A conversation between two of the most influential Black women leaders in the United States facilitated by the Los Angeles County Library last month drew more than 6,000 listeners.
When artist, author and organizer Patrisse Cullors and political activist, scholar and philosopher Angela Davis met in conversation about Cullors’ book, An Abolitionist’s Handbook, it was history in the making. Not only because of the speakers, but as Davis highlighted, abolitionism in the 21st century is directed against all the carceral structures linked to racial and global capitalism that define our lives today. The program was moderated by LA County Library director Skye Patrick.
Davis said in the United States the most familiar form of abolition is the movement to end slavery (more on that later). She offered that it’s helpful to think of 19th-century abolitionism as directed against slavery. 20th-century abolitionism was directed against racist-inspired, second-class citizenship — or the civil rights movement. Other abolitionist campaigns have included death penalty abolitionism — Davis noted both slavery and death penalty abolition movements are linked to police and prison abolition. And recently, abolition of the child and family service system or the “family policing system,” was linked to the foster system.
Cullors spoke only after noting that she is a mentee of Davis’ workaround abolition. The framework that Davis just unfolded, she acknowledged, is why Cullors had her start the discussion.
“Abolition is how we show up for each other,” Cullors said. “We’ve digested an economy of punishment and revenge … I’m calling for an abolitionist culture and that we move toward a culture of care.”
Imagining an abolitionist culture requires asking questions. Cullors submitted, how can society challenge carceral culture in people’s everyday lives as it is trying to abolish a prison system, a police system, a court system and the many systems intrinsically tied to the police state?
While abolition practices are now being discussed in the mainstream, Davis said that it’s important to insist on their radical quality and revolutionary edge. The “handbook” encourages people to make changes that allow us to imagine an abolitionist future.
Transformative Justice
Cullors came to know abolition and transformative justice by living through the police state in Los Angeles: specifically, its war on drugs and gangs, the decimation of communities, the stripping of dignity and humanity daily by the police state, the social welfare system and the systems that blamed her family for being poor.
Seeking something different, Cullors attended a critical resistance workshop on the prison industrial complex. There, when she heard for the first time that prison is an industry, a light turned on. She said this is one of the main questions people ask when it comes to abolition; if people don’t go to prison, then what do we do? The answer is to transform the harm that was caused but also transform the system and the conditions that caused it.
Davis noted it’s important to see that practices at the everyday level can mirror a future to come. “We can have an entire system of justice based on reformative practices rather than retributive practices,” she said.
Mental health, trauma and incarceration
Davis credited the disability movement for playing an important role in shaping the abolitionist movement. She mentioned a 1970s campaign to eliminate psychiatric institutions precisely because they could not respond to the needs of people. While the campaign was successful to an extent, a system of care and treatment for persons with mental illnesses was never created.
This particular issue is a lesson for the contemporary abolition movement.
“We need to be intersectional and interrelational, learn what didn’t work with the disability movement and figure out how to challenge normalcy of able-bodied people,” she said. “Those who experience neuro divergency see the world differently. Like artists, we can benefit from the ways they see the world.”
Economy of violence
Cullors noted in LA county activists challenged two jails that would have been built — one which would have been a mental health jail. Activists’ demands changed the county’s approach. No reason was given for why the county would put people with mental health issues in cages. But through both an abolitionist framework and policy, the county changed its approach.
“We have to be very careful about just saying abolition and not imagining something else. A part of our job is to say (what) doesn’t work, but it’s also our job to (say) this is what does work … to say this is what’s possible and this is what’s necessary.”
Care First Village in downtown LA is an example of the Board of Supervisors changing its direction. The campus provides housing and services for unhoused people across four acres of former parking lots near Union Station. What was supposed to be a new men’s central jail now addresses the housing, mental and behavioral health needs of residents experiencing homelessness.
Reparations
Davis said it’s important to acknowledge that we’re doing work in the 20th century that should have begun in the immediate aftermath of slavery. Instead of addressing the issues that allowed the incorporation of Black people into a democratic society on the basis of equality, Davis said the system remained the same. The system wasn’t one institution, “its tentacles were everywhere.” By leaving everything else intact, the legacies of slavery continue to assert themselves.
Because of the failure to address these many societal and economic issues, it became necessary to treat Black people as superfluous. Subsequently, the prisons developed as a repository for these populations that were considered superfluous.
“Reparations have to be about revolutionizing our society, not just about money, but rather about retooling the society,” Davis said. “If it is retooled for descendants of Indigenous people and people of African descent (to) be incorporated into the society on a basis of equality, that will be democracy for everyone.”
Cullors said if we believe in democracy and in challenging the impact that racial capitalism has had on all of us, we have to contend with the fact that we didn’t end slavery.
“Everyone of us have to be a part of this movement to end slavery, to end the policing and imprisonment of human beings,” Cullors said. “Once people realize that it’s truly a planetary fight then I think people understand it differently.”
In a moment of joy, Davis shared a realization.
“I feel like I’m living in a future that I never imagined I would witness,’ she said. “I knew there would come a time when there would be abolition evangelists like Patrisse, who would send messages out to a huge number of people. But I didn’t think I would ever witness that in my lifetime. I feel like I’m in an Octavia Butler novel … living in a future when people are talking about abolition!”