Abolition Geography

Essays Towards Liberation

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781839761720
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations

Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present. Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an "anti-state state" that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place.Edited with an introduction by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano.

PART I

WHAT IS TO BE DONE? SCHOLARSHIP AS ACTIVISM, ACTIVISM AS SCHOLARSHIP

1

What Is to Be Done?¹

I’m going to need your help tonight, as I always do. At some point I’m going to do this. You’ll remember. I move a lot when I talk, but I’ll only once do this [raises arms over her head]. And when I do this, you will say, other than your gender or transgender or other identity of choice, woman-man, person, human, lover, masculine-center, whatever you’re going to say, make it fit, in two syllables, “Other (fill in your blank) like me will rise.” So let’s practice. “Other ___ like me will rise.” Okay, now everybody say it. “Other ___ like me will rise.” One more time. “Other ___ like me will rise.” And you’ve got to say it with a little bit more enthusiasm.

So when we do that, and if you want to rise as Marlon did, feel free to rise.

If I had a title tonight that was more specific than “What Is to Be Done?” it would be something like “Universities and Unions: Institutions with Meaning for the People.” I grabbed that phrase from Vijay Prashad’s fantastic book, which everyone must read, The Darker Nations. But just keep that in mind. Universities and Unions: Institutions with Meanings for the People.

I think all American Studies Association presidents must do the same thing. On receipt of the election results from John Stephens, they immediately put fingers to keyboard and start drafting the talk they’re going to give in twenty months. Because area studies, of which American studies is a part, is in some profound sense a presentist enterprise—we study the past to understand the present, we revise the present on new senses of the past—the speech changes and changes and changes until we arrive at the moment, this moment, and the president starts speaking. Weirdly enough, the practice ghosts, of all people, that nightmare specter Frederick Jackson Turner, who was trying to figure out in 1893 the historical geography, or rather the historical-geographic future, of what we, though not he, would call the American empire. The empire had a long historical-geographical past, and he, in thinking about the frontier and its “closure,” wanted to figure out what the future might be. However, in the spirit of the antecedents I do wish to body forth—W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, and Ida B. Wells—we also ask, in a constantly reglobalizing context, why this? Why this, here? Why this, here, now?

But since there’s something irresistible in talking about the present, the paper I started to write after getting John’s email burst forth into the world as “Life in Hell,” and many of you heard versions of its forced march toward a book at Santa Barbara, Berkeley, Cornell, New York University, and University College Dublin. That project informs what I have to say here today, but this is going to be more like the discussion we could have after the “Life in Hell” book is done—which it’s not.

Twenty-one years ago, I gave my first paper at a scholarly meeting. It was a Modern Language Association convention in DC. The rubric was “The Status of Women in the Profession,” organized by the MLA commission devoted to the scrutiny of same. The presentations were arranged into a plenary and a series of sessions, with my panel of the series on the last hour of the last day.

In 1989, we were trying to figure out where women in the profession had gotten to, where we could go, and how we might get there. I use “we” advisedly. I was a drama school doctoral-program dropout who caught a break, thanks to a friend from Yale School of Drama, Michael Cadden, who recommended me to his former colleague at Princeton, Val Smith. There are clear benefits to rolling in and with the elites. As was the case in March 2009 when John Stephens emailed, back in January 1989, when Val Smith telephoned me, I immediately grabbed a new notebook and fresh pen to write a radical revisionist history of the world to be delivered in twenty minutes, eleven months in the future. I devised a time-killing title because I wasn’t sure I could actually fill twenty minutes: “Decorative Beasts: Dogging the Academy in the Late Twentieth Century; or, What Are Those Bitches Howling About? Check Out Their Golden Chains.”²

The principal argument was that in 1989 we were in the midst of a passive revolution. I also said a lot of other things, trying to sort out who and what works in the academy, for whom, and to what end. Public speaking was a novel experience for me. I had one pun halfway through that allowed me to breathe thanks to my unseemly habit of busting up at my own jokes. The solution that I offered back then was, “Organize, organize, organize! Take over what already exists and innovate what’s still needed. Unshackle ourselves because nobody will do it for us.” This evening I don’t want to sound like a Spartacist: “I took a position in 1989 and it’s still correct.” But I do want to sound like a historical materialist. We make history, but not under conditions of our own choosing.

What was in some ways still incipient then has been consolidated over the past generation. There was no NAFTA. There was no European Union. There were no capitalist Chinese export production platforms. There was industrialization in China, but the export processing zones so prominent in today’s economy didn’t exist. Nelson Mandela was still in prison, as were a suddenly growing number of people here in the States. Well-waged blue-collar jobs had, for more than ten years, been melting away from longtime industrial landscapes across the United States. At the same time, there was a measurable rise in what one wag called “guard duty”; by that he meant both uniformed security positions and jobs like assistant manager at fast-food franchises—jobs whose main duties are to ensure workers don’t cheat the time clock, keep their hand out of the till, and don’t give out free stuff to their customer-friends. Guard duty.

The Berlin Wall had come down six weeks before. However, with all that, it didn’t feel like history was over. In a way, the obsessions that drove me into and then rapidly away from drama were those most beautifully summarized in a few thoughts of Marx: by mixing our labor with the earth, we change the external world and thereby change our own nature.³ That’s what drama is; that’s what geography is: making history, making worlds. The fact that I went to Yale is often understood as a tale of generational aspiration, assimilation, and achievement. Yale janitor grandfather, Yale machinist father, Yale graduate daughter—the narrative arc of a shape-shifting myth that, in the words of William Jefferson Clinton, goes something like this: “There’s nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed by what’s right with America.” To believe that is to fall prey to what George Kent, in “Richard Wright: Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture,” called “the imprisoning blandishments of a neurotic culture.”⁴ But to think that also kills life, past, present, and future.

Here’s a different story, a more dramatic narrative arc:⁵

The woman seated in the middle in the front row, J, worked for many years as a housekeeper, as a domestic. She worked as a seamstress. She worked to make people’s lives more comfortable so that she and her husband could make the lives of their children more comfortable. Imagine her one day waiting at the stop for the trolley that will take her and her basket of freshly ironed laundry out to her “white lady’s” house. The basket was really heavy, and one of her church friends, S, was already in the trolley. S came to the steps and helped her lift the basket into the trolley.

J always envied S. S worked for a white lady who was all alone, Miss M. J worked for a white lady who was not alone, and she spent a lot of time dodging the white men in the white lady’s house. She envied S. She envied S a job that she imagined might be easier to do. But as she thought about it that day in the trolley, she thought, “Well, maybe that job isn’t easier to do. Maybe that job is actually a difficult job to do.” For example, what if Miss M wasn’t somebody who just left S alone? After all, S’s daughter, E, who, when she graduated from normal school, could not teach in the public schools because the city would not hire Black teachers, went South to teach in a school for Black girls in Florida, and she, E, discovered in Florida that there were girls who loved girls. And E thought that was a wonderful thing that those girls loved girls, and when she came back, she told her sisters, and her sisters told J’s daughter and J’s daughter told her mother and said, “Mom, is this something new?”

J told her daughter that that was nothing new. In fact, she had heard the men of her family talking among themselves about P, P the musician, who—the men were worried about P and their sons. They had sons. J and her husband had sons, four sons, and the men wanted to know what P’s intentions were toward their boys. J could not understand why these men were so frightened, why these men wouldn’t just go ask. So she did. She put on her coat one day and took her handbag and she walked down the street to a place where P was practicing the piano and she said, “P, what is your intention toward my boys,” and he said with an arpeggio flourish, “J: I don’t like boys. I love men.”

E came back from the South, and she worked in New Haven. She worked for her mother to keep her mother in her house, because her father had died. He had died of a botched operation. Her father was dead and she was the oldest child, so she worked, she worked, she worked. She couldn’t be a teacher. She could be a secretary. She was also quite a lively person who spent a lot of time in Harlem. It was the Renaissance. E met a man, an immigrant, an immigrant named D, from India. D had come to the United States to go to school, and he fell in love with E. Oh, he loved her, he loved her so! He wanted her to go with him, to go to India, to live with him in a place that was not yet free of colonial rule, but he swore to her that he would protect her and love her and cherish her, and her mama would be OK, even though she was so far from home. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t leave. He went back to India and she stayed in New Haven.

But other immigrants had come to New Haven. Many immigrants had come. They had come from throughout the world, including all over the British colonies. Many had come from the Lesser Antilles in the first decade of the twentieth century. The Negroes of New Haven who were already in New Haven raised their eyebrows when those women and men came from the West Indies, and they asked, “What do they want here? What do they plan to do?”

What the Negroes from the West Indies did was the same thing that the Negroes of New Haven did: they worked. They worked and they worked and they worked. H, the man whom E married, worked at Yale, working for a fraternity, as did J’s husband C, who stands behind her in that picture. C worked seven days a week. The janitors at Yale in those days worked seven days a week. They never could have a day off. Indeed, the comptroller, when asked why they couldn’t have a day off, said, “Why, those boys would just get in trouble if we give them a day off.”

The men conscripted their sons. They could never do all the work that they had to do at Yale University in those days, so those who had sons, like C, who had four sons, conscripted the sons as boys to come and work for them. And it was there that one of the sons, my father, as a young teenager, heard communists debating New Deal Democrats about what was to be done. He stood in the back of the room wearing a white coat, serving food to the debaters, thinking, “This makes sense, what the communists say. This makes sense.”

The military conscripted the sons and shipped them off to all the theaters of World War II. While the sons were off at war, they heard what the men back home were doing. They heard that the men, like C and others, were organizing with the CIO, the CIO that had so much leadership from the Communist Party. They organized the union at Yale, Local 35, the blue-collar union, the union for the housekeepers and janitors at Yale.

The women organized, too. His sister-in-law M was working in the wartime industries in Columbus, Ohio. She worked all night in the factories, making machines to kill other people’s children, and by day she went to Ohio State University, learning to be a teacher to teach the children who did not get killed. When she got a call from her mother that her elderly father in Virginia was very, very sick she took a bus all the way to Virginia, and when she got to Virginia, when she got to Danville, she took a bus to the edge of town, and then she had to get out and walk to the Colored hospital that was far beyond the end of the bus line.

Having called on her father and seen to his well-being, she walked back to the bus and got in the bus. This was 1942. She got in the bus and she sat in the front and she refused to move to the back. When they arrested her, when they arrested her and so many other people who wouldn’t move in those days, long before Rosa Parks finally made her refusal to move symbolize a movement, because people had organized, organized, organized, M went to court, and the judge said, “M, what have they done to you up there in the North? They have driven you out of your mind!” And her family agreed. They drove her to the longdistance bus and said, “Go back to the North and never come back.” Editors and pundits discussed this refusal up and down the southeastern seaboard, confused by patience’s militant face.

When the men came back, when they came back from the military, they were ready to fight. They knew how to shoot. They knew how to work. They fought into jobs. They fought into jobs they had never had before, but they fought into jobs that were jobs making weapons to kill other people’s children. They went to work, for example, for Winchester, one of the major firms of the military-industrial complex. They went to work for Winchester and the military-industrial complex, where the machinists were not organized, although they had, for decades and decades and decades and decades, made weapons to commit the genocide against indigenous people in the United States. They made weapons that were used to grab the Philippines and Hawai’i and Puerto Rico and Cuba. They made these weapons, and in that place where they made the weapons, they made a union.

My father, a machinist, a journeyman machinist, led the organizing. He helped to form the union. But he lost his job because of his union work. He went from job to job, working as a wonderfully skilled tool and die maker, and he eventually wound up working at, of all places, Yale, in the physics department. He worked in the physics department helping the physicists make their machines for observation, their machines for seeing the things that cannot be seen. And while they were doing that, he could see all around him at Yale the things that should not be seen because they should not happen. My father decided that something had to be done. When Lady Bird Johnson came to town in 1967, on her Beautify America campaign, the campaign in which she said, “Plant a shrub or a bush or a tree,” my father went and picketed at the president of Yale’s house. He wrote a sign that said, “Mrs. LBJ, Prez Kingman Brewster works the Dick Lee’s white power to keep the blacks suppressed,” and the other side of the placard said, “Yale supports apartheid employment policies.”

When I applied to Yale, I came to realize much later, there wasn’t any question that I would be accepted. It was a different kind of power grouping that I found myself in, quite different from the one, the kind one, the collegial one, that got me to that first Modern Language Association conference in 1989. My father, indeed, kindly offered to burn the place down if they didn’t take his number-one daughter, his only daughter. But not being a fool, not one to waste infrastructure that can be turned to other purposes, his talent was to force Yale to burn money and time rather than the physical plant to achieve what he wanted for the communities where he organized: jobs, housing, daycare, health clinics. In other words, his talent was to organize, promote ideas, and obstruct and obstruct, obstruct in the political and legal arenas. When I asked him to go to the bursar’s office with me the first day of school in case there were any remaining charges not covered by the university employees’ tuition remission, he said, “Why? They owe us.” He wouldn’t fill out financial aid forms. He refused to ask. He knew that nobody had invited us here.

“I was sent,” Lorna Goodison wrote. “Tell that to history.”

And as Stuart Hall taught me, it is history that gives us a sense of ourselves as a single political constituency, which is why we keep rewriting it.

Now I’ll turn briefly to the relationships among structural adjustment, security enhancement, and the anti-state state. Let me make some sweeping generalizations and then get down to what is to be done.

The world is, as everybody in this room knows, in political, economic, military, environmental, and ideological crisis. Recent scholarship in American studies strives to decenter the United States while remaining meticulously mindful of its forceful, although by no means decisive, role in globalization—as a source of capital and capital organization...