Dylan Rodríguez, Part I: Abolition Is Our Obligation
Professor, author, and abolitionist scholar Dr. Dylan Rodríguez joins Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein on an episode of the Beyond Prisons podcast.
This is the first part of a two part conversation. In Part 1, Dr. Rodríguez explains his belief that abolition is our obligation, touching on the development of anti-Black algorithms used to keep people in prison, what it means to be vulnerable in the context of doing this work and how vulnerability is the starting point for an abolitionist practice, and the profound impact that Robert Allen’s book Black Awakening in Capitalist America had on shaping Dylan’s own thinking.
We also talk about how academia declares institutional solidarity with white supremacy, and how some academics are the planners and architects of domestic war. Dr. Rodríguez reminds us that terror is not a thing that you can fix with training and he shares some of the conditions he places on conversations about prison reform.
Dylan Rodríguez is President of the American Studies Association (2020-2021). He served as the faculty-elected Chair of the UC Riverside Academic Senate (2016-2020) and a Professor at the University of California, Riverside. He spent the first sixteen years of his career in the Department of Ethnic Studies (serving as Chair from 2009-2016) and joined the Department of Media and Cultural Studies in 2017.
Dylan’s thinking, writing, teaching, and scholarly activist labors address the complexity and normalized proliferation of historical regimes and logics of anti-Black and racial-colonial violence in everyday state, cultural, and social formations. His work raises the question of how insurgent communities of people inhabit oppressive regimes and logics in ways that enable the collective genius of rebellion, survival, abolition, and radical futurity. What forms of shared creativity emerge from conditions of duress, and how do these insurgencies envision—and practice—transformations of power and community?
In addition to co-editing the field-shaping anthology Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press, 2016), Dylan is the author of two books: Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). His next book, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press in Fall 2020 and will be followed in 2021 by White Reconstruction II.
Follow Dylan on Twitter: @dylanrodriguez
Credits
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Transcript
Kim Wilson: Hi and welcome to Beyond Prisons, a podcast on incarceration and prison abolition. I’m one of your hosts, Kim Wilson. This is the first part of a two part conversation that Brian and I had with Dr. Dylan Rodríguez. In this episode we talked with Dr. Rodríguez about how abolition is our obligation, the development of anti-Black algorithms used to keep people in prison, what it means to be vulnerable in a context of doing this work and how vulnerability is the starting point for abolitionist practice, and the profound impact Dr. Robert Allen’s book “Black Awakening in Capitalist America” had on shaping Dylan’s own thinking. We also talk about the ways academia declares institutional solidarity with white supremacy, and how some academics are the planners and architects of domestic war. Dr. Rodríguez reminds us that terror is not a thing you can fix with training, and he tells us what conditions he places on conversations about prison reform.
Dylan Rodríguez is President of the American Studies Association (2020-2021). He served as the faculty-elected Chair of the UC Riverside Academic Senate (2016-2020) and a Professor at the University of California, Riverside. He spent the first sixteen years of his career in the Department of Ethnic Studies (serving as Chair from 2009-2016) and joined the Department of Media and Cultural Studies in 2017. Dylan’s thinking, writing, teaching, and scholarly activist labors address the complexity and normalized proliferation of historical regimes and logics of anti-Black and racial-colonial violence in everyday state, cultural, and social formations. His work raises the question of how insurgent communities of people inhabit oppressive regimes and logics in ways that enable the collective genius of rebellion, survival, abolition, and radical futurity. What forms of shared creativity emerge from conditions of duress, and how do these insurgencies envision—and practice—transformations of power and community?
In addition to co-editing the field-shaping anthology “Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader” (Duke University Press, 2016), Dylan is the author of two books: “Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime” (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and “Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition” (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). His next book, “White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide”, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press in Fall 2020 and will be followed in 2021 by “White Reconstruction II”. We hope you enjoy this episode.
Brian Sonenstein: Thank you so much for joining us, I’m very excited to talk to you today, I know Kim is too. I thought maybe a good place to start would be to ask you to tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and the focus of your work for anyone who maybe is not familiar with you.
Dylan Rodríguez: Sure, absolutely. For the purpose of this discussion, I would start by saying that I’ve been a student, and eventually a teacher, a follower, a leader, an organizer, a creator, an observer; somebody who’s followed the obligations and accountabilities of abolitionist struggle for almost 25 years. I came up in the Bay Area as a graduate student. I was invited to be a part of the original founding collective that organized Critical Resistance. Originally it was a conference, it turned into an organization, obviously. When I came on board that project in the summer of 1997, I was fresh and new to the entire project of trying to challenge, resist, and overthrow the prison industrial complex. By the time the conference rolled around in the fall of 1998, it was slowly becoming clear that the politics we were pushing for, at its best, was actually an abolitionist politics. And I started learning a lot more from there from their radical attorneys, but especially from political prisoners, former political prisoners, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, and a handful of radical activists and scholars as to what the traditions and obligations of abolitionist struggle were. I’ve been thinking and working within that tradition (or trying to anyways) since that time. I started a job at University of California Riverside in 2001, trying to carry forward some of the scholarly and pedagogical parts of abolition into my daily job, but also trying to manage the carceral policing regime of the university, which I think is deep and I think we’re seeing come up really powerfully in this specific moment. I’m happy to touch on at some point in the conversation about what I think is a budding movement in the University of California (UC) system. I’ve been trying to carry that in my daily job, but I’ve also tried to remain accountable and connected to various forms of abolitionist struggle, particularly within the Black radical tradition. I think this is a really key point that folks need to understand is that the point of origins for abolition are both grounded in the struggles against anti-Black racial plantation slavery, but in all forms of anti-Black violence, anti-Black systemic oppression, resistance, ontological denigration, everything else that’s accompanied the structure of what we call civilization, meaning the Americas in this particular hemisphere, and so forth.
Other than that, I write, read and think a lot, I enjoy talking to folks in forms like this very much. I love that I can speak my mind and speak freely here. I’ve written a couple of books. The first book I did was called “Forced Passage” and it was an engagement with the tradition of radical and revolutionary incarcerated intellectual scholars, writers, poets, and organizers. I did a second book on the aftermath of the US genocidal occupation and conquest of the Philippines. I co-edited a book called “Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader” that laid out the terms for critical ethnic studies, central part of which is abolition and a radical approach to carceral studies and studies of policing. And I’m thrilled to say that my third single authored book is about to come out in the fall from Fordham University Press, it’s got a really simple title, it’s called “White Reconstruction”. And some of the themes I’m sure I’ll talk with y’all today are present in that book. That’s a short introduction, I’ve been nineteen years now a professor at the University of California, going on twenty.
Brian: That’s incredible, thank you so much for that. You mentioned the work you’re doing at UC around policing; do you want to expand upon that a little bit more and tell us what’s going on in UC right now?
Dylan: First of all, I should be really clear that there’s a shit load going on in the UC system. There’s no way I can do justice to everything that’s going on. I will say also that perhaps one of the most morbidly remarkable but unsurprising things that’s gone down in the summer of 2020 was the UCLA administration opening up Jackie Robinson baseball stadium, of all things, for the LAPD to serve as a temporary site of jailing and incarceration for people that were in the streets protesting the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so on. As we grieve and as we mourn, the LAPD took that field with the apparent approval and consent of the UCLA administration and there’s been a big movement at the UCLA campus around that, from the Divest/Invest movement. They’ve been pushing around divesting and redistributing funds around UC policing. That same thing has been picked up all over the UC system. I’m really proud to say that the way it’s been picked up at UC Riverside where I work has been Black student led. It’s been led by Black students, it’s been affirmed and amplified by allies and folks working in solidarity with Black students. I think over five dozen student organizations have endorsed what Black students are now struggling for at UC Riverside, a piece of which is movements towards redistribution and reparations that so called defunds the UCR Police but really abolishes the UCR police and the UC police departments more generally.
Folks need to understand really clearly at the campuses and UC system, if anyone listening to the podcast works there, that the abolition of UCPD is a good thing for almost everybody. The project of doing that is a good thing for almost everybody. You’re talking about a UC police budget that has, I believe, more than doubled in the last ten or eleven years. As probably almost anybody listening to this knows, the presence of a militarized UC department on campus creates an apartheid logic on campus for students, staff, and sometimes faculty and administrators, particularly Black folks who experience the police as a terror generating apparatus within the university and then everyone else who seems to experience it more or less as a protective apparatus. You have two different experiences that go down on the UC campuses, and what folks are doing now is bringing that to the surface and saying that it’s not acceptable, it’s not tolerable, it’s not sustainable, we need to liberated from this oppressive anti-Black and white supremacist infrastructure of campus community.
So, that’s going on. And then the last thing I’ll say is, this actually is remarkable to me. I’m the chair of our academic senate division at UC Riverside, so every month I go to something called the Academic Council which is this system wide meeting of all the chairs of academic senates from around the University of California as well as some of the system wide academic senate leadership. We were able to successfully pass by, I believe, a 15-2 vote (which is near unanimous, which again, that’s remarkable) on a set of recommendations that on Monday were passed forward to the UC president Janet Napolitano, of course the former secretary of Homeland Security. It’s a set of five recommendations that lead off towards a recommendation to minimize and or abolish the UC police department. The academic senate, which is not traditionally known as a radical body at all, but we’re in a historical moment where abolition has gained so much traction that you had the overwhelming majority, in near unanimity, of the faculty senate leadership in the UC system voting in favor of a set of recommendations to the UC administration to not only rethink the security and community infrastructure of the UC system, but to actively work towards the creative project of abolishing them.
A lot of the themes that come up in your podcast from the different folks that have been on, a lot of the ideas were front and center in that discussion as people struggled to get their heads around how the abolition of the police is an enormously creative and beautiful project that means that you’re rethinking how universities and communities operate. It’s not the caricatured straw person version that a lot of right wingers and liberals are throwing out right now on social media and in the mainstream media. So, that’s the project and it’s of course spreading everywhere, but those are things going on at the moment in which we’re having this conversation in part.
Brian: That’s incredible. It’s really amazing to see this movement especially gain steam on school campuses. To see that as a location where a lot of the energy is being directed and a lot of the changes that we’re seeing happening are happening at school campuses of all different levels and across the country, I think is really amazing.
Dylan: Well, Brian, let me say this though. As much as what I just said induces a stance of optimism, which I think it should, it has to be a radical optimism, we have to keep pushing forward on the horizons of what we can imagine we can do politically and practically every single fucking day. I’m saying that’s a good kind of optimism. I want to caution all of us to not be naive. Because here’s the thing that happens at every single institution in which the discussion of defunding the police (which is a hegemonic and dominant term right now, “defund the police”, some people are saying divest). That language is already in the process of being appropriated by various kinds of administrators, elected officials, pundits, academics, and other well meaning folks, activists, grassroots community leaders and so forth. But it’s being interpreted in a manner that is not only not going to lead to the abolition of the police, it will actively undermine efforts towards police abolition by way of expanding other forms of policing that don’t involve the police.
Brian: That’s a good point.
Kim: Exactly, I’m so glad you said that. I know weeks ago, one of the things I said on Twitter. I’m someone who pops in and out of Twitter. Sometimes it’s just...
Dylan: That’s probably healthy.
Kim: It is, at least for my own health. And I’m doing it as a public service too, if I said everything that I was thinking on Twitter there would be issues. But one of the things I raised, and it just seems like we’re constantly having the same conversation, especially on social media. For years I’ve been pointing out how Temple University (where I used to teach and graduated from, I have two degrees from that institution), and they brag about this on their website, has the largest police force in the country. A university campus is boasting that it has the largest police force. One of the things I observed, and there are many things that I observed over the years having taught there and coming at it from a public policy perspective and as an urbanist, someone who’s interested in the relationship between town and gown and all that nonsense, that the police on campus were really operating in a way, as you said, to protect some people and to basically ensure that the campus was free from other people.
Dylan: Just to interject, they don’t fucking protect anybody! There’s all kinds of violence that goes on on these campuses including Temple - interpersonal exploitation and sexual violence. The police are not an effective apparatus to do any of that, but people feel that way.
Kim: That’s the thing. That’s the point I was about to make on what I was saying on social [media], it acts as a signal to parents, particularly white suburban parents who wanted to send their kids to this “urban” campus but they were scared. Temple is in the middle of North Philadelphia, which is a historically Black community. The way the campus is set up, and this has happened in a lot of places, not just in North Philly or in Philly in general because you also have Penn which pioneered that model and Drexel its neighbor right there, which basically has gentrified the surrounding communities and pushed those people out. When I was at Temple, and this is way back, maybe twenty years ago, I was working at a small business development center as an intern at the time, and I remember seeing the blueprints for the community and how Temple had basically bought up blocks and blocks of residential housing. Basically the plan was to demolish all those homes, and people were living in them at the time, to put up what’s now the Liacouras Center, which is the events center, the 7/11, the parking lot that now exists up there, and a lot of other things that just weren’t there before. All of that stuff is on the site of people’s homes. Right behind my office they also demolished the housing projects there, Norris Homes. The function of the police and of their private security, because we also need to include private security in that, was to make sure that the campus appeared to be a nice “safe place”, especially when they were doing campus tours. They would make sure that when kids came on campus, I’m talking about the neighborhood kids, if they brought their bikes or were skateboarding and hanging out (there was nowhere else to hang out and there were great places to skateboard on campus) that those kids were actively shooed away. That was the function of police and security on campus.
I’m glad to see that there’s that movement, but I completely agree with you. I caution folks to not just sit back and say, “Okay, we’re good, we circulated a petition, we started a conversation,” because they’re not going to budge that easily. There’s a lot of work that needs to happen.
Dylan: Tell me about it. In addition to not budging so easily, what they - and by they I’m talking about the interface of university administrations, “company faculty” (let me put it that way), and the state (meaning both the police and the state that funds these institutions but really the state is generally symbiotic and supportive of these places of higher learning, especially places like Temple). What’s even worse than them not budging is that they are fully open to absorbing and working with all these fucking public statements that are coming out from different university and faculty bodies, including departments, and university academic national organizations, and so forth. Can I please ask people out there listening to stop issuing statements?
[Brian laughs]
Kim: Oh my god, thank you.
Dylan: Just for a minute. There’s a place and time and moment where statements are really really important. They raise consciousness, they unsettle things, they challenge dominant discourse and what not. But when you’re in a period of heightened insurrection and rebellion in which thought is accelerating, I’m talking critical radical abolitionist thought is collectively accelerating at such a massively impressive pace among all kinds of folks. I’ll tell you all the proudest moment I ever had on social media was the badass feminist Black radical rapper Noname citing me. I was like, “Holy shit!”, right? Who would have thought?
[Kim laughs]
Dylan: I never would have dreamed of it. I already liked her shit, but now she’s officially my favorite rapper.
[Brian and Kim laugh]
When you’re in a moment when all that’s going on, and this kind of radical analysis is spreading like fire in the best way, we don’t need more academic proclamations around solidarity with trite notions of Black civil rights, Black freedom, racial equity, diversity. We need to hold back from doing that and maybe shut the fuck up for just a minute and actually build some basic structures of collective political education and accountability to what’s going on in the summer [of] 2020. Because the one thing that institutions like universities abhor is being held accountable to their declarations. You can go all day making all kinds of flowery sounding diversity and Black solidarity declarations from different academic spaces, but absent actual attempts to build solidarity and accountability with Black organizations, with Black movements, abolitionist movements, and so forth, it really doesn't mean much. It’s a bunch of fucking noise. University administrations in the states are totally willing to absorb that stuff to undertake piecemeal action, not even reforms, but just piecemeal infrastructural actions that will absorb all of that discontent and morph it into yet another expansion of the university project while ultimately reproducing university policing.
Kim: Absolutely.
Dylan: So, that’s one favor I wanted to ask people is to rethink your next public statement in this moment. There’ll be another moment where public statements will be important, but there’s just too many of them. I’ve read close to a dozen of them just from my campus and they’re just everywhere. Some of them are really great, but most of them are not.
Kim: Agreed!
[All laugh]
Kim: It reminded me of something that Joy James said in a talk that she gave at Brown about a year ago that was posted again on Abolition Journal and I’m part of the journal collective and so is Dr. James. She said, “If it’s on the menu of the academy, it’s really not radical.” If the academy is looking at that thing, then it’s part of (and I’m going to fuck this up royally probably) the de-radicalization project that is going on. It’s just not going to take us that far, does that make sense?
Dylan: Yeah, I’m totally familiar with what you’re talking about because I’ve worked with Joy in the past and I’m part of that same abolition journal collective that you’re a part of, so we’re together on that piece. I’ll say, it’s a struggle, right? That analysis is 100% correct. The logic of the academy is to expropriate things and turn them into objects of knowledge rather than to take a position of intellectual and, for that matter, scholarly humility, and try to figure out what praxis would look like alongside different forms of liberation and radical movements. Praxis is hard as shit. What it means for a lot of us that are paid to think, and paid to write and paid to teach all the time, is suddenly our expertise needs to be put at the service of somebody or something else. And most academics in western research universities, western world Civilization (civilization with a capital “C”) research universities, we’re generally used to our expertise being put at service of a fucking foundation or we’re under this delusion that basically we’re contractors for the university and that our knowledge is all our own and it belongs to us and we have property rights to it.
When you’re talking about other traditions and genealogies of radical scholarship that intersects with this thing called “the academy” (which I don’t believe in any more, by the way; I believe that something like a university exists as an infrastructure that needs to be contested, and I’ll talk about that in a second.) But I think this thing called “the academy” is a bullshit myth. I think it’s a colonial myth, and a chattel slave myth. I don’t feel like I and many others have ever really belonged to it. The struggle in part is to disavow our desires to be acknowledged, recognized, and embraced by it. That’s part of this.
I’ll also say this: there’s the academic logic that you just cited by way of Joy James, and then there’s also these other logics that confront and oppose the academic logic. Those are the logics of intellectual, scholarly, and creative production that come out of these long lineages of Black studies - feminist and trans Black studies, abolitionist Black studies, of Native and Indigenous studies, and so forth. There’s struggles around seizing particular infrastructures to create sites of relative autonomy and support, meaning infrastructure, for these insurgent intellectual traditions. Now that is always in a tension with the academic logic we’re talking about because in the end, folks can actually build a career out of this stuff. I mean, I have! I was in ethinic studies for my first sixteen years, I’m in media and cultural studies now, but I’m still doing ethnic studies stuff so I’m adjoined to it in that way. So, it’s a tension we have to inhabit, and I think it’s part of what Joy is saying.
And this brings me to the point that I was also going to make in response to what, Kim, you were just saying about how Temple University does this whole fascistic thing bragging about its police force. The reason why I think there’s a responsibility for people who inhabit universities to take on struggle in different ways, including ways within the university, is because what universities do and what Temple university is doing when it boasts about its police force, it is making an announcement of a normalized state of war primarily against Black people in Philadelphia. And to a secondary extent, against Black people on campus and others. And this is Temple university saying this, not the cops. When Temple University says this shit, and it’s not just Temple, it’s UC Riverside, it’s UC Berkeley, it’s Northwestern, it’s Yale, it’s all these fucking places. When they say these kinds of things, they are declaring institutional solidarity. They’re putting their endowment in solidarity with the militarized protection of white bodily integrity and the secular sanctity of white being and white life. It is nothing less than that. And that is what the academy is, and historically it is what the university is.
That’s all to say that for those of us who are employed in these sites of violence, in these sites of low intensity and sometimes acutely intense warfare, we have to analyze, occupy, and inhabit them as sites of guerrilla war. I don’t mean that metaphorically, I mean that in the fullest, most robust conceptualization of guerrilla war. Here’s why: university administrators, the police and the state already treat the university as a site of guerrilla war. They treat it as a site of counter insurgency, most importantly, that’s what Joy was talking about in that piece you just mentioned. Universities are generally a site of counter insurgency. They’re a site in which particular cultures’ knowledges and even art is produced, that is intended to reproduce that secular sanctity of white being and white life, to reproduce anti-Black violence and colonization. So, the question I have for a lot of my friends and colleagues is, why so many of us who are employed by the universities, treat the university as if it is somehow outside of or isolated from the conditions of domestic war. It’s actually in the fucking middle of it.
Kim: Exactly.
Dylan: It’s a primary site. So we’re in a moment right now in summer 2020, there’s a rising number of people who work in these places, (universities, colleges, higher education) who are beginning to fully acknowledge the university as a site of low intensity conflict and warfare. The rebellions of summer 2020 are pushing all kinds of people - students, faculty, staff, and even some administrators - toward a more realistic, which is to say a more radical and abolitionist, analysis of their site of work. I think universities are key to that. We need to understand them as constitutive centers through which the generally normalized condition of anti-Black and racial colonial domestic warfare as the half millennial condition of civilization is reproduced and consolidated all the time. If we understand that, we can start to come to terms with what our roles might be, the way our skill sets might be put to good use to waging a guerrilla war that at bare minimum will push back against counter insurgency. Because sometimes the best thing we can do is to push back, undermine, and challenge counter insurgency so that the fullest blossoming of the most beautiful forms of insurgency - feminist insurgency, Black radical insurgency, Indigenous autonomous insurgency - can flourish. Because counter insurgency is deep and universities are central to it.
Kim: Absolutely. You were reminding me of a meeting that I crashed more than a couple of years ago now, three years ago probably, with a UC professor (I won’t mention which campus) who was giving a presentation on risk assessments in California and how different police departments were using the risk assessment tool that she and her grad students had developed. She was very proud of this and there was very little pushback in this room of some elected officials and professional folks working in government. It was just one of those moments where, one, I felt really triggered being in that space because I had stepped away from the academy for a lot of different reasons. But being there especially as an activist organizer (and I’m not saying that you can’t be an activist organizer if you’re in the academy, but just play along for a second), not being connected and not having a university affiliation, and being in a space where you have someone who’s standing in front of a room and that doctor carries weight with a lot of people. And there’s no real pushback on this idea. And they were outlining how flawed the risk assessment tool is, and people were like, “Okay, whatever.” Okay, well what about race and gender and those things? “Oh well, it doesn’t really look at those things but what we found is that mostly the people that come out at the other end are mostly Black and brown.” I’m just sitting in the room wanting to fucking scream. What are we doing? So I think that’s also part of it. We don’t have to go too deep in that at all...
Dylan: But let me say, you identified something that has obsessed me for about fifteen years now, and that is, the logic of these kinds of criminalizing algorithms - let’s call them what they are, they’re anti-Black, anti-queer, misogynistic, anti-poor, they’re all that stuff. The logic that drives those things, at the bare minimum, it is proto-genocidal. That’s the whole point of the algorithm, is to identify populations that ought to be criminalized, policed, and incarcerated, which is to say, socially liquidated. And of course, in many cases, they’re physically liquidated because what algorithms and other criminalizing methods like that actually accomplish is they, again, reaffirm the condition of war in which it’s very clear who the targets are.
On the one hand, it reproduces this logic of genocide that is central to the modern academy. The modern academy is driven by motive of conquest, genocide and chattel, but we tend not to say that. I think a big part of the reason is because the concept of geoncide and things like massive war crime, if we want to call it war crime, but massive warfare by the state, are driven by the notion that the casualties that are created by these structures have to have somehow been intentionally planned by some conspiratorial group of policy makers, elected officials, cops, or others. That they have to have planned from the outset - or the academic in this case, the researcher - they had to have planned, “we’re going to target poor Black people, we’re going to target unhoused people, we’re going to target trans sex workers in this particular algorithm, in this particular criminalizing method” and out the other end comes these populations that are being policed, that are being killed, that are being incarcerated. It generally doesn’t work that way. Part of the problem is that we fixate on intent.
In my view, another part of an abolitionist pedagogy, theory, practice is to always come at intent with the sense that it is actually corollary, it is secondary. Intent is a secondary facet when you are dealing with casualty. Let’s fixate on casualty. What is it that institutional logics generate that make casualties asymmetrical? If we can get at that in a classroom or lecture hall like the one you were just talking about Kim and say, “What you just said Professor, is that this criminalizing method you developed produces asymmetrical criminalization, which is to say, asymmetrical casualties.” Let’s frame that with an abolitionist concept of racialized, anti-Black, racial colonial domestic war. Then what we’re also talking about is asymmetrical warfare, which is a precursor to genocide. If we’re able to do that, then maybe folks will at least be held accountable for their shit rather than be allowed this entitlement to stay within this artificially isolated, safe, and entitled sphere of purely academic discourse in which the casualties that they have a direct hand in generating, these asymmetrical casualties that they have a direct hand in creating, do not rest on their shoulders. It becomes an academic problem in the most abstracted sense of the term. We don’t think about these folks as actual planners, architects, theorists of domestic war, but that’s exactly what they are.
Kim: Absolutely.
Dylan: What I’m saying is that for any of us who are actually interested in projects of liberation, autonomy and self determination, and all the different complex ways that we think and argue about those things. I think there’s a lot of people listening to this that are engaged in projects that struggle around those things. Then we need to embrace that guerrilla war is in fact the context we are in. We need to embrace that as a generalized template, a generalized approach, a generalized analytic to pretty much all the work we do. We’ve got to know our skill set and we’ve got to know where we stand.
A long time ago I realized that if I’m going to take that analytic of guerrilla war seriously, then probably a 100% of what I do is going to be involved in the above ground struggle. I’m probably not going to be invited to join the underground, although if I am, that’s a whole other decision. Me and many others that have particular skill sets, we probably have to be involved in particular forms, and again, that is no less valuable. In fact in some cases, it’s incredibly important. I’m talking K-12, I’m talking all the different sites that people inhabit that are listening to us right now. We need to understand how these institutions need to be reinhabited by us, how they need to be held accountable by us.
But that example you give to me is typical, that is the university, that’s not exceptional. That shit happens every fucking day.
Kim: Exactly. It stood out in my mind because it was happening right around the same time there were testimonials being given by young people before the LA city council about their loved ones being killed by the LAPD. This meeting happened immediately after that and it was not a public meeting, it was not announced. They really didn’t want us there to begin with, and they told us that if we were going to be there we couldn’t actually say anything. And people did, people spoke up and raised objections, but we were told to be quiet at the same time. Coming at it from an academic perspective and knowing how funding works, this person already got a grant for doing this work but they were also getting paid by various police departments or their project was being funded by various police departments who were piloting this risk assessment tool. The focus was very obvious, it was all of the people we were in another meeting, just talking about, who were pouring out their hearts and souls and crying about being targeted by the police. And this white woman professor stands up there and gives this presentation like it’s no big deal.
Dylan: You’re about to say her name!
Kim: I have to stop myself because it was just really bad. It was really, really bad and the whole conversation around, “this will be used to determine who gets out of prison, whether we let people out of jail, whether someone has to post bail or can be let out on their own recognizance,” and I’m like, what the fuck? I wanted to scream. And this is the problem. When we think about role of the academy... I know Brian is like, “what?” I know he has some really good questions...
Brian: [laughs] That’s alright, I’m rapt here.
Kim: I just think this is an important part of it. We need to understand these institutions not as something separate as you pointed out, but as part of the problem. The kind of deep interrogation we’re talking about, and not just interrogation, but also the actively fighting, this stuff becomes difficult. I left for the reasons that I left and I’ve talked about it in other episodes, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go back into that space because of my very public critiques of the academy and of particular institutions as well that makes you unemployable. I think if you want to have a career that there’s ways to do that in the academy, but I think that’s also, one, part of Joy’s critique and what you’re saying as well. You can have longevity in that space and do...
Dylan: I mean it takes a piece out of you every single day and you have to have a community. That’s the only way. If you don’t have community, it’ll break you. And I want to say Kim, I’m just listening to your account, which I think I’ve heard you talk about or maybe read your writing about this before. In the context of this conversation Kim, you’re talking about an account with terror...
Kim: Mmhm.
Dylan: That’s what you’re talking about. Both in the instance of this academic, doing that research in the lecture hall and also the experience of listening to folks talking about the LAPD. Your response to all that shit is a response of someone who has been enveloped in a particular period by the apparatus, the infrastructure, and the feeling of terror. And this is what, I think, we have to really try to amplify right now in summer 2020 is the rebellions, and the insurrections, and the movement, and these different forms of reforms that are now starting to get some traction. They’re framed around police assassinations of Black folks. That’s one critical part of this, but it’s not all of it. The totality of it and what you see, this is what you see folks saying literally on the street in response to what’s going on with policing right now. Folks are talking about police terror, they’re not simply talking about murders and assassinations. They’re not even just talking about police violence. They’re talking about a condition of terror in which the police are a primary generative institution. Not the exclusive and only one, but they’re a primary one. That police are an institution that generate a climate and condition of terror. And what we’re seeing, what we’re hearing, what we’re feeling, and what some of us are doing is we’re letting folks know that what police terror does, anti-Black terror does is divide the world up into two parts, three parts, or more parts. It means the world is experienced fundamentally differently depending on which side of that terror you inhabit.
Kim: Absolutely.
Dylan: Terror is not a thing that can be reformed. You cannot fix terror with de-escalation or diversity training. I’ll be saying this until the day I die: that cop who killed Rayshard Brooks had just taken de-escalation training a couple months before. And what did de-escalation training do for that fucker? It put him back on the street!
Kim: Exactly.
Dylan: It gave him back his badge and it made sure that gun stayed in his holster. Not only is reform not adequate for fixing the condition of terror, or for that matter police violence, but police reform generally is what further legitimates policing and usually expands the policing apparatus. You can’t eliminate terror by starting new forms of community policing. You can’t do that. Terror is something that has to be eliminated. You have to abolish terror and you have to figure out what you need to do to abolish terror. That’s the baseline. That’s the start. That’s what I’ve been saying in every room I’ve been talking about this shit. I’m only willing to talk about reforms if there’s a basic agreement that whatever reforms we’re going to agree to must be structured in a way that enhances the capacity of people to abolish terror. Overwhelmingly, reforms do not do that. Primarily because of who the architects of reforms are. Primarily what they do is they further legitimize the terror and try to normalize that. So, we’re in a moment right now where Black led insurrection is denormalizing that terror that is so otherwise so fundamental, so normal, so paradigmatic to the so-called American way of life that it’s basically unspoken.
Kim: Yeah, exactly. But it’s those silences that are killing us. It’s that silence that is corrosive. As I was getting ready for our conversation today I was texting Brian and telling him that I was on fire and super excited, but I’m also really angry, really fucking pissed right now. My oldest son is sitting in the SHU for some bullshit that COs contrived against him and I just got a letter from him. They actually had a hearing where they told him last week that there was no evidence against him but because they believed that he was involved in some nonsense, even though the person that was involved wrote a statement (and he has a copy of that statement) that said he wasn’t involved. They’re saying, “we’re going to keep you in the SHU anyway because we think you’re involved.” This is not a system that you can reform. I’m bringing all that energy and anger.
That’s probably why I’m forgetting little shit because anger, trauma and stress fucks with your memory and I’m not saying that just because I had a couple of moments in this conversation. But it’s something that’s definitely sitting with me and is very present and a part of all of this stuff that’s happening. I remember a couple weeks ago, or maybe a couple months ago now (I don’t quite have the date) when you did the Freedom Course with Dean Spade, Mariame Kaba, Dream Defenders and Ujimaa Medics where you talked about mutual aid and you could hear Dr. Henderson’s children in the background and it was just lovely. I was sitting here folding laundry when I was listening to it and I came back and actually sat down when I heard kids screaming and I thought, oh this is awesome. You interrupted and said, ‘Wait a minute, that’s real. That’s a part of all of this.’ We cannot separate what’s happening in our personal lives, especially if you’re Black and brown, in this country from all of this other shit that’s going on because it’s all part of the same thing.
[closing music]
Kim: Thank you for listening to Beyond Prisons. If you find our work valuable we ask that you head over to iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts and rate, review and subscribe to Beyond Prisons. You can support our work by sharing this and past episodes on social media. If you’re financially able to support us you can do so for as little as $1 on Patreon at patreon.com/beyondprisons. We recently launched our new website www.beyond-prisons.com. There you will find a Beyond Prisons guide for supporting prisoners during the COVID 19 crisis including a link to downloadable pdfs in small and large print formats. There’s also a section on mutual aid projects that we update frequently and a list of demands that includes a call for the immediate release of prisoners. If you’d like to get in touch with us you can drop us a line at beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com.
Brian: Beyond Prisons is created and hosted by Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein. Ellis Maxwell edits our episodes and Victoria Nam manages our website and volunteers. The music is by Jared Ware. We’d like to give a special thanks to our many volunteers who are helping us transcribe our episodes to make them more accessible as well as our donors who provide a 100% of the funding for our show. We really appreciate your support, thanks for listening.
