—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Before we get into the stories and strategies of people fighting oppressive systems, let’s get clear about what they’re up against.
The four systems examined in this volume—community development, punishment, economics, and infrastructure—are all essential elements of society, but the way they are applied in the United States skews heavily to benefit only a few members of that society. This is not solely because of racial harassment or discrimination. A system that deploys ad hoc violence or discrimination may contribute to the historical trauma of any one group, but it could also be overthrown by counter-violence. The result would still be a lack of equality, but power would shift from one group to another. What makes racial justice and social justice in the US unique is that our systems do not operate this way. Institutionalized racism created certain “norms” or “realities” that led to a single, perpetual benefactor to the power structure in this country: wealthy, white men.
The most glaring and consequential example of this is America’s “War on Drugs.” The impetus for modern criminalization stems from policies instituted by Richard Nixon in the 1970s and reinforced by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. An influx of funds to drug enforcement agencies and policies aimed at criminalizing drug use led to a rapid increase in incarceration rates and disproportionate sentencing of Black and white defendants.
The “reality” presented to the public was the government being “tough on crime,” but behind closed doors, another motive was revealed. During a 1994 interview, President Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, was quoted as saying: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”1 Thus, under the guise of “tough on crime,” a racially motivated policy earns widespread acceptance.
This book will examine many conflicts between “Black” and “white,” but it’s important to keep in mind that before there was such a distinction, the only differentiator between members of society was power. As colonizers, white settlers quickly established themselves atop the societal hierarchy by forcefully occupying the country. The colonizers’ weapons were more deadly and they hailed from a society defined by class—a wealth-based system designed to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. It was a system entirely foreign to the Indigenous people who were killed and displaced en masse for the sake of land and power grabs.
The social construct of “race” in America grew out of this need to hoard wealth. Most historians point to Bacon’s Rebellion, a 1676 revolt of white and Black indentured servants and slaves, as the establishing point for racial hierarchy in the country. It began as a feud between colonial governor William Berkeley and Virginian settler Nathaniel Bacon when Berkeley refused Bacon’s request to drive the Native Americans out of Virginia. In retaliation, Bacon organized a militia of underclass whites and Black slaves. Together, the band of rebels brought the town of Jamestown to its knees; the militia overtook plantations and burnt them to the ground. Their success inspired similar bands of Blacks and poor whites, united by a common oppressor in the wealthy landowner. So landowners and politicians designed laws to criminalize Black life and formed slave patrols, groups of lower-caste whites who were given the authority to enforce those new laws. Where unity between poor whites and Black slaves had been found by calling to attention their mutual oppression by wealthy landowners, legal language now called attention to their most obvious difference: the technically free and the determinedly captured.
“[The white working-class’s] contradictory behavior is explained by feelings of loyalty to race, by their identification with the white hierarchy, and by their economic advantage over the oppressed races,” George Jackson wrote from his prison cell, later published in the book Blood in My Eye. “They may be oppressed themselves, but in return, they are allowed to oppress millions of others.”2
Race as a social construct can be seen quite clearly in the constant recategorization of “non-whites.” The “new” immigrants who began arriving from Poland, Greece, Ireland, and Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century were put in a sort of racial limbo, told by the ruling class that they were not considered white, nor were they considered Black, but rather somewhere in between. Caricatured in propaganda, Irishmen were apes, Jews had mythical witch-like noses, and Chinese immigrants were drawn as parasitical locusts.3 New immigrants still posed a threat as “others,” but they had come here willingly—versus Africans ripped from their homeland and sold off as commodities upon arrival—from primarily European countries. The difference allowed them a chance for mobility. As Henry Pratt Fairchild, an influential American sociologist, wrote in 1911, “If [the white immigrant] proves himself a man, and . . . acquires wealth and cleans himself up—very well, we might receive him in a generation or two. But at present he is far beneath us, and the burden of proof rests with him.”4 This further served to define “whiteness” as the norm, a preferred classification to “Blackness.”
The fallout of Bacon’s Rebellion—fear-stoked policies that generated a caste apparatus based on race rather than wealth—created opportunity for multigenerational oppressive systems. These systems have served to maintain a social hierarchy where both economics and race hold proximity to power. In the historical context of how “whiteness” was constructed, it is interesting that race, not power, is something that can be “earned,” as indicated by Fairchild.
The purpose of grassroots movements, particularly the ones examined in this volume, is to disrupt this hierarchy by redefining the systems that uphold it. This is not a practice of dismantlement. Rather, it is a practice of building up the essential elements of society toward more equitable ends.
“What is, so to speak, the object of abolition?” scholars Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write in their critical analysis of public policy through a Black radical lens. “Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that would have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.”5
Community Development
An excellent microcosm of the impact of oppressive systems is community development, simply because the driving forces of such systems are felt most acutely in society’s individual fragments.
Often, the boundaries that define a community are a result of policies aimed at social control. As freed slaves moved out of the American South in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the federal government intervened to define communities by race. When the country entered World War II, the government provided housing for the influx of workers who had moved to cities like Richmond, California, where military production was ramping up. These accommodations were segregated; Black workers were designated to makeshift, temporary housing, with their white counterparts situated near white residential suburbs in more sturdily constructed homes.6 In St. Louis, zoning laws prohibited pollution-generating industries, liquor stores, and prostitution houses in white neighborhoods but not Black neighborhoods. Residents of neighborhoods with such industry were then precluded from the Federal Housing Authority’s insured amortized mortgages. The price of homeownership went up, and the ability to make repairs went down, leaving many homes dilapidated.7
As the country developed into a sprawling landscape of suburbs, farms, and cities, government agencies—from local city planners to state legislatures and federal institutions—solidified their role in keeping Black and white neighborhoods separate and distinct. In chapter 3, when Ivan says he lived on the “other side of the tracks” from his white classmates, he is speaking literally: Federal- and state-sanctioned development of railroads and highways has been intentionally designed to separate neighborhoods defined by race and class.
“Without our government’s purposeful imposition of racial segregation,” writes Richard Rothstein in The Color of Law (a must-read for anyone interested in the subject of “de jure” segregation), “the other causes—private prejudice, white flight, real estate steering, bank redlining, income differences, and self-segregation—still would have existed but with far less opportunity for expression.”8
In a sense, the purpose of community zoning in the current system would be containment. Zoning is a way of taking necessary elements of society—industry, diversity, housing, and the like—and placing those considered unattractive to white homeowners in a neighborhood of “others.” As a result, neighborhoods with large minority populations are often near toxic factories and far from quality grocers, creating “food deserts.”
This separation is felt deeply, both consciously and unconsciously, by community members. All the aforementioned examples force a feeling of otherness on people who have been lumped in with society’s “necessary evils,” and their subsequent criminalization solidifies the message that their place has been assigned. As carceral geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore says in her seminal book Golden Gulag, “California’s indeterminate sentences extended to life sentences for Black, Latino, and white prisoners whose failure to be rehabilitated translated as their refusal to learn their proper places in the social order.”9
Systems of “order” in communities rarely derive from the community itself. Occupational reporting data collected by the US Census Bureau in 2020, for example, found that the share of white police officers was larger than the share of white residents in 99 of the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas. In several of those areas, police were whiter than their assigned communities by 20 percentage points.10 Political representation is also seemingly “outside the bounds”—roughly 62 million eligible voters live in districts considered shoo-ins for the political party they oppose.11 In short, communities are rarely governed, secured, or resourced by the people who live within their bounds.
Punishment
To understand prison abolition, it’s worth tracking the changing purpose of prison from a rehabilitative vehicle informed by religious practices to punishment and isolation.
First implemented in the US in the eighteenth century, prisons were a religious reform to the death penalty, forcing someone to be alone with their Maker and repent for their sins. Jonas Hanway, one of the most prominent representatives of this line of thought, proliferated this theory: “The repentance and amendment, the sorrow for the past, and the resolution with regard to the future part of life, will be more sincere in the prison than it usually is in the church.”12
At their inception, prisons were also meant as a deterrent for crime, entering American society on the heels of theories like John Locke’s “sensation psychology,” which suggested that conduct was the product of one’s social environment.13 Prison as a deterrent has never been proven in practice partly because, contrary to Locke’s philosophy, it imposes social environments that are harsh and violent.
Prison’s evolution into the prison-industrial complex has been spurred on by the movement from religious reformation to a political need for control and sustained power.
“Crime means violation of the law,” Gilmore writes. “Laws change, depending on what, in a social order, counts as stability, and who, in a social order, needs to be controlled.”14
The relationship between control and incarceration is far more intertwined than crime and incarceration. During Reconstruction, politicians in the North and South criminalized Black life through a series of laws known as Black Codes. The aforementioned motive for Nixon’s War on Drugs offers a modern-day example, though presented less overtly than policies in the antebellum South.
What has been made plain to the public is that rehabilitation is no longer the primary concern of correctional facilities. Even in so-called progressive states like California, legislative language heightens the need for “punishment” over rehabilitation when it comes to imprisonment.15 As Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a 2023 ruling, “Congress has chosen finality over error correction.”16
“Incapacitation doesn’t pretend to change anything about people except where they are,” Gilmore surmises. “It is in a simple-minded way, then, a geographical solution that purports to solve social problems by extensively and repeatedly removing people from disordered, deindustrialized milieus and depositing them somewhere else.”17
The state also has a financial motive to keep prisoners. In 2019 three men in California’s prison fire brigade died fighting wildfires that devastated entire towns within the state. They made about $3 per day, plus an additional buck during active emergencies. They worked alongside firefighters earning an average of $91,000 a year, before overtime and bonuses.18 In fact, California has become so dependent on its over 1,000 incarcerated firefighters that, when emergency decarceration efforts began during the COVID pandemic, a corrections officer was quoted as saying, “How do you justify releasing all these inmates in prime fire season with all these fires going on?”19
On a national scale, 3M, Western Union, Amazon, and Microsoft have all relied on the labor of incarcerated people. These are 4 of over 4,100 companies that profit from prison labor.20 During the height of the pandemic, people in prisons all over the country working for little to no money made hand sanitizer and face masks to help fight COVID-19, as they struggled to access these protective measures themselves.
These financial “benefits” contribute to the power aspect of the prison-industrial complex (PIC)—but more profound is how the PIC exerts control. In 2023 the United States had 1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 1,323 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,116 local jails, 181 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian country jails. This isn’t counting the military prisons, or prisons in US territories.21 Incapacitation of whole communities certainly speaks for itself, but beyond concrete facilities, the PIC has broadened into an intricate web of government, business, and law enforcement entities that use surveillance and policing, in addition to imprisonment, as solutions to economic, social, and political disorder. It includes electronic monitoring devices, CCTV cameras, and cell phone tracking devices, all accessible to law enforcement with little oversight.22
Prisons have moved far from the rehabilitation facilities originally pitched by religious sociologists. They have “industrialized” both a labor force and an advanced surveillance market and created a “complex” web of influence that allows prison officials to operate far beyond prison walls.
Economy
In 2021 the Harvard Gazette estimated that the net wealth of a typical American Black family was around one-tenth that of a white family.23 This discrepancy, and several other economic disparities in America, has come to be known as the racial wealth gap—an inequality entrenched in the American banking system, and a natural byproduct of American capitalism.
It is widely held by economists that capitalism traces back to Adam Smith, an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher who detailed the system’s main principles in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. According to Smith, the driving forces behind the economy were the division of labor and self-interest.24 Essentially, The Wealth of Nations proclaimed that economic progress was dependent on working-class members of society, who were driven to produce by their natural desire to generate individual wealth. This, in turn, would lead to financial gain in all of society, with money circulating through the population like blood through a body.
The book was published in 1776, a time when political, religious, and scientific revolutions were taking place across the globe. Having just freed themselves from the British, American colonists were quick to engage with a newly defined economic system that had been examined in a scientific matter. And similar to Americans at that time, Smith was willing to overlook some of self-interest’s more problematic developments, such as slavery. The Wealth of Nations, published at the height of the transatlantic slave trade, makes no mention of slavery in its nearly 800 pages of examination. Instead, self-interest—specifically that of white male landowners—dominates both the book and the motivations of capitalist designers, the idea of profits over all else.
Smith intended to evolve economic philosophy from a zero-sum game—where profits to one must mean losses to another—into one of infinite potential for progress. So why does it seem like American capitalism is a constant rat race with very few beneficiaries? Fanon puts it succinctly: “Society, unlike biochemical processes, does not escape human influence.”25
A few specific perversions of Smith’s work have manifested over the years. Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead transformed self-interest from a psychological issue to a moral one, professing that those who were not driven to improve their own circumstances were lesser beings. We can hear this echo in the 1980s’ “crack whore” and “welfare queen” rhetoric that proliferated during the War on Drugs. Morality and wealth become so intertwined that successful people are considered right while others are considered at best broken, at worst criminal.
The second issue is that Smith’s principles of division of labor and self-interest are elevated over the human cost to achieve these things. For example, an immigrant farm worker might live in barrack-like housing while harvesting crops, the sales of which primarily benefit the landowners and families who have acquired large-acreage farms. Both worker and landowner are technically motivated by self-interest, but the latter’s interest is in accumulation while the former’s interest is survival—an average farmworker made $14.62 per hour in 2020, half the hourly wage for all workers that year.26
