Abolition
“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.”
-Frederick Douglass, Abolitionist
Abolition of What?
It has been over 150 years since the end of the civil war in the United States and the mission of our ancestors in that struggle has not been achieved; Black liberation. There are now more Black people in prison or under state supervision than those who were slaves at the height of the Antebellum south.(1) The system of mass incarceration has achieved what Antebellum slavery could not, a mass of Black slave labor without a mass movement for its abolition.
Over a hundred years ago, during the rise of spectacle lynching in the United States, Ida B. Wells estimated that between the years 1882 and 1892 there were 73 lynchings of Black people each year.(2) Today conservative estimates show that police kill on average 100 unarmed Black people every year.(3) Most of the Officers who commit these murders are never jailed, disciplined, or disarmed even as the FBI reports that police departments across the country have been infiltrated by white supremacist organizations.(4) These modern day lynchings are the most extreme result of a system of policing created to corral, control, and execute the dispossession of Black people.
All this is glaring evidence of what is becoming abundantly clear to a new generation of Black liberation fighters: white supremacy is alive and thriving in 2018. Its mechanisms are more sophisticated. Its language is more subtle. Yet its results continue to be devastating. At the center of this oppression is the system of mass incarceration headed by its foot soldiers in every city and town: the police. Against this subtle and sophisticated system our clarity must be razor sharp. The prisons are the new plantations, the police their slave catchers and both institutions must be abolished if we are to achieve our liberation.
This is our struggle.
References
1: Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, 2011.
2: Wells-Barnett, Ida B., et al. On Lynchings. Dover Publications, Inc., 2014.