced.

In the 7x10 prison cell, there was a total absence of light. There was also an abject emotional darkness that came with knowing folks, wrapped in the same skin that I’m in, were left there to starve and rot in death.

The captives imprisoned at the Castle of St. George were a part of what I call the carceral class. I am a member of this class.

The carceral class is made up of persons of African descent who are systematically stigmatized as unfit for freedom and deserving of the dehumanization that comes with being incarcerated. It is essential to the idea of Black people being framed as the locus of crime and Blackness as being synonymous with criminality. As a classification, the carceral class denotes that, at any given time, your freedom can be ripped from underneath your feet. That you can be torn away from the people you love and the places you love to be.

Although he didn’t name it, Malcolm X knew about the carceral class too.

The carceral class is made up of persons of African descent. It denotes that, at any given time, your freedom can be systemically ripped from underneath your feet. That you can be torn away from the people you love and the places you love to be.

In Malcolm X’s blistering 1963 speech, “Message to the Grassroots,” he spoke of the systemic condemnation of Black folks in the United States. He lasered in on the uncomfortable common bond of being Black in America. Malcolm made it plain and uncompromising. “We are all Black people, so-called Negroes, second-class citizens, ex-slaves,” he said. “You are nothing but a ex-slave. You don’t like to be told that. But what else are you? You are ex-slaves. You didn’t come here on the Mayflower. You came here on a slave ship — in chains, like a horse, or a cow, or a chicken.”

I wrestle with what Brother Malcolm said. Not because I disagree with the troublesome truths that he spoke, but because I feel his analysis can be built upon.

His words still ring in my mind on a loop.

“You are nothing but a ex-slave.”

You are nothing but a slave.

You are nothing.

You are a thing.

Malcom’s speech takes me back to Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony. In it, Mbembe lays bare his views on what it means to be branded, burned with the mark of being a slave. He viewed slave as the “forename” one must “give to a man or woman whose body can be degraded, whose life can be mutilated, and whose work and resources can be squandered — with impunity.”

I think about a time before enslavement. Before Africans were ensnared in the wretchedness of having both their labor and their lives exploited from can’t see in the morning to can’t see in the evening, they were prisoners of a particular kind.

Those who were captured and eventually enslaved were regular folks: commoners, farmers, wage workers, domestic servants, and artisans who worked with their hands. Two-thirds of those held captive were young African men. As Marcus Rediker recounts in The Slave Ship: A Human History, slave raiders targeted “‘the roughest and most hardy,’ and avoided the privileged ‘smooth negroes.’” The class-based vulnerability of the common folks figured centrally in their capture and confinement. Rediker continues:

Second to war as a source of slaves were the judicial processes in and through which African societies convicted people of crimes ranging from murder to theft, adultery, witchcraft, and debt; condemned them to slavery; and sold them to African traders or directly to the slave-ship captains… Many Africans and (abolitionist) Europeans felt that judicial processes in West Africa had been corrupted and that thousands had been falsely accused and convicted in order to produce as many tradeworthy bodies as possible.

A judicial system of injustice had waged war on African commoners, criminalizing them into a world of carcerality.

Malcolm’s raspy tone echoes again in my mind. I hear him saying, “You didn’t come here on the Mayflower. You came here on a slave ship — in chains, like a horse, or a cow, or a chicken.”

And again, Brother Malcolm was correct.

We did not willingly travel to the Americas on the Mayflower. We were forced here on the White Lion and the Clotilda. It is not hyperbole to suggest that the slave ship was an aquatic prison. Its European captain was the warden. Its European crew were the prison guards. And in handcuffs and leg shackles were the formerly free Africans, eaten alive, buried in the belly of vessels of mass incarceration.

The largest wave of forced African diasporic movement was anchored to punishment and carcerality. Everywhere the descendants of the Middle Passage were forced to find footing, carceral-class status and the struggle for liberation followed.

Malcolm knew the global connectedness of Black folks’ oppression. He knew that in the West, the African diaspora’s carceral-class status is still branded to our being.

Forty percent of the 10 million incarcerated Africans brought to the Americas and sold into chattel slavery ended up in Brazil. Today, it is estimated that 75% of Brazil’s prison population are Brazilians of African descent. In the country’s capital Brasília, Afro-Brazilians make up 82% of those incarcerated. Although only 11% of the country’s total population is between eight and 24 years of age, this age group represents approximately one-third of those imprisoned.

In the United States, Black adults are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated than white adults. As of 2001, one out of every three Black boys born in that year could expect to go to prison in his lifetime. While 14% of all youth under 18 in the United States are Black, 42% of boys and 35% of girls in juvenile detention facilities are Black. Among Black trans folks, 47% have been incarcerated at some point in their lives.

The criminalization of Black folks in the United States is both a pathologizing and totalizing practice. No group is spared. No group is left unvictimized. These are progeny of the commoners, prisoners of war, and freedom fighters who made up the original carceral class.

Malcolm also knew that as a Muslim, “There is nothing in our book, the Quran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully.”

On Christmas Day in 1522, 20 enslaved Muslims, wielding machetes, attacked their Christian masters on the island of Hispaniola. It was the first recorded enslaved African revolt in the Western Hemisphere.

It is not hyperbole to suggest that the slave ship was an aquatic prison. Its European captain was the warden. Its European crew were the prison guards. And in handcuffs and leg shackles were the formerly free Africans, eaten alive, buried in the belly of vessels of mass incarceration.

Four years later, enslaved African Muslims rebelled against the Spanish on the coast of present-day South Carolina. It was the first rebellion by enslaved folks in the history of North America.

In 1729, Granny Nanny, a self-liberated African Muslim leader and warrior, led her army of Maroons in Jamaica into the battle with the British — and crushed them in combat. On August 14, 1791, an enslaved African Muslim named Dutty Boukman led other enslaved folks in an uprising against the French. This rebellion and the death of Boukman are marked as being one of the sparks that lead to the Haitian Revolution. On the 27th night of Ramadan in January 1835, a group of enslaved African Muslims in Salvador of Bahía, Brazil, organized one of the largest slave rebellions in the history of the Americas. After being forced aboard on June 28, 1839, Sengbe Pieh, an enslaved African Muslim, led the aquatic revolt on the Amistad.

For members of the carceral class, resistance is in our blood. Resistance is a binding component of our collective experience. Resistance is in our history. This is the history of Black folks like Safiya Bukhari, Iya Fulani Sunni-Ali, Kamau Sadiki, Jamil Al-Amin, Mutulu Shakur, and Russell “Maroon” Shoatz.

This is why we resist to this day.

In the end, I return to where I started, thinking about Saidiya Hartman’s words. We live in a time created by the original mass incarceration — the transatlantic slave trade. The “peculiar institution” that is rooted in carcerality. Malcolm X knew this. Political prisoners in the United States today, who need to be freed, know this. I, too, know this. There has not been a point in my life where I have not been intimately impacted by the carceral state. We know this because we have all been subject to and subjugated by the carceral state. It is this experience of knowing that informs my fight to abolish the carceral state.

If Death Doesn't Push Politicians Left, Then What Can?

By Christian Gines

I am sick and tired of seeing black bodies dead in the street for absolutely no reason at all. It is traumatic and exhausting to continue to see wanton violence perpetuated every single day. Every time I see a black person that has been killed from structural violence I think back to the first point of Afropessimism: “The slave, as an object, is socially dead, which means they are open to gratuitous violence, as opposed to violence contingent upon some transgression or crime.” Black people are killed daily without any justification. How can a representative of the state apparatus represent and legislate on behalf of the black community if we are socially dead in the eyes of the state? If wanton violence keeps occurring to us and nothing is done, what other means do we have other than Abolition?

In the eyes of the state, black people are seen as a commodity, not something that they represent, but something that they use when they need too and dispose of us when we aren’t required anymore. We are not seen as human in the country’s eyes, so why would a state actor actually represent us and our needs? How would the figurehead of the country not see us as anything but socially dead? When another black brother or sister dies, they see that as a side effect of the system. Instead of looking toward Abolition, they look towards performative action to subside the masses, and in the best scenario, they think that minor reforms will solve the issue. Arresting a police officer after they have killed a black person is not justice. Justice is a system that doesn’t allow that killing to happen in the first place. Justice is living in a system where you don’t have to worry about structural violence and gratuitous violence daily. There will never be justice in a system that feeds off of black death. We shouldn’t expect politicians, courts, voting booths, and other state-run apparatuses to do anything other than uphold anti-blackness. The state’s only goal is self-preservation. Whether that is defending capitalism, white supremacy, the (cis-hetero)patriarchy, and any other tentacles of oppression, it will do anything to stay intact. 

With talks of politicians being pushed left, I wonder how. If you look outside and see black bodies slain every day and aren’t moved left, what will move you? When we have had protest throughout the country since the killing of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, these politicians haven’t moved to the left an inch. In some cases, they are moving to the right. In the case of Minneapolis, change only came because of the destruction of property. Does the destruction of property outweigh the killing of an innocent black body? How many black bodies have to pile up before they wake up and realize that we need different solutions. Police without body cams kill us. Police with body cams kill us. No matter what reform we try to make, the police still are killing us. America is inherently anti-black. It is a country founded off the backs of Native Genocide and Slavery. Every single institution founded in the U.S. was based on racism and oppression. From the foundation of police deriving from slave catchers. The Prison Industrial Complex, deriving from slavery. The Immigration system, founded in settler colonialism and the exclusion of Asians. The Supreme Court and its racist rulings. The medical system and experimental surgeries on slave women. The U.S. military and its imperialism that devastates countries to the brink of land degradation, starvation, and death. Every US institution has its founding in either racism, settler colonialism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia, which means that the U.S. itself is a system of oppression that we should work to dismantle. That affects of that foundation is something that we still have to deal with daily. Black people are open to violence on the regular. If the police don’t kill us, we are killed by prisons, homelessness, starvation, disease, and many other forms of violence. Knowing this and seeing this on an everyday basis, what more does a person need to be pushed left. 

If a person is apathetic and sometimes even supports the senseless use of bombings and drone strikes on our brothers and sisters in the Global South, what makes you think they will become susceptible to the calls for the end of death within the country.  How would anyone be held accountable inside of office when we can’t even keep them accountable when running for office. If they won’t meet the voter’s demands when they need our so-called votes to win in the first place, then why would they listen to us when they get into office? Politicians will run on a platform that seemingly seeks to change things when they get in office, but when they get in, they turn their backs on the everyday person. How are we then to hold them accountable? They have gained access to more power. They have gained access to more capital. They have gained access to the most extensive domestic and foreign military apparatus on the planet. They have gained access to the FBI and CIA, which allows them to undermine any effort at resistance or liberation. How will they be held accountable by constituents when the only thing they serve is the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy? How are they going to be held responsible when to maintain the structures that they benefit from and control the production cost is your life? There is no accountability in a system that is set up like that. You cannot expect a change in bourgeoisie politics because the only thing they are beholden to is money. 

How can you make someone acknowledge your humanity? Acknowledge that you have the right to a life free from the threat of death or oppression? We have been trying this for centuries, and it hasn’t worked. Why? It hasn’t worked because the foundation of this country was the foundation of our social death. When slavery emerged in conjunction with blackness, anti-blackness emerged as well. Slavery necessitated the condition for our blackness, because how else could you justify putting someone into slavery unless they aren’t seen as human. How many videos do you need to see black people being shot by the police to believe that we need to abolish the police? Blackness’s participation in civil society is a contradiction because for civil society to exist, blackness has to be subjugated and oppressed. It has to be seen as nonhuman. To validate civil society, you must also validate anti-blackness because one necessitates the other. For a time now, we have invited people to see what is what it’s like to live at the bottom of the totem pole. Most people never take the time to even try to go through what we experience daily, and those that might help here us out do so out of their interest most of the time and come out with small reformist goals. Now that isn’t to knock any effort of reform. We should be advocating for some of our pain and oppression to be alleviated here and now, but in the long term, reform is nothing but fascism, as George Jackson says. You cannot elect and legislate away oppression. Minneapolis proves that when civil society starts to become disrupted, then change might come. Civil society only exists to maintain structures of oppression and normalize oppressive violence and demonize revolutionary violence. 

If a person or party only acknowledges your existence as a commodity or, in this instance, a voting block that allows them to get power, then you are already on the losing side. If you, after decades of loyally supporting them have nothing in return except void representation and worsened oppression, then why are you supporting them in the first place. Bourgeoisie politics will never be a mechanism for change and ending oppression. You cannot legislate away anti-blackness when that is in the foundations of something. It’s either Abolition or oppression. The representatives of the state apparatus don’t see you as anything but a tool for power. You are not human to them. “That is why you will always be open to gratuitous violence, as opposed to violence contingent upon some transgression or crime; and generally dishonored, or disgraced before any thought or action is considered.” If they don’t see you as actual people, then your death at the hands of state-sanctioned violence is nothing but a casualty of their power, and we have had far too many deaths to not fight back anymore. That is why, no matter how many black people die, politicians will not be pushed to the left. To go to the left is to go against the core institutions that they seek to uphold, and if they were to do that, they wouldn’t have power in the first place.

David Walker's Appeal: Thinking About White Supremacy's Archenemy As We Approach July 4th

[PHOTO CREDIT: AP/NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY]

By Robert Bohm

David Walker (1976?-1830), a free black parented by a slave father and a freedwoman, he was born and raised in Wilmington, North Carolina, although he left there as an adult to travel in various states. He didn't depart out of boredom or simple restlessness. But because of disgust.

If I remain in this bloody land, I will not live long. . . . I cannot remain where I must hear slaves' chains continually and where I must encounter the insults of their hypocritical enslavers.[1] ("David Walker" 2020)

Eventually, he ended up in Boston. There, he settled down, married and had two children.

Although what we know of Walker biographically is far from complete, we at least know one thing about him with certainty—

By the time he arrived in Boston he was a knowledgeable abolitionist. But he wasn't merely one among many abolitionists. He was on the verge of becoming the author of David Walker's Appeal[2], the most ferocious and multipronged analysis of white supremacy and slavery up until its publication in1829.

In it, he not only laid out a justification for, and a call for, a slave uprising, but also paved the way for future thinker-activists who explored the nature of racial and colonial oppression from what came to be called a psychohistorical standpoint. Such persons included W.E.B. Du Bois and Franz Fanon.  

If anyone is relevant to our era with regard to US racism, its history, white supremacy, and incite into, and rage against, the persistence of these things, it is David Walker.

He has something informative to say to everyone recently in the streets following George Floyd's murder.

He also has something darker to say to those who occupy our nation's seats of power.

Contexts

In spite of this legacy, Walker remains one of the least known of the early 19th century's black liberationists. This is in spite of the fact that it reasonably can be argued that no student can grasp the Declaration of Independence's (US 1776) status as an historical document without also reading Walker's Appeal[3] which critiques both Thomas Jefferson's vision of race and the Declaration's role in a racialized America as a white privilege document — one, however, which Walker believed was subvertable by blacks if they employed, in an act of transgressive chutzpah, the Declaration's own words to assault US racism. Which is exactly what Walker did.

In doing so, he instantly turned the Appeal into one-half of a Siamese twins relationship with the Declaration, tying the black freedom-fighter's vision and the white oppressor's vision together forever in all their historical complexity. Consequently, it's impossible for US citizens or anyone else to grasp the Declaration's significance without also reading Walker's deconstruction of it in the Appeal.

That the Appeal possessed visceral power was clear from the moment it was published. Almost instantly, southern officials and other whites responded to it with alarm. As the Appeal's circulation in the south began, a bounty was placed on Walker's head — $3,000 for simply killing him and $10,000 for the more complex feat of capturing him alive, then returning him to the south for (it seems clear) torture and execution.[4] ("David Walker" 2020)

But the money on Walker's head was only one part of the south's enraged response. To reduce the possibility of slave rebellion, new antiblack laws were passed throughout the region while old ones were toughened. Georgia, as an example, passed legislation that made circulation of antislavery manifestos subject to the death penalty. During the same period, in other states from Virginia to Louisiana, laws against teaching slaves to read and write were made harsher, prohibitions against slaves gathering in groups without white oversight were passed, and it was made illegal for freedmen and freedwomen to interact with slaves. Even the Columbian Centinel, a Boston publication, editorialized that these measures were justified to guarantee "The immediate safety of the whites."[5]

The panic that precipitated these responses to the Appeal was triggered by Walker's call to arms in a society already riven by fear of what blacks would do to whites if slaves united and revolted. That there were slaves willing to take great risks and even die in their fight for freedom was something whites knew well, since examples of such incidents were preserved in folklore and historical memory.

One of the first of these incidents occurred in the late 1600s when four blacks were hanged after slaves and white indentured servants joined forces to attack their Virginia owners. Another was the 1739 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina during which slaves killed and beheaded whites, then marched toward Spanish controlled Florida in the hope of finding freedom there. And only twenty years prior to Walker's treatise, an 1811 uprising in Louisiana, numbering approximately five hundred slaves at its maximum strength, burned plantations and killed slave-owners, then later, using guns, hoes, axes, clubs and anything else they could lay their hands on, battled two better-armed white militias until the uprising was crushed as the rebels tried to reach New Orleans which they'd planned to conquer.

Closer in time to the Appeal's publication, the 1820s also provided fodder for white worries, particularly with regard to fugitive slaves who, hiding in out-of-the-way places in the southern states, adopted arson as a kind of guerrilla weapon, setting fire to key locations in certain cities, then fleeing[6] and thus stoking white paranoia about the ever-present potential of black retaliation.

‌Another source of white uneasiness during this period was the 1822 slave conspiracy led by Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina.

Vesey, a skilled carpenter and freedman, initiated the conspiracy out of a long-lasting hatred of slavery which was further aggravated by the fact that his wife and children were still enslaved. His family's plight was further compounded by a recent change in local laws which made the process by which slaves could be freed more difficult.

Working from these interlaced motives, Vesey recruited an initial group of Charleston slaves (domestics, general laborers, blacksmiths and other skilled workers, etc.,) to become part of the planned uprising. Once this cadre was pulled together, the group further expanded its numbers via secret meetings through which it brought in new members from unrepresented parts of the city as well as from the countryside. The intended insurgence to which these women and men pledged their support was a three-part revolt designed to be both an uprising against and an escape from slavery.

The plan's three phases consisted of the following.

First, on the designated date, July 14, 1822, slaves were to arise in the middle of the night, then slay their white masters and families. Second, those from the countryside were to combine with those from Charleston to take over the city, torch its buildings, kill any whites who interfered, and steal the city's weapons supplies. Third, the rebels were to march as a united force to the city's docks, requisition ships for their use, then sail to Haiti where blacks had overthrown white French colonists two decades earlier.

As reported in the official summary of events, Negro Plot. An Account of the Late Intended Insurrection, the rebellion was quelled a month and a half prior to its scheduled onset. This happened when a Charleston "gentlemen of great respectability" heard of the plot from "a favourite and confidential slave of his" who learned about it from another slave.[7] (James Hamilton, Negro Plot, 2020) When the slave-owner relayed what he'd discovered to the authorities, it set off a chain of events which in a matter of days ended badly for the conspirators. Of the 131 arrested in raids, 35, including Vesey, were hanged as the prime instigators. Others received lesser sentences, and some were acquitted.[8] Also, untold numbers of other committed participants retreated, unnamed and unrevealed, into the silence of their previous lives.

As the court-imposed death sentences given to Vesey and the thirty-four others who were hanged showed, they were sentenced not only for the conspiracy per se, but for their supposed strangeness as Africans, a strangeness perceived by whites as a kind of precivilized spiritual disfigurement which reduced blacks to less-than-human creatures controlled by brutish instincts and prone to crude forms of occultism.

Typical of how this attitude manifested itself in the court's proceedings is the wording of the court's findings with regard to each individual found guilty. A case in point is one Jack Pritchard, aka Gullah Jack, whom the court accused of rejecting "natural and ordinary means" in helping to develop the plot and instead employing "the most disgusting mummery and superstition" to achieve the conspirators' ends. Furthermore, the court found that such behavior could "excite no other emotion in the mind of the intelligent and enlightened, but contempt and disgust" and therefore Gullah Jack should know that no matter what kind of conjuring he practiced or barbaric beliefs he held, "all the powers of darkness cannot rescue you from your approaching fate!"[9]

(It's appropriate to take note here of how different types of othering employ similar forms of demonization. The phrases "disgusting mummery" and "all the powers of darkness" could just as easily be quotes from the Salem witch trial judges in 1692-93 as from racist whites rabid to punish the Vesey conspirators one-hundred-thirty years later.)

Although by the time the Appeal reached the south, the failed 1822 conspiracy, and even more so the earlier rebellions, might seem from our perspective today to have been sufficiently in the past to no longer impact whites, this wasn't the case.

Living in a world in which acts of slave insolence and memories of old slave revolts regularly stirred white society's fears of what black revenge might look like if it succeeded, stories of such incidents, present or past, weren't soon forgotten. Regarding the Vesey conspiracy, the memory of its apparently large size (it was rumored to include thousands of co-conspirators)[10] and massive ambition (its aim was to flee the country for Haiti)[11] still reminded whites in 1829 of their need to always be on the alert and, when necessary, to crush black anger the moment it appeared.

This was the context in which the Appeal's appearance in the south triggered white rage, bolstered antiblack laws and increased vigilantism. What made matters even more enraging for the slave-owning hierarchy was Walker's distribution network, which initially baffled them because of the author's sly use of commercial sailors from the waterfront near his Boston shop to smuggle copies into the south on their cargo trips, then deliver them into the hands of slaves, manumitted slaves and white antislavers.

What grabbed readers' attention — including white supremacists who invariably got hold of copies — about the Appeal was Walker's writing style, a combination of pulpit-pounding oratory, knifeblade-sharp analysis, and a self-confident tone which ranged from insurrectionary to mockery.

Not surprisingly, many slaves and antislavers were moved and/or inspired by the author's rhetoric, whereas bigots and go-alongs loathed it. Even some abolitionists regarded it suspiciously. Many of these believed, as did William Lloyd Garrison, the famous white abolitionist, that the pamphlet's tone was aggressive and promoted violence. 

We deprecate the spirit and tendency of this Appeal . . . We do not preach rebellion — no, but submission and peace . . . We say, that the possibility of a bloody insurrection at the south fills us with dismay.[12]

So, even here, among Walker's supposed allies, there were those offended by the Appeal's fiery style and its call for a so-called "bloody insurrection." What those like Garrison who were offended by this aspect of Walker's argument failed to grasp (or did grasp but refused to support) was that Walker's demand for full equality resembled nothing so much as the Declaration of Independence's proclamation, "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive" of people's right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness . . . it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."

Unlike Garrison, Walker understood that he had framed his Appeal in the only way it could successfully be framed in the US—by using the young nation's own words against it. The Declaration, after all, consisted of nothing more than one part of the British population (the colonies) proclaiming war against another part (those living in Britain (the exploiters). That war, which was precisely the type of "bloody insurrection" which Garrison wanted to deny to blacks, ended with the colonies' secession from Britain and their formation into the United States. Although Walker didn't want secession for slaves and free blacks, he did employ the Declaration's formula—i.e., of one part of a population declaring war against another part in the name of freedom—for the purpose of agitating for black liberation from white rule.

David Walker

In this regard, Walker's assertion in the Appeal that it was better to "kill or be killed . . . rather . . . than to be a slave to a tyrant"[13] perfectly echoed the Declaration. For him, the July 4th document wasn't a fantasy about freedom, it was a text which validated precisely what Garrison denounced in the Appeal: the right to "preach rebellion" in order to stir the oppressed (in this case, not the colonies but slaves) to rise up against their tormenters, just as the colonies had done against Britain.

Between Garrison and Walker, Walker's read of the Declaration's implications was clearly deeper and more exploratory.  

Another white abolitionist who rejected the Appeal was Benjamin Lundy whose critique, although similar to Garrison's at a certain level, contained a more noticeable paternalism in the way he expressed his need to "set the broadest seal of condemnation upon" Walker's manifesto and its (according to Lundy) vile tone.

Such things can have no other earthly effect than to injure our cause. The writer indulges himself in the wildest strain of reckless fanaticism . . . It is a labored attempt to rouse the worst passions of human nature, and inflame the minds of those to whom it is addressed.[14]

Lundy goes on to warn all abolitionists against stooping to the arousal of what he labels "malignant passions," then warns antislavery proponents, particularly blacks, against speaking or writing with a lack of decorum.

There can be no impropriety in an expression of sentiment, on the part of the colored people, relative to their wrongs . . . acrimonious language should not be indulged, and even revengeful feeling should be repressed, as much as possible. A disposition to promote turbulent and violent commotion, will only tend to procrastinate the march of justice.[15] (Ibid.)

Although Lundy was a "sincere" abolitionist, he was also a contradictory one. In reading his comments above it's difficult not to spot the archetype of the White Master transformed into the archetype of the White Liberator instructing blacks about how to speak and write correctly. It's an interesting thought: a white member of the language police deciding what defiant slaves and freedman were and weren't permitted to say as they strove to topple slavery.

Walker refused to bow down to such paternalism. Quite to the contrary, he realized the challenge he faced in authoring the Appeal was to name and explicate the reasons behind the black right to revolt against and abolish the slave system, and in doing so to create a language of black insurrection more comprehensive than any so far heard.

To say the least, this was a daring endeavor in 1829 in a country built on racial bigotry where any effort to discuss black rights was experienced by whites (as it often is today) as insulting and belligerent. —in Lundy's term, an "impropriety." Hence, Walker's condemnation by even many antislavers. In the always ongoing language disputes which throughout history inevitably insinuate themselves into politics, to tell the truth about slavery during Walker's time, and well beyond, was, to again quote Lundy, for Walker allegedly to indulge "himself in the wildest strain of reckless fanaticism."

But Walker's real "crime" is that he did his job so well, by writing the most thorough and inspiring antislavery manifesto up until that time. One example of this was the way he anchored his statements about the need for black resistance to slavery with an often folksy simplicity which nonetheless didn't prevent his words from possessing a hard-hitting truthfulness —

it is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty.[16]

The simplicity of these words is incontestable. Also incontestable is how brazen they are. They announce, in a society in which whites are in all matters privileged over blacks, the slave's right to kill whites, since whites possess the right to kill blacks on a whim or to kill them slowly by starving them of all the nourishments that only equality can provide. This power of the individual of European stock over anyone of African heritage means that a white person is always potentially only one step away from becoming a black's executioner. Knowing this, Walker views a black's murder of a white supremacist as simultaneously a simple act of self-defense and a freedom proclamation.

To understand how explosive Walker's "to kill a man" statement was, we must recognize that it was an announcement of the black freedom struggle's presence in the midst of an array of forces, each of which wanted to crush it. Consequently, it was a announcement of its own survivor status, of its refusal to play dead and pray that one day whites would gift slaves freedom because slaves and free blacks had chosen to abide by Lundy's directive to be polite and therefore should be rewarded. But instead of passivity, what Walker gives his readers in the above statement are thirty words organized into a blunt and simple foundational thought which speaks to the principle of self-determination in a self-determined way.

The black body, Thomas Jefferson, white Christianity

As previously mentioned, Walker referenced the Declaration of Independence in his Appeal on a number of occasions. He did so sometimes in order to make points about the righteousness of slaves' struggle for freedom and at other times as an example of the degree to which most U.S. whites were either too hypocritical or disinterested to acknowledge the contradiction in lauding the Declaration as the nation's founding document while simultaneously denying that slavery revealed a gaping hole in the country's notion of freedom.

Realizing this state of affairs demanded demythization, Walker chose to expose how behind America's swagger and braggadocio, and undergirding its supposed high ideals, was hidden the nation's true source of strength, the foundation upon which it was built: not the Declaration's soaring language, but the black body, available for anything whites demanded of it.

This, Walker understood, was what the American Dream was built on. Following from this, he believed, was that continued subjugation of the black body was whites' raison d'être, which was why they persisted—through either active support (political formations, lynch mobs, etc) or simple indifference to blacks' plight—in conceptualizing freedom as by definition pertaining only to themselves and therefore not relevant to slaves, Native Americans and others of non-European background.

Regarding this situation, Walker's writing bellowed off the page with sarcasm and exasperation in the Appeal when he castigated whites for their self-serving ignorance—

See your declaration, Americans!! Do you understand your own language?[17] (David Walker 1965)

Even here, though, with his tone so caustic, Walker didn't surrender to blind emotion but methodically constructed a well-planned critique, not merely of U.S. racial hypocrisy in general, but against the Declaration of Independence's primary author himself, Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. president and a man renowned for supposedly being more sensitive than many whites to slaves' plight. 

Saying about Jefferson that he "was one of as great characters as ever lived among the whites," Walker proceeds to eviscerate him for his shallow racial views.

In analyzing Jefferson's racial stereotyping, Walker quotes part of a passage from Jefferson's book, Notes on the State of Virginia, in which the Declaration's author stresses that whites haven't yet found a good reason to consider "the races of black and of red men" worthy "subjects of natural history"[18] (Avalon Project, Notes on . . . Virginia, 2020). To further elaborate this point, the third president admits to having a suspicion

that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications.[19] (David Walker 1965)

‌In another area of Notes which Walker also quotes, Jefferson adds to this argument by insisting that when considered historically, the idea of black backwardness wasn't the product of systemic racism but of blacks' biological predisposition—i.e., blacks' "nature." To buttress this perspective, Jefferson compares Africans enslaved in the US (who weren't allowed to read and write) with Rome's' slaves (who were allowed to read and write), proclaiming that Roman slaves were often that nation's

rarest artists. They excelled too in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their master's children; Epictetus, Terence and Phadrus, were slaves,--but they were of the race of whites. It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction."[20] (Walker, Appeal, 15)

Walker lambasts this analysis by identifying the structural weakness at its core: the inherent imbalance of equating educated white slaves with uneducated black slaves. How, he contends, can you compare people living under incommensurate conditions as if their situations were the same and therefore their responses to particular stimuli equivalent?

Mr. Jefferson declared to the world, that we are inferior to the whites . . . It is indeed surprising, that a man of such great learning . . . should speak so of a set of men in chains. I do not know what to compare it to, unless, like putting one wild deer in an iron cage, where it will be secured, and hold another by the side of the same, then let it go, and expect the one in the cage to run as fast as the one at liberty.[21] (Walker, Appeal, 10)

Clearly, Walker had no tolerance for white supremacist thinking's convoluted nature, no matter how allegedly important the spouter.

But as deeply incensed as he was about this aspect of the race issue, he also was filled with disdain for the young country's sense of white entitlement and what it fed: the nation's duplicity in refusing to apply the Declaration's egalitarian philosophy to blacks. He considered it abhorrent that whites (and too many slaves) didn't comprehend how relevant the Declaration's section on a government's "ends" (i.e., the freedoms and rights it supplies to its population) was to blacks, with its guarantee that

whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.

Although Walker understood that the vast majority of whites would never agree this statement applied to US blacks, he was defiant in his persistence in trying to make the case. He knew, and refused to let go of this knowledge, that if this statement was philosophically sound enough to justify the colonists' war against Britain, it also was sound enough to justify a black war of freedom against the current (white) government and economic system. Walker not only understood this, but launching such a war is precisely what he proposed in the Appeal that blacks do. He also argued it was the only Christian route to follow, since from his revolutionary perspective the majority of those whom he labeled "American Christians" risked their souls by living lives which were the antithesis of Christianity because of how they sowed antiblack loathing everywhere while refusing to listen to blacks' outcries, including his own—

It is a notorious fact that the major part of the white Americans have, ever since we have been among them, tried to keep us ignorant and make us believe that God made us and our children to be slaves to them and theirs. Oh! my God, have mercy on Christian Americans!!. . . .[22]

O ye christians!!! who hold us and our children, in the most abject ignorance and degradation, that ever a people were afflicted with since the world began-- I say, if God gives you peace and tranquility, and suffers you thus to go on afflicting us and our children, who have never given you the least provocation,--Would he be to us a God of justice?[23]

With white Christianity long ago having spiritually disfigured itself, turning itself into a continent-conquering mass of bible-quoting marauders who viewed blacks and the indigenous as fair game for every kind of white supremacist lunacy, Walker relished the Declaration's insistence on people's right, if a government oppresses them, to rise up and "alter or . . . abolish it."

In only a few words, penned in a moment of historical irony by a slave-owner, the Declaration's announcement that people possessed the right to abolish a government which didn't adequately represent them, Walker discovered a rationale for black upheaval against slavery. Yet finding this rationale was no easy matter, he had to first   do what whites had failed to do: think more deeply about the Declaration's words. After all, what was inferred by terms like "people" and "mankind" in the document was people=white people and mankind=white humans. In such instances Walker replaced such connotations by employing each word's universalist definition—i.e., human beings—and thereby removing reference to skin color. Doing so not only enabled him to use the Declaration's phraseology to include blacks, but also to remind white supremacist Christians of how, once blacks felt sufficiently empowered by this new inclusion, they

will retaliate, and woe will be to them.[24] 

The alternative to such conflict, Walker insisted, was for white Christianity's adherents to reinvent their dead spirituality by turning it into something resembling what it was supposed to resemble: an aspiration toward brotherhood, toward a willingness to accept human beings other than themselves as their equals.

But since no evidence existed that whites in general would make this effort on their own, Walker saw blacks as ironically positioned to potentially be whites' saviors by launching an insurrection that would destroy white supremacy's institutional structures and, in the process, cleanse white Christianity's hatred-fueled underpinnings while simultaneously transforming the Declaration and other national founding documents into something substantively different than what they currently were — i.e., white-settler power treatises.

This vision, coupled with the vividness, cutting eloquence and range of topics that fueled Walker's totalistic critique, makes Walker a ground-breaker in the black liberation struggle's history. As Herbert Aptheker wrote in "One Continual Cry," his introduction to one of the Appeal's editions, Walker's book is

the first sustained written assault upon slavery and racism to come from a black man in the United States. This was the main source of its overwhelming power in its own time; this is the source of the great relevance and enormous impact that remain in it . . . Never before or since was there a more uncompromising and devastating attack upon the hypocrisy of a jim-crow Christianity . . . Never before or since was there  a more passionate denunciation of the hypocrisy of the nation as a whole—democratic and fraternal and equalitarian and all the other words.[25]

Walker clearly wasn't a cavalier writer, no dilettante with only a casual relationship to the ideas his Appeal expressed. Deadly earnest and devoted to the goal of transforming the U.S. from a nation racialized by white bigotry into one with a political culture that better incarnated the Declaration's ideas about equality than the existing one, he was an activist whose words were intended as a prompt for a specific action — i.e., a revolution against slavery and for equality. That this war was inevitable was a fact of which he was certain.

Although correct in his certainty this war would happen, he didn't know it would take thirty years to arrive, nor did he realize that after the civil war which resulted in the freeing of slaves was over, the battle against racism would still be far from concluded. Instead, the struggle would be transformed. First, it transitioned into a failed resistance to the massive dismantling of black freedoms following Reconstruction, then it evolved into a battle against de facto bigotry in the north and Jim Crow racism in the south. And now today, in the midst of the nation's "post-racist" racism, our streets are teeming with Black Lives Matter demonstrators demanding an end to continued attacks on black bodies.

It is true, of course, that in terms of racism things are better than during slavery. But they're also not. White America's failure to grasp this paradox is the failure that will destroy the nation if it isn't remedied.

We live with, and inside of, paradox.

Epilogue: Consciousness & revolution

David Walker never flinched from the fight against racism nor from the challenge of connecting issues in ways which shed light on problems other than racism—for instance, how an economy and value system that privileged profits above everything else fueled a white racism that transformed black humans into commodities for the purpose of enriching those in power. Walker identified avarice as such a system's primary motivator, writing that because of avarice and the self-importance which accompanies it, such profiteers "murder all before them, in order to subject men to wretchedness and degradation under them."[26]

This was Walker's take on an emerging free market system.

Walker also grasped how a belief system like Christianity, considered sacred by Europeans and their descendents, could be deployed against blacks by those very caucasians as a method of psychological disempowerment. This disempowerment took the form of a generation-to-generation miseducation which bombarded slaves with the "knowledge" that according to God's plan their conquerors were superior, they themselves were less than human, and obedience to their masters was the sole course of action available to them.  According to Walker, this constant white nullification of the value of black life left slaves mired in "abject ignorance," convinced by their masters and overseers "that Heaven has designed us and our children to be slaves and beasts of burden to them and their children."[27]

Walker's insights into the commodification of the African body and the use of Christianity as a psychology-based mind-control tool showed how diverse forces interacted within the institution of slavery to keep blacks oppressed.

The difficulty of penetrating the slave fatalism perpetuated by these realities was Walker's greatest frustration. Making the situation even worse was that no matter where one turned at the time, other forces made the project of turning slave despair into slave rebelliousness even more difficult.

Take popular culture as an example. During Walker's adulthood, one aspect of popular culture was the same as it is today, taking bits and pieces of daily life and turning them into easily graspable entertainments.

One of this process's subgenres during the period 1800-1830 was the production of amusing (to whites) black characters who wore the signs of their alleged inferiority (a "childish" pidgin English, cartoonishly "thick" lips, etc.) as badges of honor. In this regard, one famous image of blacks at the time was a character created by Thomas D. Rice, a white actor who kicked off the minstrelsy trend in 1828.[28] (“Thomas Dartmouth Rice | American Entertainer | Britannica” 2020)The character Rice originated was a would-be black dandy named Jim Crow,[29] whom Rice played in blackface while garbed in raggedy clothes worn in such a way as to give the impression that Crow was less of a dandy than an inept black whose unfounded airs made him, not  a hip fashion devotee, but a farcical illustration of what it meant to be black and out of your league. As Rice acted his heart out on stage night after night, Jim Crow evolved into a living stereotype — a goofy-thinking, lazy, fawning, unintentionally hilarious buffoon.

All this for the pleasure of white audiences, exactly as the doctor ordered! Not only had patrons been entertained, now they "knew" exactly what blacks were supposedly like!

Culturally defined by such stereotypes as well as by intersecting rationalizations (e.g., theological, scientific, cultural) for black enslavement, the challenge of developing a black revolutionary consciousness among slaves undoubtedly seemed impossible at times to Walker and other antislavery activists. Still, in spite of such realities Walker accepted the challenge of breaking through the wall of racist mythology in order to define more clearly how slaves were held back by a worldview designed to guarantee their continued physical as well as mental subjugation.

In one of the book's examples of this problem—i.e., the issue of black identity in a whites-defined society—Walker retells a newspaper story concerning sixty newly purchased slaves who were being transported in a wagon to Kentucky by two guards and a driver. Of the slaves, the males were shackled with iron fetters, whereas women and children remained unbound. During the journey, however, the men secretly loosened their restraints with a chisel, then, when they thought the time right, attacked those in charge, killing, they believed, all three of them. Nevertheless, after the slaves escaped into the woods, it turned out the wagon driver whom they thought they believed dead wasn't dead and regained consciousness. Seeing this, one of the female slaves who had stayed behind revived him either out of pity or from a sense of duty, then helped him escape.

Walker criticizes this slave's behavior, accusing her of accepting her oppressors' view of what was expected of her as a slave—i.e., to protect white power and its needs, regardless of the costs. From Walker's perspective, these costs included not only the endless drudgery of slave life, but also the cost of the slave's acceptance of white supremacy's view of reality as your own. Therefore, the author concludes that the woman's apparently charitable act of nursing the white man back to health is, in fact, a type of self-mutilation. Disregarding her own needs as an enslaved black, she instead clings to her mandated role as a white enabler. In doing this, she fails to see, from Walker's perspective, the moment when the other slaves escape as a moment of potential free action for herself also, a chance to reclaim her identity as a free human being by joining the other slaves' rebellion. Instead, she digs down as deeply, as securely as possible, into the imagined safety of her enslavedness.

By offering this analysis, Walker proves himself to be not merely a promoter of black insurrection, but also a psychologist of such insurrection, of how the "outer" antislavery battle is also an inner psychological one that entails the slave's struggles with the values instilled in her/him by white society. In taking this approach, he foreshadowed W.E.B. Du Boise's work decades later (1877) in developing the concept of black double consciousness. Walker also was the forerunner of another thinker, Franz Fanon, whose book Black Skin, White Masks, pursued similar concerns, particularly with regard to the impact of white colonial ideology and culture on the colonized's consciousness. 

Although Walker understood black liberation would entail in significant part a casting-off of the negative impact of white supremacist values on black consciousness, he also grasped, and in the Appeal expressed his frustrations about, the enormous difficulty of doing so, a difficulty which began with the slave's "animal existence,"[30] a life of unceasing labor and exhaustion, along with the perpetual threat of the whipping post or a beating at the least sign of fatigue or a failure to do what was ordered.  

Although Walker believed that, if his words could only penetrate the slave's propagandized consciousness, he would be able to communicate with a purer, less subjugated place within them, an area of "unconquerable disposition"[31] and stoke revolt, he found his attempts to do this often frustrating and elusive.

This is why the slave who helped the wagon driver escape was a enigma to him. From the author's perspective, the slave's assistance saved

the life of a desperate man, whose avaricious and cruel object was to drive her and her companions in miseries, through the country like cattle, to make his fortune on their carcasses.[32]

Why would she do that? the author wondered.

For Walker, this was the problem in a nutshell. Providing people with information about their selfhood, about their right not to be driven "like cattle" here and there by a white man only so he can "make his fortune on their carcasses"—this information alone, this revelation of their selfhood as free human beings, didn't seem sufficient to arouse significant numbers of slaves to open acts of individual rebellion or to join a group insurrection. This both stumped him and complicated his efforts to communicate his message. Something blocked many blacks, prevented them from internalizing, then acting upon, their right to revolt. Consequently, he writes—  

Oh! coloured people of these United States, I ask you, in the name of that God who made us, have we, in consequence of oppression, nearly lost the spirit of man, and, in no very trifling degree, adopted that of brutes?[33]

Although Walker understood that the very fact of enslavement entails not only the surrender of one's body to someone else's control (as well as to the slave system's control), but also the usurpation of that which makes a human being human (e.g., critical thought, freedom of ideas, etc.), he nonetheless was exasperated by it, which is evidenced in the Appeal's many expressions of aggravation with how difficult it was for slaves to extricate themselves from the "wretchedness and miseries"[34] imposed on them by the totality of society — religion, government, the economy, white supremacy's ownership of the word freedom.

Clearly, it wasn't merely forced labor and forced ignorance that comprised the tribulation facing slaves and other blacks. It was also the fact that slavery didn't merely consist of the ownership of black bodies and the extraction from those bodies of wealth-producing labor. It also consisted in the constant reproduction of the very conditions which guaranteed that white supremacy/black subjugation would continue generation after generation via a white power structure and culture, and a slave class shaped by the black codes which spelled out what slaves were and weren't allowed to do.

For Walker, these codes structured black consciousness, providing the slave with a framework for how to view her or himself, since what the slave was allowed to do in many ways constituted who he or she was. According to the codes, slaves were denied, among other rights, the following ones: to testify against whites in court, read and write, marry, gather in a group unless supervised by whites, own firearms, read or distribute antislavery literature, retaliate against white physical abuse, leave a plantation without written permission.

By definition, then, the black self was rooted in the principle of not: not intellectually able, not allowed to (do anything autonomous), not white, not . . . of value, other than as a product owned by a white. The slave's conception, therefore, of right and wrong and, indeed, of who exactly he or she was, was modulated by a whites-imposed system of principles and behavioral restrictions based on the premise that a slave was a nothing, a brute good for only one thing, forced labor.

The way white consciousness is implicated in black consciousness, imbuing it with a self-awareness rooted in a caucasian vision of blacks' essence, convinced Walker that the young country's whites, including the founders, possessed no inclination to extend to people of color the Declaration of Independence's "unalienable rights" principle or the document's proclamation that the oppressed were allowed "to alter or to abolish" tyrannical governments. What whites wanted, he believed, was simple: to keep blacks enslaved, permanently. "The natural love in them to be called masters,"[35] Walker wrote in the Appeal, guaranteed that whites "will keep us in ignorance and wretchedness, as long as they possibly can."[36] (Walker, Appeal, 62)

Given these thoughts, it's not surprising that although Walker believed cultivating a black liberationist consciousness was achievable, he also periodically succumbed to the fear that freeing black consciousness from its colonization by the dominant race's thinking was nearly impossible.

Walker's wrestling with the question of what was necessary to ignite a black uprising in multiple states led to his book's many expressions of despair, as when he noted that too many blacks "yield in a moment to the whites" and this is "the reason the whites are able to keep their feet on our throats."[37] Consequently, he cries out in frustration, "Oh! my coloured brethren . . . when shall we arise from this death-like apathy?--And be men!!"[38] (Ibid.) Another time he writes, "Many of us know no better than to fight against ourselves."[39] He didn't mean here only that blacks sometimes sided with their masters against other slaves, but also that blacks, by internalizing the white power system's worldview, developed a whites-based self-image rooted in the idea that if they questioned white rule, they themselves became the enemy which they had to fight.

It is here, in Walker's exasperation with and fear of what white supremacist thought had done to black consciousness, that Walker made one of his most creative contributions to the philosophy of black liberation. This contribution, unlike his use of the Declaration of Independence to justify black revolution, isn't as concrete, although it is as door-opening. With the Declaration, he recontextualized the original meaning of "all men are created equal" in which by the word man the reader was to understand white man, so that now the word man was redesignated to mean human being. In this other contribution, Walker opened up the door to studying the psychology of racial oppression in ways which hadn't been employed before.

In other words, he paved the way for a revolutionary enquiry that hadn't yet been defined, but was necessary for strategizing black liberation. This is called leaving a legacy.

For Walker, one crucial part of remedying the problem of the debilitating effects of enslavement on black consciousness entails developing a new black self by reincluding in it what's been exiled from it by white supremacy: its own history seen through its own eyes and undistorted by racist assumptions.

In large part, this is precisely what the Appeal is, an anti-story—i.e., a narrative which, once inserted into, or set side by side with, the dominant white story of white superiority, would destroy the notion of that superiority by showing what it did in order to sanctify the myth of its greatness—e.g., the mass murders and use of terrorism to enslave and demonize the innocent for the sole purpose of allowing "those who are actuated by sordid avarice"[40] to rule over the so-called inferior in order to accumulate greater wealth as the result of how "the labor of slaves comes so cheap"[41] to them.

This unearthing of such a buried history is a form of the return of the repressed. As detailed by Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization, this is a process during which a "tabooed and subterranean history" disruptively resurfaces after a long absence in order to provide us with a fuller history which reveals "not only the secret of the individual" within society during the relevant period "but also that of civilization at the time."[42]

Walker's analysis is connected to this approach in that he views all forms of black anger and frustration at, and resistance to, white domination as signaling the homecoming or return of blacks to themselves from their whites-imposed anonymity within a denied history created by white supremacy's powers that be—pastors, government officials, educators, etc.—as well as by all those who either happily or out of convenience participate in this denial by accepting its righteousness without question.

That this hidden history's return from death by exclusion is an explosive moment for a white supremacist society should be no surprise, since it disrupts the dominant racial narrative and thereby unsettles the status quo's smugness, replacing it with white dread of what comes next. Hence, the hysteria triggered by Walker's Appeal, which was, up until that time, the most comprehensive summation/analysis of the nation's untold racist history, a history which, when made visible, possessed the power to rewrite the traditional fairytale account of American grandeur.

This is what white supremacy fears, the unearthing of the nation's racial anti-story, a reformulation of the nation's history.

Consequently, this is why even today the killing of unarmed blacks isn't confined to a two or three month hunting season, but is instead allowed every month of the year. For white supremacists, this hunt isn't for food, but part of a collective attempt to eliminate as many blacks as possible.

As David Walker understood, a battle against this level of racism can't be won by endlessly waiting for the system to self-correct. Rather, he tells his readers, it rather requires insurrectionists to appear on the scene like "a gang of lions and tigers" whose threatening energy forces the dominant society to realize this is a challenge it can't afford not "to deal with."[43]

Notes

[1] "David Walker, 1785-1830.” 2020. Univ. North Carolina - Education. 2020. https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/bio.html.

[2] David Walker, (Full title) Appeal to the COLOURERED CITIZENS OF THE WORLD, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965).

[3] Walker, Appeal, 75.

[4] "David Walker." Pbs.Org. 2020. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2930.html.

[5] Walker, Appeal, x.

[6] Herbert Aptheker, ed. One Continual Cry: David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. (New York: Humanities Press, 1965), p.34.

[7] "James Hamilton, 1786-1857. Negro Plot. An Account of the Late Intended Insurrection." (Boston: Joseph W. Ingraham, 1822). 2020. https://docsouth.unc.edu/church/hamilton/hamilton.html.

[8] Ibid.

[9] James Hamilton, Negro Plot, 2020.

[10] James Spady, "Power and Confession: On the Credibility of the Earliest Reports of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy." (Virginia: The William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 68, April 2011), p. 287.

[11] Ibid.

[12] William Lloyd Garrison. Editorial regarding Walker's pamphlet. The Liberator. Jan. 8, 1831

[13] Walker, Appeal, 26.

[14] “Full Text of ‘Genius of Universal Emancipation.’” 2015. Archive.Org. 2015. https://archive.org/stream/geniusuniversal01garrgoog/geniusuniversal01garrgoog_djvu.txt.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Walker, Appeal, 26.

[17] Walker, Appeal, 75.

[18] “Avalon Project - Notes on the State of Virginia.” 2020. Yale.Edu. 2020. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/jeffvir.asp.

[19] Walker, Appeal, 26.

[20] Walker, Appeal, 15

[21] Walker, Appeal, 10.

[22] Walker, Appeal, 35.

[23] Walker, Appeal, 5.

[24] Walker, Appeal, 61.

[25] Herbert Aptheker, One Continual Cry, 54.

[26] Walker, Appeal, 24

[27] Walker, Appeal, 2.

[28] "Thomas Dartmouth Rice | American Entertainer | Britannica." 2020. In Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Dartmouth-Rice.

[29] Rice's Jim Crow character is the source of the name later adopted to describe the violently racist post-Reconstruction south.

[30] Walker, Appeal, 25.

[31] Walker, Appeal, 25.

[32] Walker, Appeal, 26.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Walker, Appeal, 1.

[35] Walker, Appeal, 61.

[36] Walker, Appeal, 62.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Walker, Appeal, 60.

[40] Walker, Appeal, 3.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization. (New York: Vintage Books, February 1962), p. 15.

[43] Walker, Appeal, 25.