Patriarchal Abolition and the Political Uses of Community

• In Event: Reimagining Abolitionist Democracies

Abstract

Liberal, Progressive, and Marxist critics of police abolition have accused abolitionists of being complicit with the neoliberal Right when it comes to abolishing the state. Critics argue that, in abolishing the state that uses policing, abolitionists are no different from neoliberals that also argue for dismantling the bureaucratic welfare state because of its inefficiencies. For these critics, the purpose of a Leftist politics towards the criminal justice system is to place the criminal justice system under concrete democratic control without shrinking or abolishing the state that is the only viable vehicle for an expansive and universalist mass politics. At stake in this debate is the question of whether police abolition is a de facto anarchistic rejection of the state or if abolition (in a Hegelian sense) is both the negation and supersession of the modern Weberian state.

This paper argues that there is a form of abolition susceptible to this critique of anti-statism, what I call patriarchal abolition. Patriarchal Abolition rejects the state in the name of premodern forms of power that are seen as more legitimate or responsive to the over-policed because of their proximity to ideals of organic community, such as families or minority communities. I develop this definition of patriarchal abolition through attention to celebratory accounts of the Black father in particular as the “natural” police authority for Black people. Following the long history of criticism of maternalism within Black communities–exemplified by Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s vilification of Black mothers as the cause of Black poverty–a certain genre of popular media celebrates the Black father as the only legitimate policing authority within Black communities. This celebration occurs, for example, when Black fathers step in to patrol high schools to prevent fights after state-sanctioned police are accused of racism. However, in turning to literal patriarchal authority, patriarchal abolition recapitulates the image of community as premodern, autochthonous, static, and hierarchical.

I argue that critics are correct to reject this version of abolition that merely replaces bureaucratically-authorized coercion with personal domination, yet this is not the dominant vision of police abolition advocated for today. Drawing in particular on the work of Black feminist abolitionists like Hortense Spillers, Joy James, and Mariame Kaba, I argue that contemporary police abolition is best characterized as a specifically Black feminist abolitionist vision. For these Black feminists, police abolition is not just the rejection of state violence but also the transformation of communities into more robust and complex structures that supersede the ideal of organic simplicity in order to support the thriving of all people. I reframe the contemporary question of police abolition then to be whether Black feminist abolitionists can be successful in their transformation of the political meaning of community, or if–in the same way as patriarchal abolition valorizes an organic conception of community–too much radical potential is still being placed on “community” as both the means and ends of abolitionist politics.

Author

• Quinn Lester, Johns Hopkins University