Black Feminist Epistemology in Abolitionist Thought

• In Event: In the Shadow of Democracy: Theorizing the Dark Ghetto

Abstract

In the early summer of 2020, amidst the death, confusion, and boredom of the early COVID-19 pandemic, Americans undertook the largest political demonstrations in U.S. history in outrage over the filmed murder of George Floyd. Perhaps the most novel and noteworthy call made during this tumultuous period was the call to “Defund the Police” en route to an ultimate goal of abolishing the prison industrial complex and its attendant institutions: police and prisons. At the height of those protests, “Abolish” had become a rallying cry for “The Trayvon Generation” and a boogeyman for commentators and candidates on the American Right.

However, despite prodding debate in the public sphere towards a fundamental reconsideration of the role of police, prisons, and punishment in our society, prison industrial complex abolition will not become a widespread policy anytime soon. At its most popular, simply reducing police budgets had a roughly 25% support rate and has fallen precipitously in popularity since. Now, almost three years after the height of the protests, President Joe Biden is promoting a signature policy, “The Safer America Plan,” that would expand the ranks of US police departments by about 100,000 officers. The lightning in a bottle of Summer 2020 has not proved sufficient to power a broad-based move toward police abolition. And yet, we should not view the call for PIC abolition as politically inert or mere utopian dreaming of a small subset of the population.

Rather, by tracing the diffusion of black feminist epistemologies—which emphasize living as the source of knowledge—we can begin to understand both the goals and stated achievements of the movement to dismantle the prison industrial complex. First, attention to the epistemologies underwriting much abolitionist organizing helps to better locate abolitionism among its antecedent theories—especially the anti-street harassment and anti-police brutality movements of the 1990s. Second, it clarifies the importance of “prefiguration,” or the “acting as if,” that constitutes a main contribution of abolitionism to the theory and practice of political organizing. And finally, a firm grasp of the epistemologies underwriting abolitionism explains the paradoxical ambivalence of organizers towards scaling any of the “one million experiments,” in community safety. By recovering abolitionists' Black feminist inheritance, this paper explicates the conceptual contributions of one of the most incendiary rallying cries in recent memory.

Author

• Kierstan Kaushal-Carter, The University of Pennsylvania