Intercepted Podcast: Ruth Wilson Gilmore on Abolition – The Intercept

The movement to defund the police in the United States is gaining unprecedented momentum as protests continue across the globe. This week on Intercepted: Chenjerai Kumanyika, assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, hosts a special two-part discussion. Kumanyika is co-host of the podcasts Uncivil and Scene on Radio. He is an organizer with 215 Peoples Alliance and the Debt Collective. He is joined for this episode of Intercepted bythe iconic geographer and abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Gilmore is one of the worlds preeminent scholars on prisons and the machinery of carceral punishment and policing. In this discussion,she offers a sweeping and detailed analysis of the relentless expansion and funding ofpolice and prisons, and howlocking people in cages has become central to the American project. Gilmore offers a comprehensive road map for understanding how we have arrived at the present political moment of brutality and rebellion, andshe lays out the needfor prison abolition and defunding police forces.

A special thanks to Zeal & Ardor for the song, Devil is Fine.

[Devil is Fine by Zeal & Ardor plays.]

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: The thing that set in motion the events that resulted in Mr. Floyds brutal murder was that an employee at a convenience store thought that they had been handed a counterfeit bill. This young person I assume is young whos probably making minimum wage, who works for somebody who I understand to be a very decent human being who hires people in the community, a Palestinian American convenience store owner, did their job to keep their job. But we have to ask ourselves, why couldnt it be, they take this suspect looking bill, complete the transaction, and then deal with it afterward. Right? They had been deputized. Why is somebody working in a convenience store a deputy cop? This is a question.

[Music interlude.]

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

[Music interlude.]

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Im Chenjerai Kumanyika. Im an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. Im the co-host and creator of the Uncivil podcast, coming to you from my home in Philadelphia. Im taking over the show from Jeremy Scahill for this week, and this is episode 134 of Intercepted.

[Music interlude.]

Ruthie Wilson Gilmore: So many public agencies education, healthcare, and so forth have absorbed policing functions. Where, at the same time, many of the agencies of organized violence, such as jails and prisons and police, are absorbing social work functions, mental health care functions, things that they actually cant do.

CK: Thats our guest, geographer and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore. In part one of our two-part conversation, we speak about police killings, the Black Lives Matter movement, and abolition organizing, as police brutality in America has inspired a national uprising with global solidarity.

[Protest ambiance comes in: No justice, no peace, no racist police. No justice, no peace, no racist police. Dont shoot. Dont shoot.]

CK: As cases of Covid-19 continue to escalate, people across our entire country, from rural towns to major cities, are retaking the streets to rebel. Police and National Guard forces have responded with even more violence.

[Protest ambiance.]

CK: The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis cops was another horrific and needless death, another unarmed Black man killed by police and recorded for all the world to see. It was another spectacle of violence at the hands of the state.

And weve seen this before. Like literally, weve seen it. Black men choked by police in broad daylight, uprisings against the carceral state police and prisons and pictures that prove that torture is going on in the institutions of criminal punishment. And we see the police are mostly not held accountable. They dont get fired. They dont get charged. And in the few cases where they do get charged, its extremely rare for them to be convicted.

But what is right before our eyes and on our cameras is not the entire picture of the change that needs to happen.

If we look off-camera and back just a little bit into history, we can see the conclusive failure of the kinds of reforms that established Democrats are proposing right now. Yes, use of force legislation is crucial. But remember, a judge found officer [Daniel] Pantaleo guilty of using a banned chokehold when he killed Eric Garner. Pantaleo is free today.

Also, as African-American studies professor Naomi Murakawa has pointed out, the concept of community policing was at the heart of the two largest crime reform legislative efforts of the 20th century. The first one was sponsored by Lyndon B. Johnson: the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Street Act, which created the Law Enforcement [Assistance] Administration. What did that result in? $10 billion was doled out to police departments, often in the name of improving police and community relations. This didnt mean treating people differently. It meant taxpayer money was spent on police public relations campaigns.

The second major criminal reform effort was the Clintons 1994 crime bill. This established the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services within the Justice Department. And what did that result in? $9 billion given to police departments over six years. And yet, here we are.

What we have to grapple with is this: These images are showing us a violence thats so clear, that weve stopped being able to see beyond it. The spectacle of violence is only the tip of the spear. Its only the most acute manifestation of a 150 years of racist state violence, punishing the poor, and failed reform. More training workshops for cops or another Black police chief is not going to fix this. Cops who kneel with protesters and then stand up and tear gas them is not going to fix this. What would it look like to try something else, to defund and dismantle police departments, and yes, to abolish the police? What would it look like to abolish prisons? And when I say abolish, what do I mean?

At this incendiary moment of crisis and possibility, we are deeply honored to hear from an experienced organizer and tremendous thinker on prisons, police, and how these systems of violence organize our lives, and what we must do about it.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center, is co-founder of several abolitionist organizations including Critical Resistance. She is author of the prize-winning book, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Shes also finishing a couple of new books, including, Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition, forthcoming from Haymarket.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, welcome to Intercepted.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: Thanks for having me on today. Im glad to be here.

CK: Ruth Wilson Gilmore shared a broad range of her thinking on the issues we are facing right now. But the first thing I was curious about was where she came from and who she was before she came to prison abolition.

RWG: Ruthie was a, and continues to be, the child and grandchild, and probably multiple generations of freedom fighters. We are Black people of the North. I grew up in a working-class household. My father was a tool and die maker. My mother worked as a lab technician. My fathers father was a janitor and a steward for a fraternity at Yale. My fathers mother was a seamstress and took laundry into her house. My other grandmother cleaned white peoples houses. This is, like, where I came from.

Everybody, every generation I know about fought for freedom. What was the freedom we fought for? My grandfather was one of the people who helped to organize the first blue-collar union at an Ivy League school. This was during World War II the double victory: victory against fascism abroad, victory against Jim Crow at home.

My father organized the machinists at Winchesters repeating firearms factory in the mid-1950s. Again, a labor struggle. He was also a leader in organizing for the well-being of the Black community of New Haven and, in so doing, made certain that all kinds of peoples lives would get better. So he was somebody who, long before Black Lives Matter, saw that when Black lives matter, everybody lives better. And hes kind of known in my hometown to this day tool and die maker became quite a fighter for freedom.

So thats who Ruthie was. I was raised by these people, in this tradition. Born 70 years ago, so in the waning years of Jim Crow, in 1950. So I came to an anti-capitalist position quite young, and I never left that.

I learned from reading and studying with people like Cedric Robinson, Stuart Hall, Angela Davis, Claudia Jones, so many people from around the world, how it is that we can make freedom out of what we have not by yielding or sacrificing some of our comrades but by trying to live the principle where life is precious, life is precious.

CK: Like so many other people, I opened Ruthies 2007 book Golden Gulag looking to understand why prisons and policing have become the answer to so many of societys problems. And why now? But in the books first pages, Ruthie gives us the image of a bus filled with people pulling onto a road.

RWG: First of all, Im a geographer. That is my discipline. And it might be interesting to listeners to understand that geographers dont make maps. Rather, we think about, we ask ourselves: Why do things happen where they do? Why do things happen where they do?

What I did in figuring out how to frame or introduce my book was to give the readers a sense of the expansive ground on which the prison industrial complex rose; to give the readers an understanding that there were urban and rural dimensions to it; to give the readers an understanding that there is a constant shift in the kinds of relationships people have with each other, with the means of production, with where they can and cant be in the world, and also how to struggle. And finally, I used that metaphor so that we could see, riding with those people in the bus, that there were so many different points of entry for various people to fight against the abandonment that had resulted in, among other things, mass incarceration, but also austerity, outsourcing, underemployment, environmental degradation, and the capture of the state government by those who are only ever enhancing the ability of the well-to-do to get richer.

CK: In the book, Ruthie describes the people on the bus as a dream crowd dream riders whose different entry points into struggle had to do with race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and religion. But they were drawn together by their sameness. As Ruthie puts it, they were employed, disabled, or retired working people with little or no discretionary income, whose goal was freedom for their relatives serving long sentences behind bars. This struck me as so much more sophisticated than some of our mainstream discussions about who has a stake in this fight and why.

RWG: My friend the fantastic historian, Darrell Scott, always warns against trying to summon outrage and political consciousness through appeals that result in pity or contempt. Instead, what we can see in following the story in my book and the empirical data that I use to make that book happen, and the ethnographic information that I managed to put together by working with people closely on the ground is this: as the Black Lives Matter people said so poignantly some years ago in the last uprisings, When Black lives matter, everybody lives better.

Now thats different from saying only Black people know what this suffering is. Rather, what we see in police killings, for example, in the United States, is that behind the sturdy curtain of racism that makes killing after killing after killing of Black people newsworthy, noteworthy, and yet not change anything, the police are killing lots of other people too. If we can stop the police from killing Black people, other people wont be killed. Because thats the killing thats so acceptable, continually is justified, and argued off as something police had no choice but to do.

So in my book, and in the research that I did, and in the political work that I have done in California, around the United States, and also internationally, I find that people can take from the multiple struggles that come together against police brutality, against police killings, against mass incarceration, against austerity, and imagine for themselves through their work how the struggle is class struggle, always, always, always.

CK: The knee jerk rejection of the concept of police and prison abolition by most mainstream politicians is based on the totally uninformed idea that what abolitionists are recommending is simply removing the police, de-carcerating, and letting the chips fall where they may. Of course, this is an incorrect and reductionist description. Instead, abolitionists have been the main ones calling attention to the relentless new investment in police and prisons.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr recently commented that he thinks calls to defund the police and reduce police budgets are dangerous. I asked Ruthie to talk about some of the weaknesses of the most popular explanations for the relentless expansion of the carceral state.

RWG: The first weakness is the one that says, well, the reason there are so many people in prison is crime. Do I, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, say there arent people who harm other people or people who engage in reprehensible acts? Of course, I dont, Im not a fool. I, like many abolitionists, came to abolition because we were tired of harm and we wanted to see something else happening in our communities and in the world. We didnt come idealistically thinking that there was no such thing as harm. Rather, we looked at the political category of crime and wanted to take it apart.

[Music interlude.]

The main reason that abolitionists in the movement dont use the word crime in a straightforward way is that its not a straightforward category. What gets lumped into that word, and certainly what appears in the front of peoples minds in their everyday common sense, people who are listening to us talk are immediately rushing to understand is: Why are they talking as though people dont hurt and rob other people? Thats what people think crime is.

So one question that we abolitionists ask ourselves is: What are the conditions under which it is more likely that people will resort to using violence and harm to solve problems? This is a question we ask ourselves. What can we do about it so that there is less harm? And one thing that we have learned is where life is precious, life is precious. So there are all kinds of people throughout the abolitionist world, in the United States and beyond who, for example, have tried to figure out how to reduce, if not completely do away with, the kinds of relationships that make people vulnerable to interpersonal violence, particularly of the domestic or intimate sort. So there is a huge amount of work on that. And I dont mean work that people have written up in esoteric academic journals. I mean the work that people do on the ground every day to keep themselves and their communities safe and well.

Two, the kinds of responses that the criminal system has put into effect over the last 40 years, approximately, has been to lengthen and lengthen and lengthen sentences, even though theres no evidence that a long sentence for one person who has committed some harm interrupts another person from committing some harm. Right? The only thing that we know seems to be the case is when the person who gets a long sentence is locked up, theyre not committing another harm on the outside. We dont know what theyre doing on the inside, but theyre not committing another harm on the outside. Thats a wordy way of saying: The purpose of locking people up today has pretty much been incapacitation. If youre locked up, you cant do what you were doing.

CK: Another reason to look critically at how the carceral state defines crime is the irrationality of the solutions that it presents us with. Ruthie says that incapacitation is one of four ways we are told that prisons will produce stability in our society. The other ways are through rehabilitation, deterrence, or retribution., But there is also another way that these systems of organized violence colonize more and more of our lives.

RWG: More and more kinds of behaviors some of it antisocial, some of it not has been criminalized over time. So thereve been new crimes added to the books, as well as extended sentences and sentence enhancements that is to say a sentence on top of the sentence for already existing wrongdoing.

So you put all of that together and then you can see how it is that in the United States crime went up, crime went down, but then they cracked down. That the rising prison lags behind the rise and fall of crime.

Thats another reason we dont talk about crime as much. What were trying to do is get people to understand the kinds of relationships that have normalized a sense that what prisons do is natural, normal, and inevitable.

CK: One way to dig even deeper into the category and meaning of crime is to look at it historically. When I asked Ruthie about this she told me about a place in New Jersey.

RWG: In fact, in the late 18th century, one of the first prisons built in the United States, the one in Trenton the oldest one in downtown Trenton, New Jersey, has etched in stone above the door: That those who are feared for their crime may learn fear of the law and be useful.

CK: One of the earliest American prisons claimed that it incarcerated people to make sure they were useful. But what did it mean to be useful for the masses of working people in the 18th century United States? To understand this, Ruthie takes us away from the United States.

RWG: So the middle of the 18th century is a time when in England, but not necessarily between and among English people, all kinds of workers were becoming disciplined to the wage. What does that mean? And this is what Ive learned from the fabulous historian Peter Linebaugh. What it means is that up until this time, workers compensation took the form of a mix of things. They would get some money pay the wage but also they could get some of the stuff that they were working with. So for example, a stevedore who took barrels of tobacco off a ship that had just arrived from the other side of the Atlantic could put the barrel down on the wharf, pry it open, take a handful of tobacco, put it in his pocket. And that would be part of his pay. That became outlawed because what the owners wanted to do was to make all workers accept only the money wage they got without any other kind of compensation. So then that meant also that people who worked building buildings could no longer take the bits of wood that they had sawed off home to do something else, whether it was warm their house or make something. Or people who worked making clothing in sewing shops couldnt take the remnants of fabric that they cut off the thing that they were making home to make their own things. The disciplining of those people to the wage was enforced by using the death penalty against the theft that they were convicted of theft of the tobacco, theft of the remnants of fabric. So Linebaugh, in his fabulous book The London Hanged, tells this story.

So we come up to the 19th century in the American project and we can use the kind of thinking that, you know, even Michel Foucault offered to us when he talked about how surveillance and punishment were key to the institutional infrastructure of control for what he called a society of strangers on the move, a society of strangers on the move.

So there is a disciplining intention to prisons. In the early days, sentences tended to be very short, as were lives. And we also know, if we follow very carefully, that unfree people were very rarely locked up. Unfree people who existed for their labor to be exploited, that is to say, African descended chattel slaves, were rarely locked up because it was not useful for those who owned the fruits of their labor to have them locked away. So prisons were for free people, generally white people, usually people who would check the box male if they had to check a box.

In the latter part of the 19th century, in the wake of the Civil War, as we know, prison expanded and rationalized in a number of ways in the South. We know about chain gangs, which were largely, but not exclusively, people of African descent. In the North and the South, both, all kinds of prisons grew up, around, and through these struggles over wage, over the right to live, the right to stay still, the right to move around. These were all contributing factors to the expansion and rationalization of prison in the United States so that by the end of the 19th century, under the capital P Progressive Movement, we saw institutions arising that regularized prisons for men, prisons for children, women, things that hadnt existed quite so starkly before as part of the expansion of large-scale governmental institutions that were designed by Progressive Era people to guarantee the ability to extract value from labor and land, right? Thats what the Progressive Era was all about, in my view. So Khalil Muhammad has written about this, Estelle Freedman a lot of people have written fantastically about the distinctions and the differentiations that shaped the Progressive Era Nayan Shah, so many people have written really fine work.

CK: Lets be clear. Police and other systems of organized violence do not arise out of any concern for public safety. Instead, these institutions became fixtures in our society so that the powerful could guarantee their right to exploit labor and enforce social hierarchy as modern society became more complex. But Ruthie says we cant fully understand why so many people are in cages today without also exploring the geography of divestment.

RWG: In the United States, where organized abandonment has happened throughout the country, in urban and rural contexts, for more than 40 years, we see that as people have lost the ability to keep their individual selves, their households, and their communities together with adequate income, clean water, reasonable air, reliable shelter, and transportation and communication infrastructure, as those things have gone away, whats risen up in the crevices of this cracked foundation of security has been policing and prison.

Now its not that surprising when we stop and think that if in an organized way, state and capital abandon people, something is going to arise to shape and direct what those people do who are not absorbed back into the political economy in other ways. Its really not that surprising, though it is frightening.

[Music interlude.]

So if we look then more specifically at what has happened in state and municipal budgets, we see the expansion of budgets devoted to mass incarceration, to jails, and to police. We see not only that but, in agencies that are supposed to be working toward other ends education, health, and so forth a rise in police functions.

One thing that we see happening, for example, is that police in schools has spread across the United States in this period. Or we can look at something as relatively technical and one would imagine benign as a student financial aid, and we see that student financial aid officers in colleges and universities have a policing function as well. Or the fact that the United States Department of Education has a SWAT team. So we see that the policing function has risen not only in the traditional agencies of the police, that is to say, police jail in prison, but also in social welfare agencies. And so its that twinned growth that shows us that weve been so thoroughly abandoned that we have to take back, we have to take back, which is to change, transform, and move to something new.

CK: As government and corporate leaders across the United States facilitate divestment that is sanitized in the deceptive language of cost-savings and shared sacrifice, Ruthie understands why some communities also begin to look to prisons for other reasons.

California Assemblyman Jim Costa used these false promises about prisons as a way to supercharge his political career. He put three prisons in his district in the 1980s and sponsored three more in the 1990s. Ruthie describes this by saying that he climbed the punishment ladder into the California State Senate.

RWG: When we were fighting for many, many years to stop California from building and opening its, I think it would have been the 24th new prison it would have constructed and opened over about a 23-year period, we did enormous outreach to the city of Delano, the town where that prison was to have been built.

CK: Delano provided a stark example of the difference in priorities between two different kinds of solutions. Costa responded to unemployment with the promise of jobs which would ostensibly be created by locking people in cages. Another solution, grounded in Delanos history, responded to exploitation with solidarity and collective struggle.

RWG: Delano is a central place in the imagination of agricultural workers throughout the United States because its where the headquarters of the United Farm Workers was. The United Farm Workers that came out of organizing, that was mostly dominated in the early days by Filipino migrant workers, but eventually became strongly associated with Mexican-American which is to say Chicano workers and Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta are the names most strongly associated with that organization, that union, and that movement.

The UFWs headquarters was at a place in Delano called Forty Acres. Why was it called Forty Acres?

Forty Acres was named in solidarity and honor with the agricultural workers of the U.S. South, the freed people, to whom General Sherman had in his field order promised they would be granted 40 acres and a mule so that they could be self-sufficient in the wake of the U.S. Civil War.

So imagine this: in the small place, small town, city of Delano, there was already one mega-prison thousands of people a small prison with about 500, and the plan for a new mega-prison designed for 5,160 people slated to be built.

I did research combed through every possible document to try to figure out how many of the projected 1,800 jobs would likely go to residents of the city of Delano and the biggest number I could come up with was 72, out of 1,800 jobs. Seventy-two. So I told a reporter for the New York Times, a woman called Evelyn Nieves, what I had found in my research, and she repeated this to the then-mayor of Delano. This was 20 years ago. She repeated what I had said to him. And he said, well, you gotta understand, things here are so bad, I cannot, as the mayor of this town, say we dont need those 72 jobs.

Some people tried to tell us that this was peculiar somehow to California and other places, towns, and other parts of the United States were, just, benefiting enormously by having lockups in their communities.

But the more that I and some of my colleagues and comrades studied the problem, going to places like North Carolina and Minnesota and Pennsylvania, to Texas and Oklahoma, to Oregon and beyond was: It wasnt true. It wasnt true that the lockups provided what people wanted, even if the lockups provided something that people were afraid of letting go. Those are two different things.

Thats what organized abandonment has done to our political imagination, to our expectation of what kinds of opportunities and protection should be available and accessible to people, modestly educated people in the prime of life. Modestly educated people in the prime of life are the people who are locked in prison and they are the people who work in prison. They are two sides of the same coin: those who have suffered organized abandonment and those who labor in the area of organized violence to keep steady the otherwise explosive conditions that people are living through.

And that kind of brings us to today. Nobody predicted the pandemic. I mean, in general, people like Mike Davis say, its coming, its coming. But nobody knew that eventually something was going to happen that would unsettle all of the uneasy relations between and among people who experience abandonment and those whose job it is to control the effects of that abandonment until the pandemic. And I do think its that objective condition the condition of people having been told to stay home; the condition of at least 20 percent unemployment, which means its higher throughout the United States; people tired of the ongoing, relentless assaults on people going about their everyday lives by police; sick of police killings, sick, sick, sick that has produced the conditions that caused us to be invited by Jeremy Scahill to have this conversation.

CK: That was Ruth Wilson Gilmore in this special episode of Intercepted. Well get back to the interview in a moment, but first I wanted to take some time for a grounding exercise. A grounding exercise is a technique that helps us to use our five senses to become present and move through states of distress or mounting anxiety. The following poem, by Greensboro artist and organizer Demetrius Noble, is entitled Poverty, Policing, Pandemic: A #BlackLivesMatter Grounding Exercise.

Demetrius Noble: In hell. Smell that righteous rage permeating from police precincts, propane with protests. I know were in the middle of a pandemic but I need you to pull your face mask down and smell the swell of 100,000 yells. No justice, no peace!

You can literally smell the fire of our legitimate political desires whenever wind blows. You try to hide inside but the revolutionary aroma rode in through busted windows. They found some rich rappin negroes to denigrate the dark denizens who dared to remind Atlantas Black mayor that they too are citizens and are tired of living in poverty in the city that leads the nation in income inequality.

With Black Lives Matter on their minds and a radical inflection point within reach, these outcasts hit the streets and told Mayor Bottoms, Fuck your New Atlanta Compromise speech.

In hell. Can you smell the fear of orange monsters cringing in bunkers? See the actions of neo-fascists dispatching troops on unruly youngsters. Tear gassing our children cause they have the audacity to believe that another world is possible and wont stop until its achieved. Smell the winds of change riding in on this new breeze. Not even your offensive line can block freedoms fragrance, Drew Brees.

See established budgets crumbling from our rumblings as we demand: Defund the police! See charges being filed as brilliant red fires glow. Hear the chant Black lives matter! as global protests grow. Hear essential workers on a picket line scream, No, we wont go! Feel this mighty movement from below. Witness that this powder keg is about to blow.

Take off your face mask, open your mouth and belt suppressed screams in hell and smell the citys on fire til you taste the kerosene.

Say their names until you can taste our pain, then join us on the frontlines as we struggle for change. Dont let these embers cool, youngun. Feed the flames .

CK: [Sigh.] Last week, after police officers in Minneapolis were charged, some people wondered why protestors and organizers were still in the streets. Of course, many different kinds of folks are in the streets for many different reasons. Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has pointed out that although Black folks are oppressed in many different areas of our lives, such as housing, healthcare, food security, police brutality and state violence are consistently the match that lights the fire of broader rebellion.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore takes up similar issues as she discusses the events leading up to the Watts rebellion in 1965.

RWG: From the mid-1960s until now, if we look at, kind of, grand indicators, one of the things that we see is a decline in union membership in the manufacturing trades. In public-sector unions, a little bit less so. And in fact, a certain amount of success up until the early nineties. We see that, at the moment that the Civil Rights movement or what some of us like to call Second Reconstruction was reaching its apogee with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 64 and 65 both of which the current United States Supreme court is gutting we see that the economic well-being already of vulnerable communities in urban and rural contexts were already under fire.

In the Watts context, I do not dispute that people came out in the streets because one too many people had been dragged out of his car and brutalized by the cops in Watts. That is true. But it is also true that Watts was already experiencing Watts writ large was already experiencing what became much more the norm 10 years later, which is what I have been terming, the organized abandonment of vulnerable communities. That jobs were leaving, that protections were leaving, that opportunities for advancement and protections from calamity were going away.

So in the early, mid-1970s, we see in the long wind-down of the Vietnam War, in the big build-up of law and order under Nixon, before Nixons own lawbreaking ran him out of office, we see what the political economists Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone called the great U-turn. And the great U-turn is the turn away from expanded unionization, expanded jobs, benefits, workplace protections, and the removal, bit by bit, of especially, but not exclusively, manufacturing jobs from high wage, high union states in the United States to either low wage right to work states or overseas. And both of those movements happen, and they call that the great U-turn.

So the Watts riots was an expression of frustration and abandonment. And at the same time I want to talk about schools for a moment the school discipline policy in Los Angeles had shifted quite dramatically from what it had been up until the passage of Brown v. Board of Education in the mid-fifties, in which school principals decided on discipline and suspension, much less expulsion, were very rare to a centralized school discipline policy that required suspension and expulsion. Required it.

So there were all kinds of destabilization of already struggling communities throughout the levels of age, education, and so forth, including school discipline policies that then, you know, resulted in young peoples frustration with every aspect of their lives, short-term and perspective as well.

CK: The multifaceted rebellions that explode from long histories of exploitation and domestic colonialism raise an important issue. As Cathy Cohen put it in a recent episode of The Dig podcast, What does justice for George Floyd really mean? Ruthie offered some insight into that question.

RWG: The last story I want to leave you with is a story of the amazing late great Michael Zinzun, who was a member of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense who fought against cops and cop brutality throughout Southern California, where he was quite the organizer and political leader. Michael Zinzun in a brutal attack on him by, I think it was Pasadena police force, lost an eye and quite amazingly, in those days, he brought suit and was compensated for this harm that happened to him.

And he took those resources and founded an organization that he then ran through the rest of his life: the Coalition Against Police Abuse, CAPA. Now running the coalition out of a little tiny office with uncomfortable folding chairs in South Central L.A., Michael paid attention to all of the things that were going on around him. He didnt only look at the cops. He asked himself questions that I asked myself and Ive been encouraging people who are listening to us today to ask themselves: What is it that makes peoples lives vulnerable? What is it that makes peoples lives vulnerable? And as you might know, I, Ruthie, have defined racism as the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. Its a mouthful, but Im going to make it clear in the next few minutes.

Michael Zinzun thought very hard about the fact that so many young people who are growing up in housing projects in Los Angeles were suffering from really bad asthma very bad asthma. And in fact, kids were dying of asthma. Nobody should die of asthma. Its eminently treatable, and they were suffering and dying of asthma. And so he looked into what it was that was creating the conditions for such relentless rates of asthma in the public housing projects and in regions of low income, working-class people in Southern California. And he saw that one of the problems that people were facing was that since the maintenance of that public housing was so dismal, the incidence of vermin infestation mice, rats, and roaches, and also mold was creating it, literally, an atmosphere conducive to asthma because of the roach droppings, mouse droppings, and the occasional or regular use of pesticides to deal with roaches, that all of this was contributing to the incidence of asthma.

That means that Michael Zinzun became an environmental justice activist because he was an anti-police activist, right? He was against the police because police were shortening lives. He became an environmental justice activist because the environment within the living spaces for these young people was literally killing them. And so he became, as it were, a model for what I imagine abolition to be today.

[Music interlude.]

That is to say, abolition has to be green. It has to take seriously the problem of environmental harm, environmental racism, and environmental degradation. To be green it has to be red. It has to figure out ways to generalize the resources needed for well-being for the most vulnerable people in our community, which then will extend to all people. And to do that, to be green and red, it has to be international. It has to stretch across borders so that we can consolidate our strength, our experience, and our vision for a better world. So thats what I came to say to you about abolition today.

CK: Whoo! Oh my god. Thank you, Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

RWG: Its great to have been in conversation with you today.

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Intercepted Podcast: Ruth Wilson Gilmore on Abolition - The Intercept