Connecting the dots in systems of domination and violence: a conversation

Abstract

This article is an edited version of a conversation between Barbara Ransby and Derecka Purnell, two US-based key Black feminist activists on ‘New lines of Black resistance in the US: undoing racial capitalism and the carceral state’, which took place at the ‘New Circuits of Anti-racism Conference’, King’s College London, October 2022 (IRR50). They discuss their own political journeys, shared by many activists today, which they describe as involving building and re-envisioning a desired future, as well as the role of Black feminism and abolition. The conversation, introduced by Chantelle Lewis of Surviving Society and Sophia Siddiqui of Race & Class, unpacks the workings of the carceral state and the specific racial and class targeting of surplus Black workers. Drawing from their experience on the practicalities of organising today, they discuss their commitment to internationalism, the challenges of building genuine coalitions and the need to connect the dots between different systems of domination and violence to understand the functioning of the carceral state, and the centrality of reproductive justice and the fight for bodily autonomy.

Keywords

abolition Black feminism Black Radical Congress (BRC)carceral state Dream Defenders heteronormativity internationalism IRR50 Movement for Black Lives racial capitalism reproductive justice

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References

Watch a recording of the conference, ‘IRR50: new circuits of anti-racism’, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTy5KZAx5vY and listen to a podcast of this session with Barbara Ransby, Derecka Purnell, Chantelle Lewis and Sophia Siddiqui produced by Surviving Society here: https://soundcloud.com/user-622675754/s2e4-barbara-ransby-derecka-purnell-chantelle-lewis-sophia-siddiqui.

Trayvon Martin was a 17-year-old boy who was killed by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, sparking nationwide protests in 2012. Michael Brown was an 18-year-old who was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, resulting in a massive uprising that was seen as the spark for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Derecka Purnell, Becoming Abolitionists: police, protests and the pursuit of freedom (London and New York: Verso, 2021).

Derecka Purnell, ‘How I became a police abolitionist’, The Atlantic, 6 July 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/how-i-became-police-abolitionist/613540/.

See Jenny Bourne, ‘“This is what a radical intervention could look like”: an interview with Barbara Ransby’, Race & Class 62, no. 2 (2020).

During the Jena Six case, six Black high school students were charged with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder for fighting with white students in Jena, Louisiana in 2006. See https://www.aclu.org/other/fact-sheet-jena-six-cases?redirect=cpredirect/31880.

George Zimmerman was charged with murder for Trayvon Martin’s death, but acquitted at trial after claiming self-defence.

Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: how the powerful took over identity politics (and everything else) (London: Pluto Press, 2022).

Barbara Ransby, Making all Black Lives Matter: reimagining freedom in the 21st century (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018).

10.

Clarence Thomas is a conservative African American jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

11.

The Black Radical Congress (BRC) was a coalition of Black left organisers and intellectuals that formed in response to the devastating impact of neoliberalism on Black communities in Chicago, June 1998. See ‘The Black Radical Congress: a Black freedom agenda for the twenty-first century’, Black Scholar 28, no. 1 (1998), pp. 71–73.

12.

Robin Kelley, Freedom Dreams: the black radical imagination (London: Beacon Press, 2003).

13.

Kelly Lytle Hernández, ‘Amnesty or Abolition? Felons, illegals, and the case for a new abolition movement’, Boom: a journal of California 1, no. 4, pp. 54–68.

14.

Dream Defenders is a multiracial activist organisation formed by young people in Florida in response to Trayvon Martin’s killing.

15.

The 1995 Million Man March ‘sought to re-establish the legitimacy of male dominance in Black politics whilst simultaneously celebrating Black capitalism and patriarchy’, see Ransby, Making all Black Lives Matter, p. 14.

16.

It was revealed in March 2022 that a 15-year-old Black Caribbean girl, known as ‘Child Q’, was strip-searched on the premises of a school academy in Hackney, London, whilst she was menstruating, in December 2020, galvanising outrage across the country. Hackney Copwatch is a police monitoring group that formed following the rape and killing of 33-year-old Sarah Everard by a serving police officer Wayne Couzens in March 2021.

17.

On 4 August 2011, 29-year-old Black British man Mark Duggan was shot dead by police in Tottenham, North London, leading to widespread riots across London and other UK cities.

18.

Inquest is a charity providing expertise on state-related deaths and their investigation, which was set up in 1981 partly in response to the killing of anti-fascist Blair Peach at a demonstration in Southall, West London, in 1979.

19.

Radical Alternatives to Prison (RAP) published twenty-two editions of The Abolitionist from 1979–1987. See a digital archive of the journal here: https://abolitionistfutures.com/latest-news/the-abolitionist-archive.

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4front is a member-led youth group established in 2012 in north-west London.

21.

See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/17/adl-police-delegations-israel.

22.

MST is Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, Movimento dos trabalhadores rurais sem terra.

23.

Ransby, Making all Black Lives Matter, pp. 33–38.

24.

Roe v. Wade, the case that kept abortions legal throughout the US, was overturned by the Supreme Court in June 2022.