Decolonization
The current justice regime does little to protect and serve Black communities.
In New York City, with one of the worlds largest police forces, in over half of all murders of Black people no one is even arrested.(1) Across the U.S. the chance of someone being arrested for homicide or attempted homicide of a Black person can fall into the single digits.(2) At the same time “broken windows” policing has proliferated across the country, targeting Black people at random for petty crimes usually related to poverty. Under New York City’s “stop and frisk” regime nearly 90 percent of people targeted were Black or brown.(3)
The current justice system is not meant to protect Black people but to dominate Black communities through a monopoly of violence. Using military equipment and counter-insurgency tactics,(4) modern policing converts Black communities into internal colonies of the United States from which black bodies are extracted for wealth in the prison industrial complex. This wealth either funds state ventures, as is the case in Ferguson, MO where the justice department found that the revenue generated by criminalizing black people was essential to the city budget.(5) Or this wealth may fund private ventures as is the case in California, where companies like Victoria’s Secret and IBM use prison laborers paid pennies a day to produce luxury goods.(6,7) In either case the Black bodies in these communities become targets of a colonial regime of capitalist wealth production.
For Black women the colonial violence of the state reinforces the colonial violence of male domination in the home. In addition to being beaten, raped and murdered in the street by police, corrections officers, and other agents of the state,(8) the second leading cause of death for the Black women ages 15-25 is the man in their home. Twenty percent of Black women experience rape or sexual assault in their lifetime.(9) This violence is often ignored by the justice system. In 2016 Black women in Detroit had to raise over ten million dollars to test more than 10,000 rape kits that had been simply “left on the shelf” by police.(10) This male domination, or patriarchy, is then exacerbated by the justice system when action is finally taken. A large scale study of youth incarcerated in Chicago found that those incarcerated for any reason were far more likely to commit violent crime, including violence against women, after incarceration.(11,12)
Black women are often criminalized for defending themselves and this applies even more strongly to Black trans-women. Often forced into sex work by currently legal forms of discrimination in the job market, Black trans-women face higher rates of assault and sexual violence. However, when defending themselves from this violence the current justice system, while often misgendering them and treating them as men, views them as the aggressors, criminalizes them, and forces them into male facilities where they face even more violence and abuse. When they are not criminalized for defending themselves, trans Black women are profiled by police for other crimes. A survey of trans-people found that 41 percent of Black trans people reported baseless arrested by police because of profiling.(13) Black trans-women already dispossessed by the colonization of the Black community are exposed to further violence as women dehumanized because their body lacks the form idealized by patriarchy.
The current colonial system of confining Black people to Ghettos and violently targeting them for incarceration creates more violence within Black communities which fuels the further imposition of the mass incarceration system on Black life. The result is a self expanding system of racial caste which devours and destroys Black people and the Black community while at the same time profiting from that destruction.
The fundamental difference between the newly emerging abolitionist movement and our ancestors of the antebellum is that, where as the ancestral movement sought to integrate Black people into American society, the modern movement understands that it is American society which maintains the Black colony in the United States. For us it is not a question of integrating into “society” but a question of de-colonizing our communities. Therefore, understanding this colonial situation and its origins is fundamental to contemplating the reality of our situation today and developing police and prison abolition as a successful strategy in our broader struggle for Black liberation.
References
1:https://www.npr.org/2014/01/13/262082861/does-justice-for-murder-victims-depend-on-race-geography
2: https://www.vox.com/2016/8/26/12631962/ghettoside-jill-leovy-black-crime
3: https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-Frisk-data
6:http://theweek.com/articles/630907/corporate-america-secret-slave-labor-force
8: Ritchie, Andrea J. Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color. Beacon Press, 2017.
9:https://iwpr.org/violence-black-women-many-types-far-reaching-effects/
11:https://thinkprogress.org/study-throwing-kids-in-jail-makes-crime-worse-ruins-lives-f67672a65637/
12: https://www.salon.com/2012/06/02/when_anti_violence_backfires/