Making Room for Abolition is a body of work that imagines a world without police and prisons by making speculative worlds through the lens of a home. This work explores the contours of possible abolitionist worlds by crafting speculative domestic artifacts; imagining, writing and reading speculative stories; and interweaving those dispatches from abolitionist imaginaries with conversations about present-day abolitionist practices.
This work and many of the artifacts collected here first materialized as an installation of a living room from a world without police and prisons at Red Bull Arts in 2021.
This website is an archive of abolitionist realities—futures and alternate presents—expressed as artifacts, dispatches, and essays. It presents a distributed storytelling project comprised of three different types of media that are connected in various ways:
Artifacts are specific objects and sounds from (various) abolitionist realities, they may be situated in alternative pasts, presents, or futures;
Essays are big-picture thematic narratives that bring artifacts in conversation with real-life interviews with abolitionist organizers, other references, soundscapes;
COMING SOON
Dispatches are short stories that offer a glimpse into the world(s) in which these abolitionist realities are imagined;
Lauren Williams (she/they) is a Detroit-based designer, researcher and educator. They work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power over Black life and death.
Ayinde Jean-Baptiste (he/him) is an organizer turned strategist whose work is story-driven: cultivating and protecting people's voices and self-perception as capable of changing their environments or circumstances. As a multimedia storyteller, they use voice to shift culture, engaging with communities through listening, memory-making, and movement.
Conor Anderson (he/him) is an Audio Engineer and Producer for 101.9 WDET, ensuring quality audio content for the station from underwriting to live bands, podcasts, and broadcasts. Before joining WDET, Anderson was an ethnomusicological documentarian and the lead audio engineer for Red Bull Radio Detroit. He is a graduate of The University of Michigan, where he received a degree in Sound Media and Culture.
Em Woudenberg (they/them) of Strike Design Studio offers frank consultancy and striking solutions for print and screens. With over a decade of experience, they have worked with notable brands and have exhibited their work across the world.
Radical Play, led by Na Forest Lim, they/them, is a photo and film studio that makes art to share unique + beautiful truths of Detroit artists, BIPOC, queer, disabled, immigrants, sex workers, & other marginalized individuals. Their creative purpose is to shift unbalanced personal narratives and transform societal issues.
This work, from 2021 through today, was made possible with funding from the Detroit Justice Center, Art 4 Justice Fund, The Center for Cultural Power, Race Forward, and Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.
In popular media. We have countless examples of more carceral futures.
Okay Jad, what's coming?
Double homicide: one male, one female. Killer's male. White. Forties.
Set up a perimeter and tell them we're en route. I'm placing you under arrest for the future murder of Sarah Marks. Give the man his hat.
The future can be seen.
If you're not familiar, Minority Report is a film from 2002 based on a book by Philip K. Dick. It envisions a world in which police can predict and intervene to prevent murders in Washington, D.C.
Another film that sells a more carceral feature is RoboCop. A 1987 film set in Detroit that posited a feature of law enforcement in which a corporately funded cyborg police officer traverses the city.
Old Detroit has a cancer. The cancer is crime.
Let the woman go, you are under arrest.
We get the best of both worlds. The fastest reflexes modern technology has to offer, onboard computer assisted memory and a lifetime of on the street law enforcement programing. It is my great pleasure to present to you. RoboCop.
This guy is really good.
He's not a guy. He's a machine.
Here's a clip from my conversation with P.G. Tawana and Curtis.
We do this all the time in film and we do it all the time, in— usually in service of imagining what I would consider to be a worse future, like these movies like Minority Report, RoboCop, etcetera, where we can like, really in great fidelity, see the possibilities of a more oppressive police force or more resourced police force. But we never do that— or not, not we— but like the world on a larger scale really never does that for a world without police or a world without prisons. Or the world that all of you have been describing and in your own work. But in the interest of like, how do we make it more impossible or less impossible? I think in a way, part of my like meager attempt to to contribute in this way is like through this work. So part of what motivated me to think about like, what if I make all these, like, boring, useless, mundane, quotidian objects in a house? So yeah, I was like: What if I make this junk that lies around our homes? Because when we touch things and hold things and look at objects that are familiar to us, it changes the ways we can believe them to be real or believe the conditions in which they exist to be real. Right? So...
The thing about writing the book. The thing about the TV shows and movies that you're mentioning to me, it's like we do have to create a different type of media that is going to paint a different type of picture because it's all— I don't know. I get it's about conspiracy back a little bit, but really I don't— they're never going to show us. And this is what OC me being a conspiracy theorist. So that's why I'm speaking in extremes. I don't usually do that, but they're never going to show us willfully a future where we do not have to be dependent on the state or where we do not have to be subject to state violence. Right? Really, what they're trying to do is numb us and desensitize us to the possibility of the ways that we are going to continue to feel the impact of state violence. Right? So anyways, all of it's—.
That's not a conspiracy. This facts.
That's real.
You know what I mean? That's what I said! Okay, thank you for that. Thank you for the grounding is very real. But, you know, I think it's just like, that's why we have to write the books. That's why we have to make the movies. That's not everybody's bag necessarily, but it's necessary.
Welcome to Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities, a series of audio essays about making room for abolition. Making Room for abolition first appeared at Red Bull Arts in Detroit in October of 2021 as a month long installation of speculative artifacts set in a home and a future without police and prisons. This series reflects on conversations from that space with Detroit based organizers and futurists committed to food justice, water access, educational equity, restorative justice and Black liberation more broadly. When Black folks in Detroit manufactured a better life for ourselves, whether that means healthier food, safer neighborhoods, or new technologies for moving through conflict is usually described as an act of survival or desperation. Rather than being classified as an act of resistance or future-making or speculative design. But each and every one of them is practicing a future that especially poor Black Detroiters have been told is impossible. In each episode, we'll look closely at the kinds of fictions that shape our current attachments to policing, prisons and punishment to examine where they come from and how they affect us. At the same time, you'll hear us propose abolitionist realities that counter these fictions and open up other ways of being.
My name is Lauren Williams. I'm an artist and designer based in Detroit, Michigan, and I work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power.
In today's episode, we'll explore the role of imagination in abolitionist movements. We'll look at the features of our experiences in our world and emotions that enable and inhibit our capacities to imagine. And we'll explore the ways abolitionists are practicing their imagined prefigure creations today. We'll close with an invitation to imagine together.
We've touched on imagination throughout this series in a few different places. We've talked about how "geographic imaginaries," a concept explored by Edward Said, have informed colonial beliefs about who gets to enjoy rights to land. We've examined racial imaginaries, for example, when we talked about how Blackness has been constructed or imagined as expansive and Indigeneity imagined as diminishing over time. We've looked at the ways new classes of investors and the neighborhoods they'll eventually populate are imagined and brought into being by real estate speculation, which presumes the likelihood of potential profit based on the imagined future value of an asset. We've talked about the ways Zionists are readily reimagining Palestine as a land without Palestinian inhabitants. And in each episode you've heard short fictional dispatches from the abolitionist storyline I was imagining when I first started making Room for Abolition.
Beyond this, the entire series has pitted carceral fictions against abolitionist realities, a framing that strives to remind us how thin a line exists between them both, if not for the violent enforcements carried out by policing, prisons and the many other systems into which carceral, colonial and capitalist logics have been inscribed. When I use the word fiction or imaginary to describe some logic underlying one of these systems, I'm not trying to imply that the thing I'm describing, whether it's about ownership of land or racial categories, is entirely fake or made up. I'm calling attention, instead, to the processes by which they're made real. The degree to which those processes are withheld from the people they are most likely to impact most negatively, and the degree to which those processes are enabled by state violence.
In the social sciences and humanities. You hear folks talk about social imaginaries all the time, the neoliberal imaginary, the capitalist imaginary, racial imaginaries. The list goes on. Each of these are sets of collective imagined ideas, practices, worldviews, beliefs, or, as we've been describing them, fictions that inform how people imagine, interpret and act in society. This is one way to understand what I mean when I talk about these carceral fictions: they're ways of imagining, interpreting and acting as a society that are rooted in carceral beliefs. And social imaginaries aren't new sociological theorists like Émile Durkheim have been writing about them since the late 1800s.
As an aside, you can't talk about Durkheim's work without acknowledging the time, context and approaches with which he was working. Durkheim was a French sociologist who rose to prominence in the late 18 and early 1900s. He's credited as a founder of modern sociology, but his work was all based on ethnographic research conducted by other researchers, much of which is founded on racist assumptions about primitivism and orientalism. Considering the source of his theories, you might be wondering why we're referencing them in the first place if they're so riddled with problematics. It's not about blindly relying on theory without questioning its origins, but because we're living in the aftermath of these theories, if we're looking for a different way to imagine, we have to look at how we got to where we are. And these kinds of theories that attempt to articulate how people form shared understandings of the world and of culture are part of that explanation. So it's helpful to return to them to interrogate how we might rethink carceral imaginaries too.
Another way theorists like Durkheim have talked about these images, stories and legends shared by large groups of people, if not whole societies, is as social facts. According to Charles Taylor, another prominent sociologist, social facts are "the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations." Point being, when enough humans get together and start operating based on a shared social fact or imaginary. Start constructing institutions based on them, it doesn't really matter how so-called factual or fictional those beliefs are. They come to shape our lives, our deaths, and everything in between. So troubling that thin line between them enough to help us question where they come from, why we believe them, why we adhere to them, why we hold on to them, and who the we is, is the goal of this series.
One thing I can promise you this I will always tell you the truth.
Donald Trump lies like breathing. He doesn't know what the truth is.
Since we're on the topic of imagination and fiction and facts, it feels like it would be irresponsible not to mention the general climate of absurdity we're all swimming in amid this contemporary Trump era political landscape.
The crowd was massive. That was all the way back down to the Washington Monument. It looked like a million, million and a half people. We get this network and it showed an empty field and it said we drew 250,000 people. Now, that's not bad. But it's a lie.
This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration period.
Sean Spicer, our press secretary gave alternative facts to that.
It's the greatest economy in the history of the world. Best unemployment numbers. Best everything. These fact checkers. They'll check facts with me. And I'm like like 99%, right? And they'll say, and therefore, he lied. You got $28 billion from China that went to our farmers because they targeted you. We tariffed China a lot of money and they paid for it. You didn't pay. You know, the fake news likes to say you paid—you don't pay. They paid.
Trump isn't the first politician to lie. But when you live in a so-called post-truth era, when deepfakes proliferate; when generative AI is pumping out hyper-realistic images of cats as street vendors and professors and ballerinas; when every day is filled with some new, unbelievable unreal nonsense; when Trump nominates WWE wrestling CEOs to manage the Department of Education; when the news cycle is dominated by actual lies and hyperbolic bullshit from the guy who occupied and will once again occupy the White House, how are you supposed to make sense of the world?
There has never been ever before and administration that's been so open and transparent. I was the most transparent and am transparent president in history.
How does our environment being so deeply unbelievable and so absurd affect our capacity to imagine otherwise? Is it exhausting or can the climate of absurdity liberate us to imagine even more freely? And what about when we contemplate whose imaginary we're living in? How does inhabiting someone else's radically oppressive imagination influence your own? I don't plan to answer these questions in the course of this episode, and I think we'd each also probably respond to them uniquely. But it feels like an important contextual point to raise in this conversation that invokes fact, fiction, truth and imaginaries.
The carceral, colonial and capitalist imaginaries we've highlighted throughout this series are bad enough on their own, but they're further compounded by another fiction about who has the power and capacity to imagine and transform their imagined ideas into reality. Arjun Appadurai is an anthropologist who studies and writes about the future and future making. He writes about the uneven distribution of the capacity to aspire to one's imagination in his book The Future as Cultural Fact. "While an ethics of probability," he writes, "is controlled in large part by capitalist markets and logics, there's space, if we adopt a politics of hope to adopt an ethics of possibility instead," which he defines as "those ways of thinking, feeling and acting that increase the horizons of hope, that expand the field of the imagination, that produce greater equity and the capacity to aspire, and that widen the field of informed, creative and critical citizenship."
So possibility for me opens up agency, collaboration, participation, and let's call it empowerment for ordinary people. That is that's the sense that you can make your own future, that the future is not simply an objective fact that rushes at you and you have to just react or respond or protect yourself, but rather you can make— so for me, the relationship is that the question you asked: what is the relationship? Is that the— seeing that the future, that there are possible futures which are not exhausted or defined by probable futures is to be the space of politics where we actually elect to do things that we may wish, even if the probabilities are against us. I do indeed argue that it's unevenly distributed and that that uneven distribution is not a matter of mental capacity or intelligence. So it's not a cultural poverty kind of argument or a racist argument. It simply says that being poor means you have less opportunity to to practice that capacity, to use it and to have examples of it and to draw on that archive of experiences, to build new experiences. You just have less of that. That is the nature of poverty. So the question becomes...
It's the nature of poverty and it's the nature of unevenly distributed power. His point isn't that the poor or marginalized don't imagine, rather, that their capacity to transform their imaginations into reality is constrained by the forces of capitalism, impoverishment and oppression. This framing is what brings me to this work of imagining otherwise by making fictions tangible, believable and real, by translating them into artifacts that we can contest and hold on to, revise and throw away and experiment with until we find what works.
In my experience, the folks working toward abolitionist transformations in whatever field rarely have the time and resources to imagine the worlds they're building. They're building the plane while flying it, as they say. And given the gravity of the systems we're talking about—food, housing, safety, education and care—sometimes it can feel frivolous to talk about imagining because as we've examined in our episode on time, this work is urgent. Who has the time to sit around dreaming? But so much creative energy is being poured into the carceral imaginary and into actual carceral implements right now that we can't afford not to dream differently.
Many of the worst carceral innovations are driven in large part by technological advancements that create new, more oppressive, more automated ways to punish, surveil and control people. In Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, Ruha Benjamin examines the various ways in which technology gets leveraged to extend the reach of or perceived efficiency of policing and the wider prison industrial complex.
Technology captivates capturing bodies. Dashcams on the front of police vehicles recording traffic stops turned deadly. As with the arrest of Sandra Bland on a Texas highway, robot cranes reaching 30 feet in the air, monitoring images and heat signatures throughout cities like Camden, New Jersey, deepening police occupation of impoverished neighborhoods. Crime prediction algorithms labeling Black defendants higher risk than their white counterparts, reinforcing popular stereotypes of criminality and innocence behind a veneer of objectivity. Electronic ankle monitors wrapping around the limbs of thousands of people as they await trial or serve parole, an attractive alternative to cages, more humane and cost effective than jails, we are told. Tools in this way capture more than just people's bodies. They also capture the imagination, offering technological fixes for a wide range of social problems. Electronic tracking and location systems are part of a growing suite of interventions dubbed "techno corrections." Indeed, these interventions come bubble wrapped in rhetoric about correcting not just individuals, but social disorders such as poverty and crime. In the first ever report analyzing the impact of electronic monitoring of youth in California, we learned that e-monitoring entails a combination of onerous and arbitrary rules that end up forcing young people back into custody for technical violations. Attractive fixes, it turns out, produce new opportunities for youth to violate the law and thereby new grounds for penalizing them. But perhaps this is the point. Could it be that we don't need techno corrections to make us secure, that we need social insecurity to justify techno corrections?
Technology often promises quick fixes for complex social problems. But as Kyle Whyte has reminded us, in the offering of kinship time, as we explore the perils of urgency in our last episode, quick fixes are themselves a fiction. In other words, techno solution, so-called post-racial upgrades to social control, policing and surveillance really just upgrade historic forms of discrimination and inequality into forms that become more elusive, more entrenched, more streamlined, and just as harmful, if not more. As Benjamin reminds us in her newest book, Imagination: a Manifesto. Quote, "Collective imagination has been arrested and confined, making it difficult to think beyond the racist, class's sexist, ableist status quo," end quote. This isn't limited to implements of the prison industrial complex or technologically-enabled imaginaries either. It really concerns all aspects of our lives where carceral, colonial and capitalist logic seep in.
I see this all the time when I teach courses or host community workshops that invite speculation about more liberatory worlds. We struggle not to inscribe the tenets of the world we know and inhabit daily into our imagined visions of alternatives or futures, even if we know we're aiming to construct something more liberatory. And I'm not immune either. This happened in my own work, even as I tried to craft the worlds that became Making Room for Abolition. This confinement of our collective imaginations is happening alongside the expansive proliferation of imagination around how to implement a radically conservative future, one that celebrates, if not worships, carceral, colonial and capitalist possibilities. Take the range of policies advanced in Trump in the Republican Party's Project 2025, which promises a world where no one can have an abortion and pregnant people can't make decisions about their own health care; where gender and sexuality are heavily policed and trans people are denied an existence; where student debt continues to crush borrowers; where mass detentions and deportations place immigrants in constant fear; where Black and Indigenous communities are even more heavily policed than they are now; where climate change is denied and further climate change research is completely abandoned; where the death penalty becomes widely popularized; where children are encouraged to work; and where no one wears masks or takes vaccines in the time of a global pandemic. The imaginations of the folks who want a more carceral, colonial and capitalist future are working overtime.
As Claudia Rankine sums up in this short poem from Citizen, written shortly after visiting Ferguson in the wake of Michael Brown's death.
"Because white men
Can't police their imaginations
Black men are dying."
...talk about, well what actually fuels racist police? A racist imagination. When the man who killed Michael Brown said, "When I saw him standing there, he looked like a monster." I believe him! When— I do believe that that's what he saw, because that's how we are characterized. So we have to do something about the invisible stuff, that— the invisible hand that guides all of this carceral stuff that is explicitly racist.
You're hearing from Angel McKissic, who runs the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network.
That white police officer who shot and killed that black teenager, 18 year old Michael Brown. We begin with Officer Wilson in his own words. His exclusive interview with our George Stephanopoulos saying he feared for his life that August day.
I had reached out my window of my right hand to grab onto his forearm because I was going to try and move him back and get out of the car to where I'm no longer trapped. And when I felt I just felt the immense power that he had. I mean, the way I've described it is it was like a five year old whole on the hook. That's just how big this man was.
Hulk Hogan?
He was very large, very powerful man.
You're a pretty big guy.
Yeah, I'm above average. That moment before the second shot, you guys are staring at each other. And you said there was a look in his eye like something you'd never seen before. You described it as a demon.
It was a very, very intense, intense image he was presenting. I was so shocked by the whole interaction because this was escalated so quickly from a simple request to now a fight for survival.
And the thing that renders Wilson's imaginary real is his capacity to act on it with a weapon and a badge. This is not a drill. Imagining otherwise is an urgent task to be addressed with care, intention, responsibility, and through time, because behind black men and women is a long line of other racialized, marginalized people who will continue to become targets for homicidal cops and the myriad of oppressive, imagined realities to follow.
That prisons, police and jails continue to expand and receive funding belies the notion that we must prove that any other means of cultivating safety works before we apply it. When we talk about abolishing police and prisons, another common fiction is that one single thing must replace them all, or that there is no room for experimentation or failure in the course of developing abolitionist interventions.
In Octavia Butler's essay, "A Few Rules for Predicting the Future," she shares an anecdote about an exchange she had with a student:
So, do you really believe that in the future we're going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books? A student asked me as I was signing books after a talk. The young man was referring to the troubles I described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy. Marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming. "I didn't make up the problems," I pointed out. "All I did was look around at the problems we're neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full fledged disasters." "Okay," the young man challenged, "So what's the answer?" "There isn't one," I told him. "No answer? You mean we're just doomed?" He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke. "No," I said. "I mean, there's no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There's no magic bullet. Instead, there are thousands of answers, at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be." Several days later, by mail, I received a copy of the young man's story in his college newspaper. He mentioned my talk, listed some of my books and the future problems they dealt with. Then he quoted his own question "What's the answer?" The article ended with the first three words of my reply. Wrongly left standing alone. "There isn't one." It's sadly easy to reverse meaning, in fact, to tell a lie by offering an accurate but incomplete quote. In this case, it was frustrating because the one thing that I and my main characters never do when contemplating the future is give up hope. In fact, the very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.
The students' lie is a carceral fiction we often internalize: that because there is no easy, singular answer, there is no other way. Until another way is so-called proven to work, even though the current way has only disproven its own capacity to produce safety and proven its own capacity to cause intergenerational harm. As Mariame Kaba has said:
Part of why we're in the situation we're in right now is because we offer kind of a one size fits all response to every single possible kind of harm in the world through this criminal punishment system, which we're told is actually synonymous with justice.
The reality here is we actually already have the tools to move differently, and we aren't starting from scratch.
In our episode on time, I mentioned that my motivation for this work came from frustrations about the way urgency was driving and distorting our actions in the movement spaces I was part of. When I started out, my goal was to imagine otherwise and render those imagined worlds tangible, material and real through artifacts you can hold and turn over because I believe that constructing a shared belief in their plausibility might drive organizing strategy and goals. I'm operating on the hypothesis that doing so can help us get to those liberated worlds, convince us of its viability, and add depth and rigor to our strategy while shaping our action along the way.
It's worth noting that part of the reason we don't see as many imagined liberatory worlds in film and other popular media is at least partly because they're simply at odds with the prevailing social facts of our faith in both capitalism and carcerality. And as I can attest, imagining liberated futures is hard, especially amid this nonsense. There's times when it feels like my own imagination is stunted because of inertia, because there's no quick and easy answer. Because we're surrounded and exhausted by heartbreak. Because we're blinded by rage. But one thing that keeps me going is knowing that sometimes the same things that seem to constrain our imaginations can fuel them. And many of these things are already happening or have happened before.
I have to imagine that imagining freedom amid slavery must have been pretty damn hard too, if not for all the obvious reasons that getting free would have been challenging, for the uncertainty of what was to come and for demanding we step into the unknown.
In Tera Hunter's account of Black women's lives and labor after the Civil War, a book called To 'Joy My Freedom, dshe opens the prologue with an anecdote about a formerly enslaved woman named Julie Tillery, who seeks out the Freedmen's Bureau in the spring of 1866 with her two young children in tow to find her husband.
When Tillery found the Freedmen's Bureau Office, she encountered Northern missionaries and union Army officials busily tending to the business of helping destitute families find shelter, food, clothing and work. Her eyes fixed on a missionary woman who was herself overwhelmed by the tasks before her and the gravity of her responsibilities. Apparently, in all of the seeming contradiction of destitution and determination surrounding her, the missionary pondered the state of affairs. She asked Tillery a question that had been burning in her mind ever since her arrival in the South, and her firsthand observation of the monumental changes brought about by Union victory. "Why would you want to leave the certainties and comforts of your master's plantation where subsistence was guaranteed for the uncertainties before you?" she asked. Without a moment's pause, Tillery replied "to 'joy my freedom." To enjoy the splendid fruits of freedom at last. Here was her opportunity to protect her dignity, to preserve the integrity of her family, and to secure fair terms for her labor. Tillery's resolve and endurance typified the spirit of ex-slaves determined to be truly free despite the absence of material comforts.
Mia Birdsong, who you heard talk about the etymological roots of the word freedom in episode two reflects on this passage in her own writing, noting the presumably white missionary's limited imagination, her shock that Tillery would abandon certainty in slavery for uncertainty in freedom. In Birdsong's words, the limiting viewpoint of the missionary quote "speaks to a broader relationship with uncertainty that impedes our ability to create changes and shifts that make liberatory futures possible," end quote. When I talk about abolition, most of the conversations I have and questions I receive revolve around the uncertainty of what it might mean in practice. Who would you call instead of the police? Or what about the rapists and the murderers? The carceral fictions we've talked about throughout this series, the ones we internalize, become so entrenched, familiar and comfortable that they slow our inertia to imagine and transform because the unknown is scary.
That principle. Since it's been here, most can still continue to be here. So, of course, I mean, we have we are replicating the same— qualitatively the same type of resistance that maybe folks who were enslaved felt of like "How, sis?! Like how are you going to undo all this—this is their livelihood! It's too much money at stake!" I mean, this is what we are saying now, except it's a different set of concerns in some ways. How? How we going to do this? What about the rapists and murderers and, you know, all of that stuff? Right. So it's right, but it's not because we have some innate limitation in our imagination, but it's because you have huge systems of power for generations telling us that this punishment that— this is a very strong logic. We parent carcerally; we school people carcerally; medical institutions, mental health are all operating on carceral logic they're all punitive. So it's a pervasive logic that really has to be, you know, we have to try to cut right through it. And there is data, but also we need to be on a more relational level.
Carceral logic is strong. It's all encompassing, it's enticing, it's easy and quick and clean. It disappears people, remember? It cleans up the perceived mess of harm with the one and done solution of hiding people who cause harm or disrupt capitalist order in cages. Carceral fearmongering about a world without police and prisons is strong too. It's also convincingly certain if someone causes harm, they're punished for it by the courts or by prison, right? But if we're honest, adhering to carceral solutions is only certain in the way that staying enslaved would have been certain in that it guarantees we stay unfree. And if we're being honest, the outcomes of carceral so-called justice aren't actually any more certain than the abolitionist possibilities for responding to harm.
Many harms today are never reported. The ones that are may not be taken seriously by police or prosecuted. And the punishments delivered by the carceral state may not actually deliver accountability or closure for those harmed. At the same time, there are unreasonable demands placed on proponents of abolition that they must produce a clean, all encompassing certain one stop shop solution to harm or it can't happen at all, which sits squarely in denial of the fact that the carceral state we have doesn't solve for anything that way presently. Our indoctrinated comfort with carceral logics leaves us to reinscribe carcerality into our abolitionist imaginaries and practices too, another reason it's such a grand undertaking to imagine otherwise. Here's Sirrita Darby, founder of Detroit Heals Detroit, a youth-led organization that uses healing-centered engagement to dismantle oppressive systems for marginalized Detroit youth. Here, Sarita describes how this plays out on an interpersonal level when teaching young people how to navigate conflict at school.
I mean, you have to be real everyone doesn't want abolition, everyone doesn't want this system to change! So then I'm like, okay, are we being real with ourselves? Like, do we actually want this? Or do we want the same punishment system? Because I always go back to like, Are you actually disciplining the student? Or are you punishing them? Because punishment and discipline are two different things. And I see a lot of punishment. And if we're constantly relying on punishment instead of discipline, where discipline actually changes behavior, then it's like, okay, because discipline includes the student like, okay, what do you want— what do you want your, you know, consequence to be? What do you think is appropriate? I always ask my students that they're just always like, "Well, I don't know"— .
I mean, they've never— they've never been asked, right?
Right. They're like really confused. Like, are you asking me? Just suspend me! Like, throw me out. Like, no! Like I'm bringing you into the conversation, and then I'll ask the class...
As an educator in Detroit public schools, Sirrita was practicing restorative justice in her classroom with her students. Restorative justice, as we discussed briefly in our episode on Time, focuses on non-punitive approaches to repairing harm through cooperative processes that include those both directly and indirectly impacted. This approach aims to reconcile the victim, the harm to her and the community, and can happen both within and without the legal system. The other very real impediments Sirrita points out here is the fact that people have to be on board, consentfully, in order for these kinds of abolitionist conflict resolution strategies to work. They're necessarily not coercive, meaning you can't force people into them the way you might compel someone to go to court or drag them into prison. Buy-in is required. And abandoning our carceral conditioning and embracing the unknown entities that lie beyond that is required.
Like, I'm bringing you inside a conversation and then I ask the class, like "Okay, we had a circle about this. What does the class think is appropriate disciplinary action for this situation that occurred? And then they're becoming accountable to their peers and not just me as a teacher. So I always try to go back to my students, like what do my students want? So, leaning into that. We all we all have to want it, it has to be buy in from all actors, everyone involved, for it to actually work, but everyone doesn't want that. And we have to be honest too. So, the people who do not want it. How can we get them on the other side and saying, look, this is what's needed? And if we go back to the research, this is what works.
Angel has seen the same pattern in her experience in schools, too.
That's exactly right. And that's exactly my take. From what I understand about what's happening currently in the schools with restorative justice. When I was in DP of the Henry Ford High School, it was extremely punitive and violent across all domains where violence can occur. And I think it really resonates with me when I hear Sirrita to talk about the students being like, just suspend me. It lets you, this is evidence for how much white supremacist systems, right, capitalist system say— structure us in this severe power imbalance. And we always we are conditioned to put our faith in power structures. And so whatever it is, if you say, you know, "police and prisons is right and that's the way to do it, I guess so" you know it because it sort of de— debases us as individuals and and and not just us as individuals, but what we bring our histories, our wisdom, our knowledge, our organic sort of relational traditions that sort of completely gets invisible eyes and erased and replaced with we're the experts. We know how to deal with this. You can't deal with this type of violence or whatever.
This is precisely what we talked about in episode one when we discussed the various ways that we either silo or segregate our needs for things like safety and conflict resolution, off into the hands of various institutions over which we have little to no control.
And we internalize that. Of course, you know, we but but it's there's such a long entrenched history of it, and we're so far away from our roots of how we used to deal with it that we have taken on the system's logic and and we think it's our own. So there's a lot of sort of like work that we have to do that slow and tedious and relational in nature. We help people recognize you— you actually know what you need. You know, it was one of my critiques of psychotherapy which is another reason why I stopped doing it. The focus is on individual and not actually the individual in their context. When you look at the individual in their context, their behavior makes sense. All behavior makes sense. If you actually listening and paying attention and fully appreciate the context in which the behavior comes out of. So I think that...
The approaches Sirota describes here and then Angel supports through the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network rely on trust. They aren't quick and they aren't guaranteed to be clean. They're inherently uncertain. And while it makes sense that uncertainty or the fear of the uncertain stunts inertia, as Sirrita demonstrated, it takes practice to manifest these abolitionist realities she's constructing with her young people as social facts, to occupy more social imaginaries. These practices rest on expectations and promises of responsibility for one another, much in the way that Kyle Whyte explained kinship time in earlier episodes.
When you have a responsible relationship with someone else or or a non-human, it means that you have an emotional connection to them, that you are going to be responsive over time and in different situations to the very needs that they might have. And so it's not like a contractual obligation or even something that is is written in stone, but it's a certain emotional connection of responsiveness that you have with that other being or that other entity or that other human or that other other system, which means that you're really plugged in to their to their well-being and you're willing to do what it takes to support them, whether it's their success, whether it's their health, whether it's their, you know, their rights. And when you have a responsibility and we have a responsibility for, you know, for someone else or some other being, that responsibility is most significant when there's also expectations of reciprocity, when there's also expectations of, you know, consensuality, of of trust. And so when you think about what it means, like to really be responsible and when two parties, regardless of whether they're human or non-human, have responsibilities to each other, those responsibilities are best and they're best for society overall, when there's high levels of reciprocity, high levels of, you know, consensuality, high levels of trust and a lot of other qualities as well. But these particular qualities are really important for the overall well-being of a society. For example, take...
These qualities might be important for the overall well-being of society. But again, this isn't easy, as Angel points out.
I'm like, how do we extend that sense of kinship and responsibility to one another outside of our families, to everybody in our communities? Right. And so it's hard it's hard work to do because we're there's generational divides and there's fear between generations and there's class divides and there's fear along class lines, too, even within the city. So it's that kind of shifting When people say narrative shifting, you know, like, what do you actually mean by that? It's not just storytelling. There's a lot of stuff implicated in that. And so, yeah, my focus is definitely on how can we. Regroup in a different way with each other so that restorative justice practices feel normal for us, feel natural. Right now, we've just been conditioned by the system that calling 911 and the police— we outsource our problem solving because that's what they tell us, they're better able to handle it and that's what justice should look like. And so that's another piece, too, is saying, "Well, actually we have what we need and those who need support, we can help support them so that they also have what they need." Like Sirrita was referring to, so that we don't feel like, "Oh, we can't handle this, we need somebody else to handle this."
It requires practicing a degree of vulnerability and trust in ourselves and in each other that we're all unaccustomed to.
Making Room for Abolition is a double entendre. It's about home, how we can see and construct abolitionist possibility through the artifacts we value, collect and use in our homes. And it's about exploring what we need to make room for in our movements. And as a starting point...
I, I make room for the realization that everyone is not going to make it. That one was difficult because I feel for a long time, like everyone had to make like all of us and not— or none. But everyone is not going to make it.
That's Monique Thompson, the program director at Feedom Freedom Growers, and Myrtle Thompson-Curtis's daughter. Angel and Sirrita agree and reflect here on the tension between this pressure to build critical mass and movements and bring everyone along and what feels like an uncomfortable realization that there will inevitably be folks who just don't want to face the discomfort, the uncertainty, or to take on the labor required to move forward a more liberatory abolitionist future.
I think I wrote some notes about what she was saying about buy in, and I've recently been having a really complicated relationship with that, you know, because yes, we do. We need a critical mass. And I look back on other movements and I think about apartheid. I think about the Civil Rights Movement. We didn't have everybody come with us. And, you know, and some—.
Had to pull people kicking and screaming.
Right, ask them to come with us: "I don't want to go!"
This right. And I've recently— maybe I'm just tired. I mean, that could also be. But I'm just like, you know what? All right. Because at some point, I have to conserve my energy for the for my work and the people who are on board to do my work. And I'm over here arguing with you about why you think it's a better idea to have more police. And I'm like, I'm not doing that. Like, that's fine. We actually don't need everybody to come with us.
Okay, because Harriet didn't take everybody, now let's be clear.
She did not.
Look, she had stuff to do. You all want to go? Okay. God bless you. Moving on.
I got— But if you think about apartheid, half that country was against it and they was like, "Oh well, boo. Like, we still doing it!" Same with Civil Rights Movement.
Same with Civi— Yeah, I think about this a lot because, you know, in studying the Civil Rights Movement, you find that— it's taught to us as a watershed moment, right? But then when you understand why the bill actually passed, you're like, it was just so some Southern senators...
That's right.
Could get reelected.
That's right.
And it literally like they needed the National Guard to like enforce this new social transformation so, I that I think about that a lot...
As Angel and Sirrita remind us, these other liberatory movements didn't have everybody on board. People got left behind and we might just need to make room for that in this movement, too.
These reflections raise a ton of questions. How should we spend our energy with respect to movement work? With respect to abolition, specifically? Should we be trying to convince holdouts and naysayers or simply build with those who are already somewhat on board?
As I say this, I'm also reminded of Cedric Johnson's arguments in his book, The Panthers Can't Save Us Now—a critique of contemporary anti-racist campaigns against police brutality and mass incarceration. Cedric is a friend and professor in African-American studies and political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His central critique of the Movement for Black Lives is that its insistence on focusing too narrowly on policing and incarceration as products of anti-Black racism amounts to, quote, "Black exceptionalism. A sense that black folks are noble, long-suffering victims of ontological racism rather than being subject to various political and economic processes." This, he says, leads to demands that don't address the fundamental neoliberal processes that have produced and benefit from mass incarceration and policing. Those fundamental processes, he argues, have more to do with class than race. In his view, the carceral state wasn't born of racism alone. Even though racism informs disproportionate disparities in profiling, brutality and sentencing against Black folks. In his view, policing and hyper-incarceration are tools for deploying neoliberalism's surplus population irrespective of their race.
Now, I've talked at length about the role of race in this series. We've discussed how race is used to render Detroit terra nullius. We've examined racialized disparities in public education funding in the state of Michigan. We heard about Brittney Cooper's notion that white people own time. That said, I've also talked at length about the role of neoliberal urban policy and the way it affects poor folks in Detroit, in this series: organized abandonment, water shutoffs, the land bank, the flooding and so on. As much as my initial reaction to the notion that "it's a class, not race" issue is rejection—reframing it is a class and race issue feels like a no-brainer. Of course, there are vastly more poor white people locked up and killed by police every year, so why wouldn't there be poor white folks who similarly stand to benefit from abolition? In dialogue with this question of who will come along to liberation. This is important because too often we accept a fiction that the Black identity alone is in and of itself a political position. But it's not. And assuming, though, is dangerous because as the saying goes, "not all skin folk are kinfolk or in other words, race just doesn't predict someone's political commitments.
In reality, the Black middle- and upper-class political interest is most often aligned with neoliberal urban policy and carceral politics and the Black poor are the ones disproportionately harmed by the carceral state. Recall, for example, our critique of buying back the block as a solution for dispossession in Detroit. Or take the example of the neighborhood park's demolition that I shared across a few episodes here. I found out after the fact that an older Black woman on the next block over had been one of the primary complainants who called the city to have the park demolished. Or consider the fact that every single city employee, from bulldozer operator to police officer who was on site for that demolition was a Black person. This is particularly salient, but probably unpopular to raise in Detroit, a majority Black city where the face and voice of funding endless policing and mass incarceration is often Black folks in positions of both city and community leadership.
Long story short, if it's as hard as it is for folks who are already so inclined to question our carceral conditioning, imagine the impediment it creates for those who are thoroughly bought into the wider neoliberal conditioning about wealth and worthiness and punishment. And even if we acknowledge as fiction the idea that everyone must come along on the way to abolition, we also must accept as fact the notion that as a starting point, that category of everyone needs to include a wide base of working class people, of working poor, far beyond just Black folks. There simply aren't enough of us to tip the scale politically on our own. And carcerality is not a Black issue alone. Racism explains a lot in this country, but not the entirety of the carceral state.
At the same time that inertia and indoctrination keep our imaginations motionless, resistant to change. Sometimes heartbreak can block our capacity to imagine otherwise. Here's Nate Mullen, an educator, artist and founder of People in Education, on how the heartbreak catalyzed by carceral fictions made manifest—things like disinvestment, policing, the mismanagement of the pandemic—can wear you down and close off possibility, if you begin to internalize it.
I know for me personally, it's hard. I find it's hard to be with all the heartbreak. Right? Like, I think that like like Monica's talked about like we know too much and and you and and— Myrtle you talked about like activism as an act of caring. When you do care and you do know, the pain is— and the suffering that you witness is it's hard. It's crippling for me sometimes, and it's a lot to be with. And I think that, like in some ways that what we're looking at when we look at America nationally, like I think we're seeing like white folks not know how to deal with being with that suffering. And so they're freaking out and they're like taking that terrible, heartbreaking feeling that America promised all of us that if we just did enough work and made enough money, we would never have to feel. And as saying— and as and it's it's like the last– this moment, this pandemic, this this moral uprising, this reckoning has forced it on all of us. And I think that there are...
While that might sound like a downer, it's a kind of heartbreak—he points out—that's double sided.
I think white-bodied people in particular haven't had— you don't have to live with that stuff, right? Like, you don't have to like I mean, in education, I'll say this all the time, right? Like if you went to a well-funded school, you can live in the fantasy that, like, education is working, right? One of the gifts this gift is is— comes with so much responsibility... One of the gifts of this place of of what we call Detroit is that you can't really pretend that it's working. Right. Like I can take you to like my little school that sits vacant like like a Greek ruin. It's physically not working, right? Like, it's so clear. And that's a gift. But that is also a great weight to hold. Right? And I think it is powerful...
In other episodes we've talked about what disinvestment means and how it surrounds us.
...If you're in Detroit and you're open and to be with what's really present, I think it's present always in all spaces. But there's something I think unique about Detroit, where we get to look at it. We get to be with the heartbreak. In some ways. It's really real ways that in— in New York where like buildings get to be refurbished, you, you know, you don't have to think about it. And even just outside of Detroit, right? Like where all schools are funded and maybe not closing or they're turned into lofts. Like you don't have to sit with the realities that in Detroit we get to. And sometimes that is also overwhelming and it makes dreaming different.
There's a strange thin line between our capacity to see Detroit as something altogether different, to see the abolitionist possibility around us and the types of imagining that happens in and about a place like Detroit when folks have no attachment to it. For many outsiders, especially this present state that Nate talks about, is interpreted in the way settlers interpreted terra nullius, right? They see the city as a blank slate, awaiting claim and conquest, ready to be transformed into something orderly and consumable. We talked about this at length in part one of our episode on Nature. But if you're really present with what Detroit has to offer—massive architectural, geographic reminders of corporate collapse and organized abandonment—you couldn't possibly arrive at the conclusion that this place is empty, blank or ripe frontierland ready for the taking.
It's not, I mean, it's not a place for care for young people, it's not a place for care, like there...
For Mama Myrtle, what inspires Nate's heartbreak also inspires rage.
I remember being able to walk to school!
Yeah.
My primary school, my elementary school, my junior high school, and then my high school. You know, out of all those buildings, I can walk through that neighborhood and it's like, my goodness, it looks so devastated. And the only thing to come as far as some investment in that area is a factory that's producing fumes that are causing asthma and hurting people, harming people. And so, I don't know. I'm in a state of— we could— things could be done a lot differently.
Well I guess, yeah. What do you do with that anger? Like, does that anger help you imagine? Because, like, I mean, you are imagining in manifesting everyday like this work at the garden, right? But so I guess I'm curious, like: Does that anger or —righteous, righteous anger—does that anger like help you imagine these like possibilities or does it hamper it? Like how does it shape the ways you imagine?
It creates possibilities. I'm always thinking of how do we have these conversations that stir some action for movement, movement and memory? Yeah, how do we get those things going? Those what those things do? It makes me hold closer to those folks who are doing that work. How do we get this work done? How do we save ourselves? How do we create the alternative? So I guess it does push me in that way. But it also it's got me really— these young people! My young people, my youngins with more, more energy, you know, so grateful for those who are active and paying attention, you know, to helping me as we help each other create movement. So, yeah.
Yeah, I think. I think there's some, there's there's a lot to like, I think, to, to untangle. And I think one of the things that this is, it's just so true to me, like, I, like I, I grew up in Detroit, so I've actually just turned 35 this weekend.
Happy birthday!
I am the bringer of Scorpio season.
Oh Lord.
Yeah. You got two Libras in the room.
I mean, I am a...
No cheers for that one.
I am a Libra but I am the bringer of Scorpio season.
Oh, what?!
I was born earlier in the day.
A traitor.
Someone's got to bring it. But I think there's a real duality to it, right? It's a real. It's a real gift and responsibility. I do think that there is, you know, to be, to be frank, just like our environment as we know it. I think my, Mama Myrtle, you were talking about it with your body rebelling to food. I think Mama Monica was talking about when we talk about like the quality of water in this city: our environment is also toxic to our young people's imagination and to our people's imagination. Because if you grow up in a city— and I mean think about it: so my daughter's five years old and if we think about like, let's say if we lived, we don't, but let's say we lived around the corner from my middle school then for all of her life—and actually my middle school has been closed for at this point, if it's 2021, probably closed for close to let's say 15 years, right?—so every person in the city of Detroit under the age of 15, that is the world that they have always known, right? And there's also something very real about the city that and this is, this goes into and this is why like abolition is all over everything, right? Like our young people also are not free and safe to move freely throughout this city. So most of them only see what's immediately around them. So if you live in a world where everything around you is just invested in where like people don't provide you with fresh, healthy options for food, water, air, then there is a moment where there's a little bit of a moment where in which like you start to internalize that, that you think that that is what you deserve and that is what the world is. And so it is it is a and that's where the activism part is— If you if you are a young person in the city and you get lucky enough to have someone in your life that helps you understand that that is the world around you is not your fault. It is not because there's something inherently wrong with you, which what else are you supposed to believe when that is your entire life? When literally the water inside your school is not safe to drink? Like, like what are you supposed to believe? But if you have—and this is again, that's where relationship comes in—if you have relationships that help you understand that that is not because there's something wrong with you, then you have the opportunity to dream. You have the opportunity to to to think differently. But our dreaming, I think—and I will speak for myself—my dreaming is sometimes stunted by my anger and my ability to to deal with the amount of heartbreak I hold. And that's why I actually like what is helpful for me in that...
This tension between rage as fuel or impediment has stuck with me. Nick Buckingham, the co-founder of Michigan Liberation, talked about anger as a source of passion.
The anger, right? One: where I get my passion from. Where I get the like the anger from is that I'm impacted right? Like, I'm directly impacted. And it's not just prison. It took for me to get a degree in social work to realize all of these social factors that as a young Black boy, I was forced into—all of these different scenarios of the world. You know how we how I'm going to say we how I grew into, you know, homophobic, disrespect for women. There was a time where like, yeah, I carried a gun. Black people, Black guys? Like, come on, now I'm not about to rock with you— you look at me wrong, right? Like I'm looking for a reason to put one in you and to peel it all back. It's like these are the social factors that have brainwashed us, that have put the veil over our eyes. It has forced us into this way of thinking.
It's one thing to pull back your own veil, but the real challenge is how do we get others to come along?
RJ has been co-opted by institutions and gatekeeping now is into play. You need a certificate, you gotta go to school, you gotta do all that shit or whatever and, you don't! But it also took a very myopic approach to to its scope and that this is just this procedure that we do when harm occurs, right? Instead of pulling back and saying, actually those circle processes are a symptom of a larger transformation that we make from being afraid of each other to trusting each other. And that's hard, it's hard because like, all these systems are set up for us to mistrust each other, right? On purpose. And so I understand restorative justice. And the way we're trying to advance it in Detroit specifically is that it's not, "Here's a new set of tools to use when someone gets into a fight," but all the requisite work you have to do before that, if you aren't in community with one another, what is circle going to be? I mean, how effective is that going to be if this is not a norm for us that we're in community, that I'm invested in, your integration back into the community, that I see that as valuable? You can't just import these procedures without having like this community sort of foundation.
There's another fiction at work that tells us the skills we need to navigate conflict differently and cultivate safety are too specialized or too complicated for us to practice ourselves. We have to leave them to professionals. In reality, however, police do not have a specialized set of skills or a track record for navigating conflict, de-escalating conflict or addressing harm. Siloing off the production of safety to a few isolated people is problematic to folks who envision an abolitionist reality.
I think it's going to take like again, a new system that is getting buy in from everyone involved. I tell— I always tell educators like when they're talking about their school, like does your school have equity officer? And they're like, "Yeah, we have like a diversity officer." Okay, that's a problem! Because either everyone's a diversity officer or no one is— like the fact that you have one is like problematic to me. So the fact that there's one restorative justice person like Angel said, and they're the one with the certificate, like anyone can can hold a circle like this isn't— this isn't something that someone has to be certified to do. Like I don't need letters behind my name to hold a restorative justice circle. Like, that's ridiculous. So, so yeah, but it has to have buy-in from everyone and we need to know the why behind it. But you have to...
That's Sirrita Darby again, Executive Director of Detroit Heals Detroit. In other words, we can't silo safety. Navigating and healing from conflict are skills we all have to learn and practice. They belong to all of us. And so too does carceral conditioning, our predisposition to punish rather than repair. This is why Sirrita developed Detroit Heals Detroit with her high school students in 2018: to create space where they can practice learning, unlearning and guiding one another toward healing from trauma. In large part, the challenge Sirrita offered her students and that abolitionists to bring to us all is about taking responsibility for one another's collective well-being, for cultivating safety, for navigating conflict, and simultaneously, for our roles in perpetuating cycles of violence and harm.
Thinking about certain types of violence and how we're all complicit as a community. That's a thing I really I really want to move into in that it's not just about you did something bad to this person. My my interpretation of restorative justice is that it leaves the space open for us to fully realize everyone who's implicated here. And because otherwise we're just replicating a system that again, is saying, this is your problem, you did this, you're responsible and not understanding who else was there and knew the violence was happening and didn't say anything or who did like a survivor or a victim speak to and wasn't believed. You are all implicated in this! But also thinking about, specifically, I was working with a lot of Black women who are trans, who were doing— these were women doing survival sex work and— many of them experienced violence at the hands of cisgender Black men. And we were all hush hush about it because it doesn't affect us if we're not in that group. But also we just—like we do with anyone who commits harm— "They're crazy. They're some deviant!" And we don't necessarily see the person who is doing harm to a Black trans woman has internalized some very problematic things about their gender expression, their sexual attraction. And that comes from us. That comes from us as a culture.
So are you having— your your young man has an interest in something and you're shaming him. People need to see the connection between that, the community and the cultural and the parenting influences and how this violence manifests against other women in our community. We're implicated in that violence. If people come to us and they want to live their truth and we shame them and we enact violence on them, we need to see how that violence recycles in our own communities and maybe not so easy for people to track, but that that is a direct implication— that violence against women in our own community is— we are responsible for that. And so that's sort of my broader approach is to help us see how like none of, it's not just there's this one off person who can lost their mind and is harming the community. We all have a part in it. And and that's going to be hard because people don't want to do that. I mean, straight up, they're just like like Sirrita was saying, "This ain't none of my business. Like, I didn't do this, so I don't want to be a part of this." So it's the hard work. I don't have an easy answer about how to transform our sense of like, community and trust. It's going to take a whole bunch of work from literally everybody and every space. You know.
Angel's point here is foundational: Drawing from our episodes on safety and interdependence, one of the primary carceral and capitalist fictions we have to dismantle is the belief that we don't need anyone else to thrive, that we can segregate ourselves and our needs off into separate silos and get to an abolitionist reality. Many abolitionist practices, including restorative and transformative justice, demand a kind of relationality and responsibility for one another that runs completely counter to our conditioning. A kind of relationality that requires us to step out of our echo chambers.
That sense of growing awareness and knowledge of our present conditions that Nate, Nick and Myrtle have all referenced, and the degree to which we understand them as shaped by oppressive forces can sometimes morph into another impediment for abolitionist imagining if we let it: we end up working and talking in self-affirming echo chambers.
We end up getting really dogmatic about our ideology. And it is an ideology and we create an echo chamber where, you know, because I'm getting— I'm putting out this questionnaire where I'm asking trying to ask Detroiters about what might accountability look like without police and prisons for you? What does it mean to be safe and think across all lines, psychologically, spiritually? Those sort of things, right? And in trying to figure out how to get people to this questionnaire, I had to I mean, I just finished up probably 50 organization outreach from FOCUS Hope to, you know, Team Wellness because we put it out through our stuff and we gonna get the people that already buy in. That's our problem is we're not actually engaging with people who disagree with us. So we we're working in these echo chambers that are self-affirming. And what that does is that really limits our creativity, our imagination, which I think is a part of your question.
So what do we need to make room for, in Angel's words?
We need to make room for a diversity of ideas and approaches. This also means that when we come in to engagement with folks who don't agree, we can't effectively strategize then, right? Because we can't anticipate what people are going to say, what their resistance is, what their real actual concerns are that are valid. If we're effectively keeping that out of the echo chamber, how can we actually attend to that? Because we don't we're not making room for that to come in to the space. So we're strategizing— our strategy is just being informed by the echo chamber, not actually informed by what people are saying. "I don't know about all that. Defund the police? Okay. I mean, it's been, you know, four break ins, my my son was shot. They still ain't caught the person who did it, bla bla bla." We, we don't even listen to try to see here: What's the concern? What's the fear? And how can our movement say validate that and say and also point out. But the current systems ain't doing it either, sis— so what else, right?
I think we need and I've tried to make room for that in the organizing space that I've set up, but also in my encounters with folks in the community where I'm meeting with block clubs and people are saying they want more police, they want more money for police. You have to put that aside. We get allergic to that in social justice movements, right? We like freak out and just think these people just ain't there yet. Let me help bring them there. You know, like get self-righteous and we have to say no, people have real concerns about safety and that's real. And we can accept that and bring that into the space and also say, "So how are the police— how they doing for you? If your concern is this or this, how are they showing up?" And when we talk about abolition and we say "defund the police," I say especially in certain neighborhoods I live across from the twelfth precint, they don't even come! So I tell people: abolitionist future is not that far. If if they defunded the police, you wouldn't even feel it because they don't even come here no way! And provide any services, no way. So— but we can't do that and we can't say that if we don't listen. So we do, we need to not be— we gatekeep around our ideas and we're self-righteous about our ideas and we think we've got the formula and we've got it figured out and that people who aren't bought in are on board, just are sort of less evolved in a way, or have some archaic ideas rather than say, what is the concern that's at the root? How can we make sure that our movements are inclusive of those concerns? You miss that completely. If you don't let it into the space. I would definitely, totally in agreement with the idea that the disagreement is healthy and it also helps propel our movements forward. We're going to stagnate if we're just only working with this set of ideas, you know.
Folks who are skeptical of abolition have valid concerns. And while it's worth questioning the extent to which the current system presently addresses those concerns, it doesn't mean we should dismiss them in the conversation about the abolitionist world we're constructing.
Over the last couple of years, I worked with Angel and the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network on a study about how Metro Detroit residents experience safety, accountability and harm. This study was composed of roughly 70 survey responses and qualitative analysis of five, two-hour interviews. Ask me about interpretative phenomenological analysis sometime if you want to hear more.
In our findings, I was most struck by the incongruous ness of some respondents trust in policing when compared to their actual experiences of police or the wider carceral system. But this ambivalence, I think, and my own reflections while attempting to reconcile people's trust with their skepticism or fear, parallels this double standard about people's expectations for an immediate abolitionist solution to replace policing and incarceration. Here's an excerpt from our report to be released in the spring of 2025 entitled Unraveling Harm Cultivating Safety: Learnings on Healing, Justice and Accountability from Metro Detroiters.
In this excerpt, you'll hear about four of the five interviewees. Sharon is a longtime elder Detroiter in her 80s, a mother, grandmother and widow who now lives alone in her family home. Throughout her life, she worked various jobs in factories and hospitals. She feels somewhat isolated since her husband's death and since some of her adult children live in other states. She's deeply faithful, and has close ties with her church. Denise is a Black entrepreneur, artist, block club member and single mother of adult children. She's in her 60s and has lived in Detroit her entire life. Denise's role as a mother who prioritizes protecting and caring for her family, especially her kids, colored her reflections and informed many of the decisions she made surrounding her experiences of harm. Bianca is a 30-year old trans woman and former sex worker. She now works for a grassroots organization that provides social services. In her time there, she has grown to take on more responsibility and expand programs in a way that she's really proud of. She has strong familial support and a deep bench of support from her chosen family as well: her trans sisters. Jonathan is a Black creative worker and administrator in his 50s who came to Detroit as a child after losing his mother. He spent over 30 years incarcerated in Michigan.
Sharon and Denise both hold a deep, enduring trust in police that is seemingly undisturbed by the knowledge of police brutality, prejudice or the reality that police have never resolved any of the harm they've experienced. Sharon, for example, explained that she would always call the police if she experienced or witnessed harm.
No. No matter! If it's something wrong, I'm going call the police. No matter what it is. Well, if it's a family member, would it? It, it is— something wrong that they need, I need to call somebody! I would call the police. I trust them. All I can say is I trust them.
Here, Sharon doubles down on her unequivocal trust in police.
No matter what it is.
She will call the police. And this is, quote, "All she can say," seems to operate as a placeholder for a more substantial rationale. She can't explain it, but she knows it to be true that she trusts them without reservation. Most interview participants, including Bianca, Denise and Sharon, believe police are absolutely necessary in spite of their acknowledgment of the ways in which they fail to meet their material needs in the wake of harm. Sharon, for example, called police in a few situations that she shared with us: once after her home was burglarized, another time when her car was stolen and the last time when her home alarm system was triggered. In all three cases, they arrived and their presence helped her feel safer. But they did not resolve the harm she had experienced, locate the people who had harmed her or return her stolen property. In the case of the home burglary, she called them after she had called her own daughter first for accompaniment and comfort. When asked to articulate why or what the police did to make her feel safer, she didn't identify an action, but reiterated that simply seeing them was reassuring.
Their presence. They have weapons and it's their presence that that's why.
What Sharon describes here is textbook security theater: measures designed to make people feel safer without functionally enhancing safety. In the end, however, Sharon reveals that her trust in police is predicated on the sheer expectation that they are supposed to fulfill a particular role. Whether they do fulfill that role or not is immaterial. The expectation alone is enough to lead her to rely on them always.
It's just that. The society we live in and that— that is the role that they supposed to be fulfilling, that they are— the position that they have.
Similarly, when asked whether he would call the police if he witnessed violence, Jonathan noted that he would, if only because responding to harm is their duty.
Well, we identified that as a job. Do your job. I'm out here doing mine, do yours! That's what I'm paying all these high taxes for.
Here, Jonathan's willingness to call on police in situations of harm comes across as more of a resignation to the presumed function of a public service to which we're bound because we pay for it than Sharon's vehement declaration of trust in police. In essence, Sharon's trust in police is derived from the belief that we are supposed to be able to rely on them. They are supposed to fulfill a role in which they protect and serve, and we are.
Supposed to call them for protection.
She trusts them because she is supposed to. Not because they're trustworthy or because they've helped her address harm in the past.
Even though there have been some times that I can see what happens, that I think they were wrong at times. But but I have to trust them! I don't have nothing else— but God, and I know He is above all them. But I still trust the police. I have to trust them!
When Sharon says:
I have to trust them.
She suggests that her trust emerges not from a demonstration of trustworthiness, but from a lack of options. In essence, she is forced to rely on police simply because she's not aware of any other strategies for addressing harm. Having mentioned the significance of her faith many times throughout the interview, she also implies here that she essentially places police second only to God, as authority, quote "above all of them," end quote, a belief that corresponds with the unwavering faith she places in them in spite of their inability to address most of her needs and her experiences of harm. Later, after sharing a revelation that her son had been the survivor of racist police profiling since his teen years and throughout his adult life, she reiterated the sense and the phrase:
I have to trust them.
That trusting the police is essentially a forced non choice.
Don't have nothing else to trust. I don't have nowhere else to go. I have to trust them and... What else am I going— I have to trust them because when things happen, who else to call? You ain't got nobody else to call.
At this point in the conversation, Sharon was almost exasperated by the thought exercise around alternatives to policing and wondering, quote, "What if?" Or "Who else?" as if it's so far beyond the realm of possibility that it's an absurd line of questioning to follow. The fact of her and our reality is that there is no other centralized, reliable responder to call on or go to in case of emergency, when in need of support, when your safety is threatened. Right now, police are a catchall for every possible kind of harm we encounter, even though they cannot remedy most of the harm we experience. Sharon, Denise and Bianca all acknowledged an awareness of patterns of police misbehavior, prejudice or brutality. When Denise says that calling the police:
Makes sense on paper.
She reinforces the idea that relying on police is something she does because she expects to be able to rely on police based on how they've been purported to operate in theory, not in practice. She then goes on to explain the many ways in which police might fail to address people's needs. Her insistence that we need some kind of entity to...
Help make things right.
...is a clear plea to meet a need that we expect police to meet, but is not substantiated by her own experiences with police and the instances of harm she shared during the interview. In the cases she shared with us, police have never actually.
Helped to make things right.
In fact, in one situation they were the harm doers themselves. When Denise says:.
We need some type of law enforcement entity.
She expresses a sense of inevitability that policing is the only way forward, reiterated by both Bianca and Sharon. Both Bianca and Sharon hold a belief that a world without police would be one full of chaos and disorder, informed again by a set of expectations that police exist to create and enforce order and safety. Every interviewee acknowledged several problems or misgivings about the current state of policing. Some commented on the wider legal system and prisons, too. But they all arrived at different conclusions about why those problems exist or whether those problems necessitate a different system altogether. Some had survived police harm themselves. Denise, for example, had her home raided by police with a warrant for the wrong address. Others had witnessed people being harmed by police themselves. Others simply see the ways the system has failed people around them repeatedly. Some spelled out the ways in which police failed to meet their needs, but still didn't conclude that alternatives were needed. Sharon, Bianca and Denise, all conveyed a belief that bad behavior like racist profiling, police brutality or excessive force is an aberration—a few bad apples—rather than a fundamental issue with the premise and nature of policing as a system, they all seem to attribute it to the bad behavior of a few bad officers, because in Sharon's words:
In my heart, they gon' do what's right.
Pointing once again to a deep belief in the true purpose of policing being to protect and serve, and an enduring faith in their capacity to do so.
There are a few takeaways here that I'll try to disentangle. To Angel's point from earlier, we can't dismiss the folks who hold on to carcerality. We have to get out of our echo chambers long enough to hear and understand people's needs and fears and respond earnestly to those. In typical abolitionist style, we have to hold a lot in tension here. It's not simple. We can't hang the possibility of abolition on the notion that we might bring everybody along. Speaking to Sirrita, Angel and Monique's points about the ways major transformations have happened in the past. But the idea that people's expectations—their imaginations—based on every social and cultural cue we're taught, are what direct them to rely on police, in spite of how rarely police fulfill their needs, reinforces the notion that we desperately need something different. But the abolitionist response, I think, is that we simply can't and shouldn't expect a singular, massive, one size fits all solution to enter the gap. That is precisely what's wrong with the prison industrial complex. What we need, instead of imagining that police meet our needs, is to flex our imaginations around the kinds of multidimensional responses to harm and abolitionist practice that groups like the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network, Michigan Liberation, Feedom Freedom, the Detroit Safety Team, Detroit Heals Detroit, 313 Liberation Zones and others are building today.
To that end, part of what we need to make room for is practicing our abolitionist prefigurations.
And I also think what Sirrita was saying about just making it a practice, we see that a lot. I don't think we really appreciate the implications of that word. We use it in medicine and law and in therapy. We say I'm going to have a practice and because we are practicing and we don't have it figured out. And that's the important thing to keep in mind in abolition, because capitalist systems tell us we've got to get it right the first time. And if we fail, then conceptually it's a failure and you need to start over. And again, that's— there's a double standard because we know that police and prisons and all that shit fails all the time, right?
In our episode on Time, we pointed out the many overlapping realities at play at any given point in time. Every time folks implement abolitionist practices, they're prefiguring the abolitionist relations and worlds we're told are impossible. They're manifesting abolitionist realities in a context we're told can't contain them. In spite of that denial. In the summer of 2020, P.G. Watkins helped organize 313 Liberation Zones, temporary autonomous zones that took over public space in Detroit. You heard us introduce these in our episode on time. But here, P.G. expands on their original description by exploring their intentions further.
In the concept of it is this idea that in order to actualize the world that we want, we have to be in practice around it. When we are practicing it, we need to create the kind of boundaries of like, okay, here is where— we're going to be doing this: in this space, this is how we treat each other in this space. This is what we're practicing and doing. And it is usually trying to figure out how to develop these types of resilience-based actions that are outside of the systems that already exist. And this idea that we have to change our dependence and reliance on those systems, create our own systems. So, I mean...
In a direct way, these zones offered spaces to practice and perform and see and experience liberated space.
...was can we demonstrate to people through these occupations, through these direct actions a little bit, just a little bit of what it could be like to be in community without police. To handle conflict without police, to provide food, without having to rely on the state to provide other care products. You know, we were doing those actions in the midst of the pandemic. So it's like, what does it mean to provide care for each other in this time, in this way? So it was a, I think a abolitionist practice or like the liberatory practice around can we create these territories? And then I mean, the larger history of liberated zones, right? I mean, something I was studying recently was about a Amilcar Cabral and Guinea-Bissau's revolution and the importance of liberated territories in the armed struggle that they were in and around, like, okay, we know here that we are safeguarded. You know, like we know in this space we have defenses set up against these external forces that are going to try to mess us up, harm us, kill us, make us give up our land and our freedom. And so let's, like fortify ourselves in this contained space or many contained spaces over the country, really. But yeah, I think we're trying to, learn from that type of practice. And like, what does that mean?
You don't just arrive at a different reality. It has to be practiced‚ put into practice to move from social imaginary to social fact.
How do you sustain something like this? You know, so for us, the 313 of the occupations were never longer than a day. You know, we were out there for 17 hours, one day, three hours, one day, you know, 4 or 5 hours, one day. It wasn't like, we're here and we're occupying the space for days on end, for weeks on end, right— which was an ultimate dream, it's something that we had talked about, right? It was something we had considered and wanted to do. But the sustainability of it was just like, this feels completely out of reach. So I think the biggest lesson was the impact that you can have in these kind of temporary moments. And just the the conversations that we got into with people on Juneteenth last year, we're like, my gosh, you know, I'm just like, I'm so happy that we did this at this time in this place. And we got to talk to so many people about defunding the police and about abolition. And people really heard us because they saw us try to be in practice around it. And the need for like that to happen consistently. Like we know that in order for us to realize that it needs to happen consistently, but in order for it to happen consistently, we have to figure out how to not exhaust ourselves, exhaust our resources, you know, diminish the impact because we are tired and overworked and overwhelmed by the process of holding it.
Sirrita's class again demonstrates how new social norms are produced through practice.
It made me think of like every time someone would, like, get in trouble or like on the verge of suspension. We always have circles. And like in the beginning, my young people are like, "This ain't got nothing to do with me! Like, what he doing—" you know how young people are.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I mean Black people in general are like, "What he's got nothing to do with me," right? It was like, no, but— but it does. And here's why and explained that to them and so then it became like such a thing so that when somebody would like about to get in trouble, they're like, "Now, you know, we gon' have to have a circle. So, you need to— I'm trying to get to the lesson so you need to get it together!" And it's like, right, accountability.
That's right.
You see how she got you together now because we trying to get to like like they will always be like, okay, we know you've got to have a circle because there was a norm. Some people are like, "I don't want to have a circle today. Like, you really just need to act right," And I'm just like, look, that's how we're accountable...
I love that.
...Of each other, cause we are our brother and sister's keeper.
That's right.
Like, we do not need anyone else. Like we, like you said, being proactive and having circles before to harm.
Nick Buckingham and Michigan liberations work during the pandemic and uprisings in 2020 also demonstrated this kind of mutual responsibility and care.
When we got involved in the uprisings in Detroit, it gave us it gave us like a blank canvas to really take the ideas of, you know, when we asked people what it's like, you know, like to really, like, throw a lot of this onto the blank canvas and step into it. We were able to create, like, these small hubs that— these hubs that would like, I don't want to say like protect the movement, but there were hubs to where, you know, if there was conflict that happened within them. We had hubs of expertise that can address it, right? I don't think we ever had an instance where we got the police involved. We didn't we didn't have to rely on the EMS anymore because we had our own medic team. And then our medic team came out and trained hundreds of people on a like— just medical care, right.
During the daily marches that were taking place in Detroit in 2020, Michigan Liberation developed systems of care and conflict mediation that rested on their own capacity to intervene and get people out of the carceral system.
We have hubs that, you know, took care of folks that, you know, they needed Narcan. And it became like this— it almost like, the community. This thing that we threw on this blank canvas it, it just popped up. So now, like fast forward we're here in 2021 and those hubs, they still exist. And now it's like the to keep the container, the containment of the street marchers safe has now grown into like, how do we keep communities safe? Right. We've had some situations at Michigan Liberation of course, like always dealing with folks that spent lots of time in prison, you know, to— we had one situation where we honestly feel if it was not in the hands of Liberation— in Michigan Liberation, this person would end up back in prison, right. And we didn't we didn't want to get there. We didn't want to throw a person away, we don't want to get the police involved. So we got our community involved. And the way folks have come to support this individual around suicidal ideation and mental health, to support this person around, you know, the the proper way to kind of like reentry, reenter back into a society; to make sure that this person is getting the resources that's needed and then like a hub that's connecting with this person on like a human level, right? "Hey, what up? Are you good? What do you need? How do we show up?" So we're starting it, we're seeing, you know, how we can take these different things that we've been able to create during the uprisings and start to like really put some um— like just make it more solid in the community. Having funders...
It's important to name that this work often emerged from sites of protest or direct actions. While these conversations with Nick and P.G. Are referencing the Movement for Black Lives that emerged amid the 2020 uprisings. We're witnessing similar phenomena in the wake of the genocide in Palestine in 2024. We've heard students protesting in encampments talk about the ways in which their needs have never been more cared for than by the encampments. Encampments have not only been sites to demonstrate political solidarity with Palestinians, but students meals are taken care of, their belongings are protected, they're receiving free educational experiences and have access to free libraries and art materials, they're surrounded by people demonstrating care in various ways.
While protests can act as a prototype, in these ways, moving away from carcerality also demands that we find everyday ways to practice these other ways of being responsible to and for one another: in the classroom, at home, in our neighborhoods, in our friendships, at work, at the grocery store and beyond.
All right. So to sum things up, throughout this series, we've invited listeners to question what they've been taught is true. We've called people into relation with each other. And we've called folks to imagine differently. In this episode, we've pinpointed some of the hang ups that might impede our imaginations, the ways we've been indoctrinated, the fear of uncertainty, the strength of inertia, the weight of heartbreak and rage, the limitations of our echo chambers. We've highlighted a few carceral fictions about imagination as it relates to abolition, like the notion that the power to imagine should remain limited to those with power and wealth, or that our abolitionist imaginations must produce a totalizing solution to replace the all encompassing carceral apparatus. Or the idea that because there's no singular abolitionist solution, that means there's no way forward at all.
We've explored the spaces where we need to make more room naming that we need to let go of a desire to bring everyone along, that expanding our definition of everyone is necessary to get there, that we need to get out of our echo chambers, that we can and should abandon the carceral obsession with one size fits all solutions, and that we have to practice our prefigurations in the midst of this hostile, absurd, seemingly fictional environment.
Thanks for joining us for this limited six episode season of carceral fictions and abolitionist realities. This time, instead of offering a dispatch, we invite you to imagine.
It's a Monday morning, July 8th, 2047. As you roll over and rub the sleep out of your eyes, you groan thinking to yourself that you can't tolerate another 100 degree day. As you brush your teeth, you see a news headline that mentioned something about all those police statues being vandalized and torn down overnight, the ones that were erected in the wake of the last major wave of police layoffs. You had wondered how long they would last. How do you react to that news? Do you chuckle to yourself? Send it to a friend? Are you worried? Where did you even see it? Was it on a TV, a smartwatch, or some new device we haven't heard of yet? What sounds do you hear as the world wakes up around you? What is your neighborhood look like from your window? What lies ahead of you this week? What kind of work do you do? What's happening in your home life? And who is there with you? What are your family responsibilities? Who are your friends? And lastly, what else is going on in this world without police? How did we get here?
Someday, eventually, after I've recovered from this project, I'm looking to bring together a writer's room to keep imagining otherwise. If you are interested in collaboratively writing speculative abolitionist fictions dispatches from worlds without police and prisons, please hit me up. Visit making room [dot] online. Click on "View," select "Dispatches" and leave me a note.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for listening. And thank you to the many people who've made this show and the wider body of work possible over the last three years. If you've listened to the whole series, I am so grateful that you stuck with us for this long. Thank you to all the futurists featured in this episode who participated in this project three long years ago. That includes Angel McKissic, P.G. Watkins, Monique Thompson, Myrtle Thompson-Curtis, Nate Mullen, Sirrita Darby, Curtis Rene and Nick Buckingham. And thank you to Kyle Whyte, who participated in an interview last fall. Thank you especially to PG for helping me facilitate these conversations.
This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by me, Lauren Williams. Essays were co-edited by my dear friend Ayinde Jean-Baptiste, and the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Excerpts from several references were read by voice actor Joy Vandervoort-Cobb. In the excerpt from Unraveling Harm, Cultivating Safety, Denise and Sharon were both voiced by Lorinda Hawkins-Smith. Jonathan was voiced by Erron Allen. Thank you, also, to the actual interviewees whose names were changed to protect their identities and to the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network for allowing me to share this preview of the study. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.
This project is presented in partnership with Respair Production and Media.
What are memories of lands, waters or peoples, without time? What is the future? And, if we are unequipped to view time, like rivers, as currency to be manipulated, resource rather than relation, what have we already lost? In this episode, Lauren Williams shows us that these questions too, are political, introducing to the broader archive the concept of chronopolitics. She asks us to consider the question of Grace Lee and James Boggs: “What time is it on the clock of the world?” while her guests chime in with considerations of kinship, urgency, and magic. She also highlights the relationship between time and punishment in a world that may itself be more temporary than dominant narratives suggest.
But today I want to talk to you more about the political nature of time. White people own time.
Now, the one thing I'd add to Cooper's analysis here, which might sound a little counterintuitive, is that to some degree, increasingly, irrespective of race, those who own and control capital are the ones who really own time. But here, Brittney Cooper, an activist, author, cultural critic and professor of Women and Gender studies at Rutgers, adds a layer of racial analysis to time that's necessary in the context of our racialized lives and economy in the United States.
The reason I'm saying that the way that we position ourselves in relationship to time comes out of histories of European and Western thought. And a lot of the way that we talk about time really finds its roots in the Industrial Revolution. So prior to that, we would talk about time as merely passing the time. After the Industrial Revolution, suddenly we begin to talk about time as spending time. It becomes something that is tethered to a monetary value. So when we think about hourly wage, we now talk about time in terms of "wasting time" or "spending time," and that's a really different understanding of time than, you know, like seasonal time or time that is sort of merely passing. And so I wanted to think about what does it mean if people are considered folks who largely are not impacting the flow of things, right, which is often a racialized idea. So when we think about Black and brown peoples around the world...
Throughout this series, we've explored time and its relationship to carcerality, colonialism and capitalism. We discussed the fact that time, as experienced by waterways like rivers and wetlands, moves differently than it does for humans. That their lifetimes, and consequently memories, are way longer than ours. We've explored how our manipulations of land and water can speed up or slow down landscapes, effectively shifting time scales of nature as we go. We've discussed notions of linear time and kinship time: a more relational way of narrating the transformations that emerge between more than human kin amid climate change or, in the words of Kyle Whyte:
Kinship time is that sense of, you know, temporality or that feeling of how long it will take to do something solely based on what we understand to be the degree of kinship that we have with the people, the beings, the non-humans, the ecosystems that we have to coordinate with, to mobilize, to do something.
We've also explored real estate speculation: a means of financial risk taking for the sake of profit that counts on the value of land and homes exceeding their present value at some future point in time. We've examined the pace with which neighborhood change transpires, the ways in which gentrification erases people and their histories, supplanting them with a shiny quality of novelty and temporality and the sense that multiple Detroit's are happening atop one another.
We've talked about time quite a bit in this series, but there's still more to say.
Welcome to Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities, a series of audio essays about making room for abolition. Making Room for Abolition first appeared at Red Bull Arts in Detroit in October of 2021 as a month long installation of speculative artifacts set in a home in a future without police and prisons. This series reflects on conversations from that space with Detroit-based organizers and futurists committed to food justice, water access, educational equity, restorative justice and Black liberation more broadly. When Black folks in Detroit manufacture better lives for ourselves‚ whether that means healthier food, safer neighborhoods, new technologies for living through conflict‚ it's usually described as an act of survival or desperation, rather than being classified as an act of resistance or future-making or speculative design. But each and every one of these folks is practicing a future that especially poor black Detroiters have been told is impossible.
So in each episode, we'll look closely at the kinds of fictions that shape our current attachments to policing prisons and punishment to examine where they come from and how they affect us. At the same time, we'll hear us propose abolitionist realities that counter these fictions and open up other ways of being.
My name is Lauren Williams. I'm an artist and designer based in Detroit, Michigan, and I work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power.
In this episode, we'll talk about carceral chronopolitics or how time is used to punish and how race has been constructed to transform over time. I'll talk about how my own struggles with and against time both motivated and shaped the original Making for Abolition Installation in 2021. We'll explore how rushing toward abolition constrains our imaginations and how narrating the crisis of policing and incarceration through a lens of kinship time might offer a perspective that shifts how we think about the problem much in the way it shifts how we interpret and respond to climate change.
So we're going to talk about time and politics in three different configurations. First, the politics of time. Then the time of politics and last, politicized time. All right. So let's talk about the politics of time.
The politics of time refers to the regulation, synchronization and allocation of individuals' everyday time and lifetime.
Time is political, and it's so deeply interwoven with all aspects of power that it's easy to miss the many carceral fictions it informs, as you heard Brittney Cooper mentioned a moment ago:
White people own time.
More specifically, time is operationalized to shape and control everyday of our racialized lives. Since the carceral state is one that both relies on and reproduces race in its function, understanding how time and race interact is a necessary starting point. We can see the politics of time at work in the uneven distribution of power that dictates the pace of the work day, how much our time is worth, how long we wait for basic services. When we dissect the politics of time, we can see capitalist fictions at work and the conventional wisdom, for example, that "time is money."
I remember there's one of the RJ people that I work with‚ which is her full time work‚ she was like this, there's an American Indigenous man that she knew, and he told her that time was the white man's invention. And, you know, I believe that's right. And the way that we monetize time, I think‚ think of the saying "time is money," I mean, even fucking time has been capitalized. We get paid by the hour. Our work is quantified, you know. And so even down to those things that we don't realize need to transform, our sense of time and how we move and what pace we move, that is also something that effectively needs to be like decolonize, if you will.
You're listening to Angel McKissic, who leads the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network, and at the time of this recording worked at the Detroit Justice Center. When Angel says RJ, she's referring to Restorative Justice, which focuses on non-punitive approaches to repairing harm through cooperative processes that include those both directly and indirectly impacted. The origin of the phrase "time is money" is debated, but it's often wrongly attributed to Ben Franklin. He did say it, but he probably just wasn't the first. When he published Advice to a Young Tradesmen in 1748, he admonished readers to remember that "time is money," and perhaps most importantly, he went on to warn that any time spent idly not working is losing you money. In other words, there's an opportunity cost to resting. What's implied here, too, is that if you don't adhere to this advice‚ work endlessly, rest never‚ you'll suffer from it. But let's be real: who does this line of thinking really benefit? And what if time were actually money and everyone's time was valued equally?
Here's a dispatch from an abolitionist reality.
I could tell Seti he was annoyed by the way he ambled over to the side table, feet dragging, eyes tumbling to the backs of their sockets. A deep sigh? No, a growl escaping from his gritted teeth. The somewhat silent protest of a pre-teen. I remembered how quickly things could change, though. So I'd keep making him practice. "Come on, baby," I said. "We've got to get going or we'll miss the lady with the good clementines. How much do we need?" "I don't know why you keep making me practice this. It's embarrassing. Why can't we just use time like everybody else?" he whines. "Exactly," I told him. "We've got to make use of these bills before they're completely worthless." He's right, though. The dollar is on its way out of circulation. The death rattle has been echoing for years. Until then, though, we'll practice conversion so he can practice math and practice remembering a time before he was born. I'd gone into labor around the same time the new currency system went into circulation. Sometimes in my dreams, I still paid for things with the $1 million notes emblazoned with a man's puckered lips and orange-tinted face. No one has those bills anymore. And if they do, they're so rare that they're actually worth something now. It really hadn't been that long ago, but I couldn't quite remember what he did that earned him a place on those bills or monuments. His smug smile was frozen in three dimensions on many of the remaining shrines to capital. The ones that survived the flood were mostly the cheap ones. These hollow, sculpted out plastic monstrosities, the metal ones had stayed fixed to their cement pedestals, submerged like everything else. Everything that to me seemed so novel, seemed, to Seti as old as time, like it had always been that way. He turned his hair between his thumb and forefinger, perfecting a single coil as he appeared at the handbook and contemplated digits. "$14,300. 25 hours." "You sure?" I asked. He sucked his teeth again. "All right. All right. I trust you. Grab a ten in time while you're at it. Just in case. All right, let's go before we miss the jitney."
Time is only money in our current paradigm because your very existence has to be monetized in order to survive, and because it behooves employers for workers to believe that they are actively losing money the less they work and the more they rest. And at the same time, part of where this logic falls further apart for me in this capitalist paradigm is that everyone's time is not valued equally. In a piece about fast capitalism for the Telegraph India, Arun Kumar writes:
The gap between the poor and the rich is not just about haves and have nots. It is also about who will should wait or not wait. Time is money and status. How you spend your time shapes your class, caste and gendered self. The theft and management of time was and is at the heart of capitalist profit in the 19th and 20th centuries. Factory owners stole time from workers leisure hours by reducing lunch times, letting machines run partially during breaks, asking employees to work on weekends and mismanaging factory clocks. This stolen time amounted to significant profit for employers.
This still happens, by the way, in the form of wage theft, which might include employers paying below minimum wage, not paying overtime, coercing employees to work off the clock before or after shifts, prohibiting workers from taking legally-mandated breaks, confiscating tips and many more things. In a 2021 report, the Economic Policy Institute found that workers had been deprived of an estimated $15 billion per year through minimum wage violations alone. But that's only what's been reported. And in most cases, unlike crimes of poverty like homelessness or shoplifting, wage theft isn't even considered a crime. It incurs a civil penalty. If anything, this makes clear who the target of our carceral infrastructure is and isn't. And this doesn't even begin to touch on the fact that the vast majority of exorbitant wealth isn't even made through people's labor, but through speculative markets. To be clear, there is labor involved in producing this kind of wealth. It's just that the workers aren't the ones who get to reap the benefits. So much of what produces these wide gaps in how our time is valued is a product of neoliberal capitalism's orientation to time, as Jens Beckert writes in Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations in Capitalist Dynamics:
Capitalism is a system in which actors, be they firms, entrepreneurs, investors, employees or consumers, orient their activities toward a future they perceive as open and uncertain, containing unforeseeable opportunities as well as incalculable risks. But it is also anchored in the unique human ability to imagine future states of the world that are different from the present. As they seek to make profit, augment their income, or increase their social status, actors create imaginaries of economic futures. The achievement or avoidance of which motivates their decisions. The temporal disposition of economic actors toward the future and the capability to fill this future with counterfactual economic imaginaries is crucial to understanding both how capitalism diverges from the economic orders that preceded it and its overall dynamics. As is the case with fiction in literature, the defining feature of fictional expectations in the economy is that they create a world of their own into which actors can project themselves.
As Rasheedah Phillips has warned us, quote, "Time is also used to punish people, oppress people, and to create severe inequities," end quote. Phillips is a cultural producer, artist, housing advocate, author and creator of the Afro Futurist Affair and co-creator of the duo Black Quantum Futurism. As she explained in a presentation about the Black Quantum Futurism Time Zone Protocols Project, we see time used as a tool of punishment in the housing and court system.
So the majority of people who end up in eviction court across the country, but in Philadelphia in particular, where I come from, right, is the people who are in eviction court, 74% of them are Black women and their children. And every time you go and every time you get threatened with an eviction, you get an eviction record. And so that record follows you forever because there are no mechanisms to hide or mask that record from view. And anybody can can go in and look it up and find it, right. And so those eviction records, because they are used by landlords routinely, they lock Black women in particular out of the future. They lock Black women out of the future of housing stability. And so some of the solutions that we came up with in Philadelphia to address this issue was a law that would not allow landlords to look at the eviction records beyond a certain time period, right. And so cutting off, again, thinking about the sort of temporal nature and the way time is embedded in the way in which these eviction records are open forever and sort of designing solutions that are going to cut, mask those records or put some time limitations on them. So that way that we're opening up possibilities for the future that were previously foreclosed because of those records. So again...
In prisons and in the carceral systems that permeate Black neighborhoods and Black lives, time is an instrument of punishment levy disproportionately against Black and Indigenous people. Colloquially, we say someone who's been incarcerated has "served time" or "done time," for example. Time in carceral systems becomes a punitive tool.
And many people righteously believe, and I used to long time ago, righteously presume that somehow continuation of unfreedom must mean a continuation of slavery, which must mean a continuation of labor exploitation. It's different. There is exploitation. It's not labor. What turns into money that circulates as wages and interest and rent and utility bills and so forth is tying the people who are locked up are deprived of time, which is to say time is extracted from their lives. They never get it back. Nobody ever gets their time back. And it's the fact of time that becomes transformed into money that circulates in these various ways that time becomes money. And if you think back on everything that anybody has ever written to analyze the peculiar conditions that capitalism throws entire polities and political economies into, we're reminded that Marx talked about the annihilation of space by time, and that's what happens to people who are imprisoned one by one by one. We are space and our space, our lives are annihilated by the extraction of time.
That's Ruth Wilson Gilmore on Daniel Denvir's Jacobin podcast, "The Dig." To back up even further, we can see the politics of time at work in cutting Black lifetimes short, whether during slavery in the Transatlantic passage, whose traumas persist across generations; when Black mothers today are significantly more likely to die in childbirth; or when Black people today are disproportionately killed or brutalized by police. Beyond that, the very contours of race and racism in the United States are carved by and through time. Some features of the way race was designed pay explicit attention to temporality, particularly the racial categories of whiteness, Blackness and Indigineity. The white racial imaginary relies on Indigeneity diminishing over time while Blackness expands, in part because Black offspring were bound up as capital into perpetuity. These fallacies shaped the delusions that no Natives remained to claim their stolen land or that descendants of enslaved Africans have no rights as thinking, feeling, human American citizens. Only by constraining these racial imaginaries in time, does whiteness work. Consequently, the underlying infrastructure of race is delineated by its relation to time.
All right. So let's talk the time of politics.
The time of politics refers to the political systems, own time to the arena of the decision making process and to the changing rhythms and durations within which politics take place.
Most insidiously time is used to delude us about our rights to freedom and the pace at which we might achieve it through the political systems at our disposal. Admonished to wait for freedom, justice and the right to live, protests are often met with reproach. We're told, "Be patient, wait for the right time, or accept performative gestures rather than substantive shifts in the sociopolitical infrastructures that govern what it means to be free. The theft, genocide and enslavement that brought us here happened so long ago that it should be a distant memory, irrelevant to our present realities, because enough time has passed." And in that way, time is used to delegitimize viable demands for repair of historical harms.
And finally, we have politicized time:
Politicized time in turn, is time employed as a weapon of politics, as a means of legitimizing one's own political program and of challenging or discrediting political opponents or opposing political views.
We're reminded time and again that black people are behind the times.
We think about Black and brown peoples around the world. In Western frameworks, there is a way that Black and brown people are seen as a lag on social progress, so they are seen as holding back the power of the West to modernize the world. And that becomes the pretext often to do all manner of violence. Time has a history. And so do Black people. But we treat time as though it is timeless, as though it has always been this way, as though it doesn't have a political history bound up with the plunder of Indigenous lands, the genocide of Indigenous people and the stealing of Africans from their homeland. When white male European philosophers first thought to conceptualize time in history, one famously declared, Africa is no historical part of the world. He was essentially saying that Africans were people outside of history who had had no impact on time or the march of progress. This idea that Black people have had no impact on history is one of the foundational ideas of white supremacy. It's the reason...
In terms of contemporary metrics of social and economic well-being, educational outcomes, household income and wealth, Black people are often described as behind slow, backward or needing to catch up to a white benchmark. Too often, this is framed as a deficient quality of Blackness rather than a product of white control, systems of oppression, or the machinations of capitalism. This orientation denies the ways the construction of race itself and the infrastructures that rely on and uphold racialized categories have weaponised time to craft those outcomes. On the flip side, in today's political landscape, a multiracial future is the boogieman that drives white paranoia about the so-called threat of a minority majority. Here's white nationalist Jared Tyler, for example, saying the quiet part out loud for Eddie Huang, a Taiwanese-American author, chef and restaurant owner in 2017.
I voted for Donald Trump for one reason only. His policies, if implemented, would slow the dispossession of whites in the United States. If he were to deport all illegal immigrants, if he were to think very hard about letting in any Muslims, all of this would slow the rate at which whites are becoming a minority. I wish...
Why are you so worried about the white dispossession of America?
Because I want my people to survive. Is that so strange? We don't control China. We don't control any place where whites are not a majority. And if we become a minority, we will not control our own destiny anymore.
The temporal irony here is that Tyler's fears about the future are predicated on a fiction about the past, that his ancestors‚ white people alone‚ are the ones who, in his words, built this country. All that said, as Tao Leigh Goffe writes in her article, "The DJ is a Time Machine," although, quote, "Slavery attempted to make flesh into a machine, an object, Black and Indigenous people have continued to invent in spite of the conditions of the apocalypse," end quote. Speaking of apocalypse, in our second episode, you might recall that we talked about the quote often attributed to Jameson and Zizek, that "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." But to expand on Goffe's point here, Black and Indigenous folks have been through apocalypse countless times before. We don't have to imagine it because our ancestors and our genetic material remember it. So even if the end of capitalism were somehow beyond apocalyptic or at least beyond the scope of our apocalyptic imaginations, it doesn't necessarily have to mean the end of the world, the planet, or humanity. As written in "Rethinking the Apocalypse, an Indigenous Anti-futurist Manifesto:"
Many worlds have gone before this one. Our traditional histories are tightly woven with the fabric of the birthing and ending of worlds. Through these cataclysms, we have gained many lessons that have shaped who we are and how we are to be with one another. Our ways of being are informed through finding harmony, through and from the destruction of worlds.
Just as time acts on us, Black and Indigenous people on Turtle Island act on time living, breathing and forging futures in spite of and in light of the precarities imposed on us through and throughout time.
In the context of imagining and striving for a more liberated abolitionist world, a world without police and prisons, I'm often inherently talking about futures moments in time that are yet to come. Moments we still have the capacity to shape, if we understand, time to move along a linear spectrum from where we stood to where we stand, to where we could be. The English language to some degree reinforces this construct. Maybe we also contemplate these positions in time as alternate present moments, potential variations on the timeframes we're currently experiencing, or we dream of a return to a past, a nostalgia for something we've left behind. Maybe we're trying to prevent a particularly oppressive future from coming to be. Either way, it's worth pointing out that all of these orientations of time still interpret it as existing on a linear scale. We can look backward and forward exclusively. But, as I worked on Making Room for Abolition, the installation, three years ago, I found myself struggling with and to some degree rejecting that linearity in ways that emerged as I thought about how to represent time as a feature of space.
When I first started talking about making room for abolition, I said I wanted to imagine abolitionist futures. But by the time I started actually making those artifacts and building the space, it became clear that it was important to represent multiple overlapping time frames in which abolition was actively being practiced.
And actually, this is a Det‚ old Detroit Summer quote, right? Like "Another Detroit is happening." It's almost like I think that‚ I am like, yo, the depth of that is beyond me, right?
That's Nate Mullen again, an educator, artist and founder of People in Education. He's speaking about this kind of multiplicity that occurs when we practice beloved community in Detroit, meaning that folks are simultaneously practicing another reality alongside the prevailing one we all inhabit. The more time I spent with people similarly working toward abolitionist possibility in Detroit, the clearer it became that it was unhelpful‚ dangerous, even‚ to present abolition as a singular point in time, a single destination we have to reach, because in doing so, we set up the same dynamic we have with the prison industrial complex, a singular thing that must alone solve for every kind of problem we experience: an impossibility. The artifacts you've heard about in our dispatches‚ the water steward uniform, study materials, Chrysanthemum City graphic novel, the Third Edition Ojibwe Dictionary‚ were made for the original installation of Making Room for Abolition. As I workshopped the concepts of these artifacts with Detroiters. It became clear that it wasn't going to be helpful to place them at some point in the future that we couldn't recognize. I didn't want to represent the living room in Making Room as only a moment we were striving for, yearning for, or working toward without reflecting the countless ways people are already living abolition today.
Mariame Kaba, an organizer, educator and writer who advocates for the abolition of the prison industrial complex, has referred to abolition as a "horizon." At first thought, I wondered if this was similarly too destination-focused to frame how I want to represent our positioning relative to abolition. But if I understand a horizon as a place that will repeatedly come into view day after day, it works. Interviewing Kaba for the Nation, Elias Rodriques shared an experience at a temple where a monk told him that, quote, "Life is kind of like doing the dishes. You do all the dishes and it's clean, and then in three hours we're going to make a mess again and you have to do the dishes again," end quote. The horizon exists already. It's not that it's a different moment in time, but it is spatially distinct. Maybe it's a different time zone, it's a destination we can get to and maybe we've already visited. It's in view. It's attainable and it's already being practiced, even if we don't see it in our everyday.
In other words, as a horizon, abolition is visible from where we are, even if it's not everywhere we are and everything around us all the time. And even then we can go there from time to time. So this is how I attempted to depict the farthest futures in the installation. I resolve to situate the room itself in multiple timescales and to incorporate artifacts from three different moments in time, equating space and time in the form of overlapping transparent walls, constructed as a Venn diagram that organizes the room into three distinct spaces. One reflects the present moment, one reflects a far future without a date, and the interstitial space produced by their overlap is set in the year 2047. Here's past me describing the space in one of our earlier interviews...
That, so like the way that the space is structured, what you enter when you walk into the room is a Venn diagram, so there are two, two spaces overlapping with each other that produce three, right? The way that like a Venn diagram would. And you see that sort of in the, in the division of the walls that are around you because they're sort of like composing those shapes. And so I think a little bit to your point earlier, Angel, about like what, you know, why does the state still exist here? Like, I don't want to be in a place where practices that shouldn't be coercive or co-opted and made obligations by the state... Or why do we still even have Detroit Free Press? Like, why are you know, just any number of questions? And I didn't. I almost like threw all the stuff from the workshops away and like started a new version. But then I realized, I think I think what I was trying to reflect was like when you walk into the room, you're in a space that in my imagination is now. So all the objects in that first space are from last summer for the most part, or like somewhere between then and now; when you walk into the second room, you're in a near-future that's like Sirrita was saying, 2047; and then when you walk into the third space, you're in a farther future that I don't even know when to set it, so there's no dates. It's just very different like we're referencing Waawiyatanong on the map, the map is‚ It's different. Like the shoreline is not what it is right now. There's a reference to a great flood on some other stuff. So like that, it's not really a conclusive decision about form, it was just I was like, I can't I don't know when we are. I was like, I don't know when this needs to be and I don't maybe it's just an alternate present, maybe it's an alternate future. But time is somehow confused and I at the time felt like it was somehow instructive to reflect how difficult it is for me and most people to see that. So it's like you can stand in the first space and look in the third and see the stuff, but it's obscured by the walls and same with the second. Like you can look back or forward and it all feels like murky because there's this sheer wall in front of you.
When Aggie Toppins, a friend and colleague, at Wash U in Saint Louis, wrote about time in the installation in her review of the show, she described it in this way:
Dimly lit and dreamlike, the setting appears to be mostly in a time forthcoming, but it makes many historical references situating the visitor in non time where past, present and future are conflated in a way that de-familiarizes the home, making it strange.
The strangeness was reinforced by the way visitors would encounter and come to understand time and the installation, too. The structure I just explained to you was experienced by visitors, but not explicitly described. I intentionally left the room and its contents open to interpretation because I was more interested in the questions it could provoke than dictating exactly how it would be understood. As an aside, this makes the digital archive of Making Room [dot] online really distinct from the embodied experience of moving through the living room space. Here's Nick Buckingham, co-founder of Michigan Liberation, describing his movement through the space and interpretations of what he encountered.
Cause, so I wanted‚ so I felt that, right? I started‚ I didn't start in the front. I went all the way to the back:.
Okay, okay.
And the first thing, like I sat in the chair and I wanted to I wanted to hear, you know, what was that, what was this conversation? Who voices was I hearing? And it sounded like a mom and her daughter. Right. And when I was in the last room, I looked at the money, then the language on some of the documents. And I immediately went to a hundred years and I said, Wow, this is. This is money. Right?This money looks good. And this is money, you know, and I seen the like, the American money rolled up.
Right, yeah.
And for me, I looked at it as, like, there's no value in this anymore.
Absolutely, yeah.
And so then when I went to the second piece or like the the overlay where the shells are in, and then I felt like when I was looking and reading the story about the shells and like this new‚ it's like, this is leading up to this, this hundred years, right? I also took the shells as, as a sign of like multi-generation, very inclusive, diverse. You know, I don't I don't know if this is like true or not, but like are there two shells alike? You know. And so like all of these shells, that's just right there, right? And creating something. Then as I came into the front room, this felt like today, right, reading a newspaper about, you know, the lay off of the Detroit‚ I mean, of the police, the statues: I immediately went to last year. The street‚ the uprisings around George Floyd, Breonna Taylor.
Yeah.
It was like, oh I could see this by five years down the line, right? We have this like crazy visioning process in organizing, we always like to start off at the end.
Nick was processing the room much in the same way he strategizes around campaigns in his work.
And we say, you know, if we start a campaign, "[If] we win, what does the next day look like?" And usually we say, you know, "What would the headline look like?" And it's like, oh crap, there go the headline right there, right? So like, yo, we end cash bail and we can defund the police right now, you know, continue to call out all the corruption, all it would make sense. And, you know, this would be the first line of language to come out. Yeah, through our newspapers. Right? Yeah, like I was just sitting there reading, like... "statues of police officers are going up," and so I thought about, you know, a statue of Chief Craig going up and we vandalizing it and kicking it over...
Hell yeah.
Others experienced time in the installation very differently. Here's Angel McKissic:
Your comments about time are I think really interesting because I mean reflecting on it now and I... I really had no sense of time in that space it was just like future, maybe... Maybe but still‚ but and even still, I, I was still looking at it here, now, today and I think it's interesting, to‚ I think it's important to let that struggle with the time be out there, because I, like you were saying about trying to "get it right," you know, and again, how that's another product of like the society we live in and that invisible demand on us that that we adopt and it made me think of...
This struggle with placing ourselves in time, placing abolition in time is perhaps an abolitionist reality we need to contend with rather than to shy away from.
Also, what you were saying is really powerful, which is about this time traveling that we're doing when we step into the piece that it is in the future. But it is now. Right? I mean.
It's both‚ yeah. And it's something I struggled to define. Like, is it the future or is it just a different? Is it a different present?
Because I mean, Mama Myrtle can tell us about the changing shoreline of Detroit!"
Exactly...
Right now. That is life. Right? Like it is life that the that the water is coming to reclaim.
I mean, look. Yeah, I was making this around over the summer during, you know, when there were at least two major floods.
And getting comfortable with this struggle rather than resisting it might help counter our carceral conditioning and the fiction that time is only ever linear.
It made me think of the scholar who was working with Fanon, and he's actually had access to Fanon's papers that only a few other people have had access to. And the book is about two different Fanons, but in terms of his voice: the sort of, you know, revolutionary Fanon that we know and also a bit more ambivalent. And what he was saying was that people have‚ and this is connecting to maybe what you're saying‚ people have really tried to make Fanon cohesive and like a singular voice. And he's saying through this examination of these papers that there are two different voices coming up in Fanon's work, and that by trying to suppress that and just make him, you know, cohesive, we we miss that he's struggling. And it's important for us to know why was this so hard for him? That's important for us as movements to know that this, you know, a great, very influential thinker, psychiatrist, you know, educator was struggling. And if we don't allow that to come forward, it really disadvantages us and our movements. It helps us fully appreciate that this is a big problem and this is a hard problem. And so I really appreciate the piece about the time and maybe not like coming forward because that's also a provocative part of the piece to say, why is this so hard for us to imagine exactly when this would be?
At the end of the day, this struggle with time and space was about rejecting the notion that abolition is only a future state, a destination to which we've never been and can't relate, and recognizing the ways it's being practiced all around us.
Plus a world without police is already here, now, today for some of us, but in a pretty twisted way.
So I tell people abolitionist future is not that far. If‚ if they defunded the police, you wouldn't even feel it because they don't even come here no way. And provide any services no way.
To be clear, the fact that police don't respond to calls in certain places is problematic in a context where we're taught that the police are our only option, in a place where widespread viable abolitionist responses to harm don't yet exist. But this conundrum, which really is a feature of the carceral state, not an accident, helps to illustrate again how fungible and fragile the linearity of time is.
Ultimately, my creative decision to situate the room in multiple timescapes was informed by my own slow recognition of the nonlinearity of time, which was further informed by the reality that a world without police, for example, is already very much a reality, especially for poor Black folks in Detroit and the fact that at the very same time, like Mariame Kaba reminded us, some of these abolitionist futures are already happening, too. During the summer of 2020's uprisings, 313 Liberation zones began popping up across Detroit. Operating with a similar orientation to time‚ an overlapping simultaneity, a recognition that multiple presents are possible and necessary‚ temporarily practicing an alternate reality in the midst of the one that surrounds us. PG Watkins, a Detroiter, organizer, incredible facilitator and friend who co facilitated many of these conversations with me, was involved in organizing some of these spaces.
And‚ and the concept of it is this idea that in order to actualize the world that we want, we have to be in practice around it. And when we are practicing it, we need to create the kind of boundaries of like, okay, here is where we're going to be doing this. In this space, this is how we treat each other; in this space, this is what we're practicing and doing. And it is usually trying to figure out how to develop these types of resilience-based actions that are outside of the systems that already exist. And this idea that we have to change our dependance and reliance on those systems, create our own systems. So in terms of like the work with three and three, L.Z., was can we demonstrate to people through these occupations, through these direct actions a little bit, just a little bit of what it could be like to be in community without police, to handle conflict, without police, to provide food, without having to rely on the state to provide other care products. You know, we were doing those actions in the midst of the pandemic, so it was like, what does it mean to provide care for each other in this time, in this way? So it was a, I think a abolitionist practice or like a liberatory practice around can we create these territories? And then I mean, the larger history of liberated zones, right? I mean, something I was studying recently was about a Amilcar Cabral and Guinea-Bissau's revolution and the importance of liberated territories in the armed struggle that they were in and around like, okay, we know here that we are safeguarded. You know, like, we know in this space we have defenses set up against these external forces that are going to try to mess us up, harm us, kill us, make us give up our land and our freedom. And so let's, like, fortify ourselves in this contained space or many contained spaces over the country, really, but yeah, I think we're trying to learn from that type of practice.
As PG describes, liberated zones or temporary autonomous zones aren't new. Hakim Bey, a poet and anarchoimmediatist, and Sufi scholar coined the term in 1990 to refer to a, quote, "liberated area of land, time or imagination where one can be for something not just against and where new ways of being human together can be explored and experimented with," end quote.
Locating itself in the cracks and fault lines in the global grid of control and alienation. A temporary autonomous zone or T.A.Z. is an eruption of free culture where life is experienced at maximum intensity. It should feel like an exceptional party where for a brief moment our desires are made manifest and we all become the creators of the art of everyday life. The key is to remain mobile, relying on stealth and the ability to melt into the darkness at a moment's notice before the T.A.Z. Is spotted and recognized by the state, which will inevitably seek to crush it. It dissolves and moves on, reappearing in unexpected places to celebrate once again the wonders of conviviality and life outside the law. It might last hours, days, years, even, depending on how quickly it is noticed by authorities.
Thinking of spaces like this, the inherent linearity of time we're so attached to begins to break down and the abolitionist reality begins to take shape: that multiple worlds are possible, that our experiences situated in time overlap with one another. And perhaps most importantly, that we have to practice the future we're working toward today. The construction of that sentence itself demonstrates how insufficient our language is to describe time in this way. This reminds me of a point we've raise in this series before.
I feel so sorry for people who are not living in Detroit. People are always striving for size, to be a giant and this is a symbol of how giants fall.
That's Grace Lee Boggs from American Revolutionary, the documentary about her lifetime of thinking and action. Detroit is a city that's known for its industrial ruins. Grace's point here is that it's a blessing to be reminded of how hard corporate collapse can hit. How fragile it is, how temporary.
I visited Havana, Cuba recently and I was reminded of the same collapsing of time, of time folding in on itself in the spaces you inhabit. When people talk about Cuba, they often talk about it as a place that feels stuck in time because of the relics of buildings and cars and appliances made ubiquitous by the American blockade.
Havana and Detroit share this temporal conundrum. While the traders are reminded of corporate collapse and organized abandonment, Cubans are reminded of American callousness and the brutal effects of imperial oppression. Cuba is a site of punitive American foreign policy. The blockade is a collective punishment against all Cuban people, which is considered a human rights violation by the U.N., by the way. And the United States knows this, as Lester D. Mallory, who was then Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, said in 1960.
The majority of Cubans support Castro. The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba, a line of action which makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.
Much in the way that Black folks in the United States have been cast as behind the times, another effect of that collective punishment was to lock Cuba in a past that cast the country and all of its people, many of whom are also Black, by the way, out of time altogether. In a world where "time is money," one way to deliver on that maximum is to banish an entire nation's population from the neoliberal capitalist concept of contemporaneity and futurity, to prevent them from participating in the overconsumption of the newest stuff, because novelty is equated to progress; to relegate them to a life of maintaining and repairing old stuff. So when we see Cuba as a time capsule, we're really witnessing a representation of its banishment from the global timeline. To be a socialist country today is to be out of sync with the times and with neoliberal ideals.
Cuba is not a panacea, of course, and I'm not interested in lionizing Fidel Castro or romanticizing revolution. To be fair, that's a conversation for a whole other day. But Cuba is a place where both the revolution and many of the state social policies that followed, outwardly prioritized people's collective well-being, which is such a threat to the United States that they've held on to and escalated this blockade for the last 60 years. In a strange way, even though the American establishment's decades long punishment attempts to trap the island in time, it hasn't succeeded in restraining Cuban social policy, which is light years ahead of American social support for its most vulnerable families.
While I was in Cuba, one of the most confusing things I encountered as a guest was the currency system. There were drastically different exchange rates inside and outside the hotels. Inside our hotel, there was a special card we could buy and load dollars onto, but you couldn't purchase anything with actual dollar bills inside the hotel, and you couldn't use that card anywhere but the hotel. And some people told us not to worry about getting Cuban pesos at all because everyone would accept dollars. For the record, they were wrong. But by the time I was in Cuba in 2024, the currency system had already been somewhat simplified. It used to be that there were roughly three currencies in use: the Cuban peso, the American dollar and the CUC or Cuban Convertible Peso. The American dollar was formally brought into circulation during the Special Period, which began in '93. The Cuban economy was de-dollarized in 2004, but the dollar remained in circulation and the convertible peso was introduced at the same time. The value of the convertible peso, which was removed from circulation during the pandemic in 2021, was pegged to the U.S. dollar and essentially created a double economy because people's wages were paid in Cuban pesos, but most goods for sale were listed in convertible pesos. According to a book called Money: From the Power of Finance to the Power of the People by Rémy Herrera, this especially impacted, quote, "workers performing functions essential to society, among others industrial workers, peasants, doctors, teachers, researchers, etc. who were penalized compared to others who could access the dollar," end quote. Plus, for those who worked in tourism or received remittances from relatives in American dollars, for example, it was much easier to buy goods at the convertible peso rate. It cast those Cubans, the ones who were paid in Cuban pesos, exclusively, into a frame of reference where their time and money was worth less than those with ties to the American dollar and economy.
I'm sharing all this because, for one, it feels resonant with what we've explored so far about the adage that time is money. Secondly, because in our current paradigm, the value of currencies rely, to a large degree, on a country's GDP and a presumption of persistent GDP growth over time, the idea that progress is both inevitable and necessary. And third, because currency is also subject to a speculative foreign trade market. Another financial transaction, much like real estate speculation that relies on guesses about the value of something at a point in the future. Because many of these monetary policy maneuvers by the Cuban government were responses to the ever evolving terms of the American blockade. It's as if this collective punishment further traps the island in time by controlling the flow of currencies, resources and access to global economy in such a way that undermines the very value of Cubans' time.
When I first proposed Making Room for Abolition, I was responding to my own struggle against the urgency of movement work coming off the 2020 uprisings, which demanded urgent, immediate, repeated calls for organizers to show up in the streets. As I helped deliver pallets of water in plastic bottles to Detroiters whose water had been shut off by the city, I contemplated what felt like a contradiction: knowing the deliveries weren't a sustainable response to their need, as urgent and necessary as it was and continues to be. The contradiction was amplified by what felt like the pitting of one urgent crisis against another: the crisis of families being denied access to water against another pressing crisis of plastics consumption and climate change, the effects of which are sure to be felt most acutely by poor Black and brown communities.
To be clear, this moment helped me formulate a criticism of the crisis manufactured by the city shutting off people's water, not the work of delivering water itself. We the People of Detroit, where I was volunteering, is also committed to long-term visionary work grounded in policy and research to address the water crisis and other quality of life concerns affecting Detroiters today.
But to me, this urgency, this rushing around in 2020 was distracting and suffocating almost to our ability to expansively imagine the worlds we were working toward with greater fidelity. It felt like we were always flailing around, as we hurried, to address multiple, very real, very pressing compounding crises.
And this kind of urgency is one that many of us in movement spaces have internalized. It's one that's weaponized against radical organizers who don't have a whole cloth replacement ready to go for the systems they critique.
Right, exactly. So, yeah, I really I think I latched onto your comments about time because I've been thinking about that in the organizing space and what I ask of people and how I ask it of them. And it's been a real lesson for me. It's a battle against myself. It's a battle against a sense of urgency because the system puts especially people work in abolition. It puts a sense of urgency on us, like y'all got to know how to fix it now. Those are the questions we always get. So what now? What else we going to build? And I'm like, where's that energy for the current system? You know, y'all are coming at us like it has to work the first time. And I'm like, why don't you save that energy for your current systems of policing and, you know, whatever. And it reminds...
To Angel's point, that energy for the current system simply doesn't exist. There's a double standard at work here. One of many we hold for abolitionists and not for the carceral state. Wherein the urgency to prove our ability to implement abolition is not matched with the same energy for proving that the carceral system actually does anything it promises to do: reduce so-called crime, keep people safe, so on. Spoiler alert it doesn't. And in fact, there is plenty of evidence, much of which we shared throughout the series, to prove otherwise already.
But if we understand these carceral tactics like policing and incarceration to be catchall solutions to countless problems, we should also understand that they're inherently inadequate for the breadth of problems they're expected to address. We talked about this when we talked about silos and alienation in episode one, right? The notion that the same institutions of policing and prison could possibly address everything from writing up the documentation you need to file an insurance claim to addressing sexual violence is just absurd. They don't have the range.
In our episodes on nature, we explored the ways that our perception of time as only linear does us a disservice when it shapes our responses to climate change. For example. We introduced a concept called kinship time, to which I was introduced by Kyle White, an environmental justice scholar and faculty at the University of Michigan. He's also an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. We spoke about kinship time in the context of our relationships to nature as an alternative to what is typically presented to us as an urgent, imminent crisis of climate collapse. The idea that if we look at the relational shifts that happen and our responsibilities to our more than human kin, we might come up with better responses to climate change than when we're acting out of urgency. This resistance urgency is a lesson we can take to inform our responses to other kinds of shared crises as well. What if, for example, we looked at abolition through a similar lens? What if we tried narrating the multiple compounding crises of carcerality in terms of kinship time?
Instead of simply talking about the increasing rates of incarceration and out-of-control police budgets, I could tell you that for longer than I've been alive, we've been taught explicitly and implicitly that the police are the guardians of safety, the keepers of balance between people, and that prisons are the containers that keep bad people away from good people and prevent bad things from happening on the outside. But what is the role of police today, really? And what function do prisons really serve? As protest against policing mounts and the façade shifts. We're witnessing police sow fear with lies about crime rates to garner more funding. We're seeing police receive more and more transfers of equipment, technology and training from the military. And prison infrastructure and profitability expand on the promise of a new president and even more incarceration to come. As policing and incarceration adapt to contemporary social norms and contort to serve capital more dutifully, there will be more reasons to incarcerate people, more laws that criminalize the things people do to stay alive. More ways to punish people's survival. This is already happening, as we've documented throughout this series of essays, turning your own or your neighbor's water back on in Detroit has been categorized a felony and homelessness in some states a crime. Various kinds of harm, violence, abuse, rape continue to occur because as it turns out, policing and incarceration do very little, if anything, to address harm or produce accountability after it occurs. And they do even less to prevent it. In fact, both policing and prisons produce new kinds of harm that echo through generations and through the lineages of families touched by them. The more public money we pour into policing, the more resources we deny the kinds of social services that address the needs that are being increasingly criminalized. The more we rely on these systems to address harm through violence and extraction, the more we enable the degradation of the kinds of right relations required to cultivate actual safety and deprive ourselves of the skills required to navigate conflict without state violence. Policing and prisons have always been enemies of the people. Today they're being aggravated and multiplied by what we call the prison industrial complex.
If we keep thinking about carcerality and climate change only in terms of linear time, only with a laser focus on the impending doomscape of the future, we'll probably keep coming up with terrible, shortsighted interventions that don't prioritize the relational nature of crisis and the relational nature of the skills abolition demands that we develop, like responsibility and consent and care. As Kyle White reminded us when describing kinship time. As you'll recall from our first episode, Ruth Wilson Gilmore said:
Abolition really does require that we change one thing, which is everything.
Including the carceral conditioning we've internalized, such as the ways we've learned to turn to carceral interventions because they seem quick and easy, especially when motivated by urgency and the attendant fear it brings up.
Yeah, somebody is having a different experience at a different time at this exact moment. Right. But it's it's it's, you know, it's one of those things where I can actually see a world beyond all this. I can see it. The complicated thing is that this infrastructure that's in place will continue to create circumstances where the minute we feel like we're making gains, they'll create a new circumstance that taps into our biggest fears, our deepest fears.
You're listening to two on a petty a social justice organizer, poet, author and facilitator whose work focuses on racial justice, equity, privacy and consent.
I'll use, I'll use‚ face recognition as an example. Momentum. Tremendous momentum all across the world to get rid of it. Tremendous momentum. Then January 6th happened, the Capitol riots. And even people I know who are hell bent on getting rid of face recognition were like becoming private sleuths to help solve for... So it's almost like I hate this thing for the people on my side. But if you talk about the people on their side that I don't care about, then I want all these carceral systems for those people. And so, yes, so they figured out a formula to tap into the things that we're still struggling with. And so, you know, I see the vision and there are places that are further along than than the United States in moving towards a abolitionist framework. And, you know, in and in in‚ ending some of the carcerality that we're we're experiencing especially in a medical industry. COVID came and it was like our immediate response was like, let's track everybody, let's get surveillance, face recognition, temperature checks, and thermometers. You know what I mean? Like, let's scan everybody's faces. But not every place is thinking that way. And so it really is the "what time is it on the clock of the world?" And like, how much do we know about places all around the world that might be a little further along than we are and thinking about a community that's not so connected to policing.
Grace Lee and Jimmy Boggs first posed this question in their 1974 book entitled Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century. This question points to the exercise of placing all human history‚ 3000 years or so‚ on a clock and envisioning every minute as a 50 year chunk of time.
What time do you think it is? The clock of the universe? I think that we are at the time in the clock of the world, of the universe, when we have the power within us to destroy all living things on this planet. But we also have the power within us to create the world anew. And that, I think, is what each of us needs to live with, 24/7. How do we deal? What choice do we make at this unprecedented time in the history of the universe?
Frankly, it's hard to have a solid answer to this question, but at the very least, it stops you in your tracks long enough to contemplate where you see yourself in our collective struggle situated in time. It reorients you to the scale and pace of a time frame that far outlasts any of our human lives and forces you to consider ancestors, descendants and the circumstances they had to and will have to contend with that may relate to your own. While it feels true that we urgently need a different world and hope to see glimpses of it in our lifetimes. The pressure to arrive at a whole cloth different world immediately is crushing. And more importantly, it seems to distort the potential of abolitionist work. Here's PG Watkins again.
Time, ah time. I think that time in this capitalist world is. So it goes so fas, right? It's like. Where did this year ago? You know what I mean, like, it's November now. Like what? It's about to be February. You know what I mean? Like, it's just last week was July. I'm just like, I don't quite understand where time goes. And I think it's because you work all the time and sometimes you sleep and then you work some more and then sometimes you sleep and then six months happen. So time is weird, but I think that I'm someone who, in order for me to actually show up in this work and be excited about it and be present to the possibility of it, I do believe that I want to find some bit of this liberation in my lifetime. I understand that this is going to be a multi- multi-generational struggle, right? Like, there's going to have to be ways that the work continues after my lifetime in this way, in this body is done. And and I'm like, yeah, let's make some shit shake before before it gets too late. Like, what are we got to do to make it happen right now? So I do think there's this thing around time where it's like it goes so quickly. I don't know that we always know what to do with it. So often organizers in movement struggle against time and in the face of a pandemic as well, multiple pandemics, like constantly feeling this urgency of like, we have to solve for this, this all these crises right now, and there's not enough time to do all that. And but we have to do it right now. But there's not enough time. We have to do right now... So I think that we're in this constant fight against using the time we have, finding value in the time.
I think like as a person that describes themselves as a turtle.
Oh, I didn't know that, okay.
I didn't know you did too! I thought I was just baba.
No, I'm definitely his child. That is real.
You're also hearing the voice of Curtis Renee, who identifies as a turtle and is a co-founder of the Detroit Safety Team, an organization dedicated to assisting communities in building a new safety infrastructure that shifts away from police reliance. Curtis is also an incredible chef.
But like describing myself as a turtle and I think doing support work, there is always like a line of urgency that is like layered with like crisis and mediation and things like that. And I think it's often a very hard negotiation for me because I really feel like, you know, at the basis of urgency, most of the time shit is not urgent.
It's not!
Most of the time shit is not urgent. And when I say that to people they be like, "It is! It is urgent right now! Why is you not moving like it's so? And so, like, the negotiation of like hearing people in crisis and also being able to say, okay, I understand your crisis and also this is‚ that does not mean it's urgent. It just means that you need some care. And also, like being able to just move through the world, like I need to. So it makes sense. Like things when we allow things to, like, take the shape that it needs to, and the time that it needs to just take that shape like, it happens in a really magical way. And when we apply, like, this sense of urgency, like it needs to happen tomorrow, then I don't know, like the magic is lost and really like the true shape of what it could be is like completely distorted. So, you know, time is weird. I'm moving through the world like a turtle. And I try to acknowledge where people are.
Part of what Curtis is saying here, too, is that re-categorizing something is not urgent, doesn't mean that it's not important or doesn't demand our attention. Rather, that first, urgency is relative. And second, our responses to urgent matters can't consistently completely upend everything else going on around us all the time if we expect to make any progress on these massive issues we're facing in movement work.
It's if if "we move through it with urgency and expect it tomorrow, then the magic is lost," to me, I'm just like, I feel like one of the most common refrains I have when I'm talking to people, when I'm canvasing about abolition is just like, we're not expecting this to happen tomorrow, right? Because I think if we were to say that this was happening tomorrow, like even the fight for the budget this past year and hopefully the fight will continue to have against the budget in the coming years, it's not like, okay, we're going to change this budget that's going to fix everything. We have defunded the police. Go Detroit. Right? It's like actually, if we move in that way, that okay, this first year of trying to divest, we actually do defund it by hundreds of millions of dollars without building up what else is needed to, like, fortify our communities in the wake of a different type of safety network safety system? Like then, yeah, we don't have the magic of true community in the ways that we envision like true liberation and justice in the way that we envision because we've moved so quickly to try to self‚ or like to predetermine or pre-fix something that needed more time to be built.
In other words, building abolitionist ecosystems to replace the totalizing scheme of the carceral state takes time. The carceral fiction emerging here is not so much that these things aren't urgent because they are, but that our response to their urgency sets us up to produce an equally urgent and poorly-formulated, short-sighted response.
If you've made it this far in the series, you've probably, hopefully already seen the digital archive of artifacts from the Making Room for Abolition installation on Making Room [dot] online. As I thought about how to carry this work forward from the physical installation three years ago, I thought a lot about the role of archives historically.
We tend to understand archives as evidence of the past. If an archive is typically a tool for preserving history or recording a past, what does that become when it's used to construct a future? What if it were possible to remember a future? When we re-orient an archive around futures and set of pasts, it becomes a tool of prefiguration. Archives are always political, in the sense that they preserve narratives and culture and shape the historical record. With Making Room [dot] online, this project starts to ask: What if instead, archives could also shape the realm of possibility? What if they could define the scope of our imaginations or prefigure our worlds? Historically, archives have been the sites of colonial theft, where folks with more power collected bits of other people's culture and history, kept them behind lock and key and withheld them from the people to whom they belonged. But what does it mean to produce an archive instead of collect it? Or to project meaning into archival material rather than to interpret artifacts? And what might it mean to generate evidence for an uncertain but possible future rather than to gather evidence of a certain past? In the second part of our episode on Nature, we talked about these maps of the Mississippi River alluvial basin, illustrated by Harold Fisk. They tell a story about the many paths the river has taken over time rather than the fallacy of the singular blue line we usually see depicted on maps. Commenting on the Mississippi River's shifting banks and flooding, Toni Morrison once remarked:
The act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use. But in fact, it is not flooding. It is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that. Remembering where we were. That valley we ran through. What the banks were like. The light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory with the nerves and the skin, remember, as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our flooding.
Like the Mississippi, the many traditions of Black and Indigenous futuring are our flooding, our remembering. I see this archive I'm building as a space where time collapses on itself and the resulting collisions produce openings in the limits of our imaginations. In our next episode will examine where those limits reside, what enables our imaginations, and what we need to make room for in movements to support more abolitionist imaginaries.
Alright, so to sum things up, what if we began to release our attachment to urgency, to take the time it takes to imagine and develop abolitionist interventions and gave ourselves time to witness that flooding of our imaginations that Toni Morrison mentioned. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities.
Until next time, remember what's real: time may be money in today's paradigm, but we have to continually question who that maxim serves. Time is a punitive tool in the carceral system and the social systems that operate with carceral logics. Time isn't only linear, it's relational and layered. The sooner we get comfortable with narrating complex relational shifts in terms of kinship time, the better we'll be able to respond to them. Thank you for listening and thanks to the many people who've made this show and the wider body of work possible over the last three years.
Thank you to all the futurists featured in this episode who participated in this project three long years ago. That includes Tawana Petty, Nate Mullen, Angel McKissic, Nick Buckingham and Curtis Renee. And thank you especially to PG Watkins for helping me facilitate these conversations. Thank you also to Kyle Whyte, for participating in an interview in the fall of 2024. This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by me, Lauren Williams. Essays were co-produced by my dear friend Ayinde Jean-Baptiste, and the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Excerpts from several references were read by the voice actor Joy Vandervoordt-Cobb. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.
This project is presented in partnership with Respair Production and Media.
Human made infrastructures always eventually crumble, lost to time and memory. The 21st century has brought these concerns uncomfortably close to ‘First World’ or technologically advanced societies, societies which tell themselves that they have mastered nature. Levees break, power grids overload, and suddenly a highway is a river. As we wade through the layers of deprivation, segregation and allocation that make it so, we uncover that some of these roads had always been rivers, and their memories may still be stronger than our methods. In this episode Lauren Williams points to human designs nearing failure tolerance, and calls us back to a different relation with Nature and each other.
I rode my bike to 94 when it was a lake and I was like, "Damn, a freeway does not have to be a freeway!" And it can happen in less than 24 hours. A freeway can become something completely different.
By now, you probably recognize that as the voice of Nate Mullan, an educator, artist and founder of People in Education. This conversation with Nate was recorded in the summer of 2021, when Detroit saw two major floods that turned Interstate 94, which runs east to west across the city, back into a body of water.
And, so I —for a point of reference here, you can see on this overpass here on 94, just a couple blocks from Livernois, it says 14ft is the clearance. And based upon that clearance, we're guessing this is about 8 or 9 feet of water. You can see the trash truck, the "think green" is still in the same spot. That it was yesterday. We still have submerged vehicles here on I-94. You can see the back of one right there through the trees. So, not much has changed here since yesterday. And as we look down the road, you can see semi trucks, vehicles still sitting here in water.
And and these floods were bad, bad. The week after each one driving around the city, you'd see sidewalks filled with bulk trash from people's basements where everything had been submerged, often with sewage contaminated water. There are many different kinds of floods. But what we've seen in Detroit over the last few years have been predominantly pluvial, surface water floods caused by extreme rainfall.
And it's like, when I spend time with some of the natural spaces of the city, you know, since since your‚— since the flooding happened and really impacted the work at Feedom Freedom because I've been thinking incessantly about the waterways of the city and how so many of them have actively been covered and turned into streets.
You heard that right. The city of Detroit sits on top of a bunch of submerged waterways. Nate's talking about what are sometimes referred to as "ghost streams." Since 1905, Detroit, like many cities, has removed or covered up over 86% of the total length of streams that existed in that year. These ghost streams are waterways or wetlands that were either buried or filled in to support urban development. Here's Jacob Napieralski, a geology professor at the University of Michigan Dearborn, discussing ghost dreams and WDET's Created Equal with Stephen Henderson.
So we can just basically define a ghost stream or wetland as a structure or a feature that existed in the past that functioned like a wetlands, flowed like a river. But then after European settlers come, we begin to sprawl and develop and we see this as an inconvenience and so we drain and remove. So, a river can be removed by simply dropping it underground so that it still actually is flowing, but it's no longer visible on the surface or in lots of situations. We literally just removed it from the landscape. So a lot of times there are rolling hills in your community that are not random hills. They are a stream valley that no longer fills with water. But that landscape does remember what it's supposed to do, even though we've tried to change it. And of course, that's...
Rivers' memories are much longer than ours. There's a series of what have been called "meander maps" of the alluvial valley of the Mississippi River that I've been obsessed with for years. And I'm obsessed with them because they're visually striking. They're stunning, undulating drawings of curves exploding on a map. In them, the Mississippi River emerges from the knot of swirling pathways as a negative space rather than the bright blue fixed line we typically see in geological or geographic depictions of rivers. These maps were drawn by Harold Fisk, a geologist and cartographer working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s. What they represent visually is the historical behavior of the river rather than the river at a fixed point in time. In other words, they depict the river's fluctuations through space and time. A blogger named Jason Kottke writes that Fisk's maps "represent the memory of a mighty river with thousands of years of course changes compressed into a single image by a clever mapmaker with an artistic eye. Looking at them, you're invited to imagine the Mississippi as it was during the European exploration of the Americas in the 1500s, during the Cahokia civilization in the 1200s, when the city's population matched London's or when the first humans came upon the river more than 12,000 years ago, and even back to before humans when mammoths, camels, direwolves and giant beavers roamed the land and gazed upon the river."
While these maps depict the Mississippi River, and when I mention ghost streams, I'm talking about a bunch of smaller waterways connected to the Detroit River, the takeaway here is that water remembers where it ran before, and sometimes it returns to those paths. Water doesn't care what humans have tried to do to corral it, even if it emerges as a phantom of the waterway that once rested there. You'll hear us talk about time elsewhere in the series, and this observation about water's memory connects us to that theme by challenging our understanding of waterways as static or fixed simply because we only know them as we've witnessed them in our comparatively brief human lifespans.
These maps and Detroit's historic flooding evoke the carceral fiction that we can and should exercise unrestrained control over our landscapes.
Welcome to Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities, a series of audio essays about making room for abolition. Making Room for Abolition first appeared at Red Bull Arts in Detroit in October of 2021 as a month long installation of speculative artifacts set in a home and a future without police and prisons.
This series reflects on conversations from that space with Detroit based organizers and futurists committed to food justice, water access, educational equity, restorative justice and black liberation more broadly. When Black folks in Detroit manufacture better lives for ourselves‚—whether that's healthier food, safer neighborhoods, new technologies for moving through conflict‚—it's usually described as an act of survival or desperation, rather than being classified as an act of resistance or future-making or speculative design. Each and every one of them is practicing a future that especially poor Black Detroiters have been told is impossible.
So, in each episode will look closely at the kinds of fictions that shape our current attachments to policing, prisons and punishment to examine where they come from and how they affect us. At the same time, you'll hear us propose abolitionist realities that counter these fictions and open up other ways of being. My name is Lauren Williams. I'm an artist and designer based in Detroit, Michigan, and I work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power.
In this episode, we'll explore the capitalist, colonial and carceral fictions that convince us we can control nature and the consequences of doing so. We'll talk about how we attempt to exercise that control over water; how water responds; and how our manipulations of both water and land constitute a meddling with time that echoes through time, as well. As I mentioned in part 1 of this episode, when I talk about nature, I'm referring to elements of nature that concern urban space and Detroit, which means in large part, I'm talking about the land beneath the city, the water all around us, and the wider dynamics of climate change that manifest in our environment. I'm also talking about our relationships to these elements of nature in the context of our focus in this series on carceral abolition: namely, how our carceral conditioning shapes our interactions with nature; how our responses to what we experience as crises of nature and reflect an abandonment of our responsibility to care for one another; and how developing a different orientation to time might help us relate differently to our environment, as urban as it may be.
Before we begin, here's a dispatch from another world: Stevie's always studying these days. Her Water Steward textbooks and vials and test strips stay scattered around the living room. She's learning about the way the landscape changed, how there used to be 500-year floods, that became 50-year floods, that became daily floods so massive that they permanently transformed the composition of water to land in this region. What used to be the Midwest of a larger landmass called the United States is now the northeastern most corner of a region with many different names, among them: Waawiyatanong. The last big flood happened when her late grandma had been a baby, but long enough before Stevie was born that it still seems so foreign, so far away. There's not much left of that world. So much of it was swallowed by water. She's heard stories about it, the catastrophe, the fires, the destruction and the futile attempts to stop the water from rising. But even those feel like a novel or a movie about some fictional place, since she's never known what it's like to live without water surrounding her on all sides. She flips through her notebook, highlighting her meticulous notes to prepare for her exam as she peers out the window of her stilted home at the sun setting below the shoreline. She's nervous because to be a steward is a lot of responsibility, but not because she doubts her knowledge or is worried about the test. She's been preparing for this, like everyone else in this place for her entire life, protecting water is just what we do.
Jefferson Chalmers is the neighborhood where Feedom Freedom Growers is located. Feedom Freedom is a community garden set against a canal on Detroit's east side. Founded by Myrtle Thompson-Curtis and her partner Wayne Curtis, to, in the words of the mission, quote, "nourish ourselves, other marginalized Detroiters and our relationships with each other and the environment." In Myrtle's words, it was a response to the violence perpetrated against Black folks in Detroit:
The least that I can do, is to the sound of warning bell. To educate, to understand that we can grow food that is not violent towards our very bodies. And so I started to understand that my body was rebelling against the food I was putting in it. And if I can have that understanding, why not share that with others? And, in that work‚— my partner, who has a lifetime of activism and caring for others, and that's what that activism is, it's caring for self and others to utilize the resources that we had available, which were plots of land. And so to understand that growing our own food‚—and I advocate everyone to have a backyard garden, a side lot garden, a pot garden‚—to grow something, to understand that connectedness and to build those relationships with that form of kin. It starts to undo some of the damage and violence that is perpetrated against us.
To that end, as the mission continues, quote "Feedom Freedom grows and shares political power, social consciousness, healthy food and a culture of collectivism and interdependence through gardening, stewarding land and water, providing mutual aid, encouraging artmaking and hosting critical conversations."
And Feedom Freedom was hit hard by these floods.
In the context of Detroit's ghost streams and flooding problems, there's a few things related to power in urban space that we have to call attention to, because it's no accident that these floods have been more devastating to some Detroiters than to others. As an aside, there's a twisted irony embedded here too, that connects to some fictions we explored in another episode of this series on Safety and Interdependence: understanding how rich Michigan and the wider Great Lakes landscape is in water makes it really hard to swallow how the state has tried and, in many ways succeeded, to convince us that it's a scarce resource that must be taken away if residents can't afford to pay for it.
But back to the task at hand. Part of the fiction we intend to unseat in this episode is that people can corral or contain nature for our benefit and without restraint. It's important to point out that these forms of control are akin to carceral tactics for social control. We contain, cage and police nature, much like we do people.
The point here isn't that humans can't affect nature. Rather that we cannot and should not strive to control nature as certainly and resolutely as our urban landscapes would have us believe. Detroit's waterways, for example, will not let you forget their presence. They'll swiftly remind you of the fact that a freeway isn't necessarily a freeway or that a wetland isn't necessarily solid ground.
Nature will make fictions of our best laid plans.
That said, there are absolutely ways in which humans, through our social, political and technological systems, intentionally can and do shape nature's movement. In essence, it's no accident that nature's remembering—its flooding—affects more vulnerable populations more severely. Here's an excerpt from an interview by Ari Shapiro on NPR's All Things Considered:
Professor Carol Miller of Wayne State University in Detroit has been studying water infrastructure for decades. And she tells me people used to ask her about contaminants, whether the local fish they caught were safe to eat. But these days?
The questions that are being asked at dinners and out with friends is a question questions relating to flooding. Like why is this happening? Why is it that disadvantaged people in the city have to go into their basements several times a year to pump out or pail out sewage that has gathered in the basement from a storm?
Let's talk about three reasons why this is happening.
First of all, climate change is making these floods more prevalent. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's 2022 State Climate Summaries, extreme rainfall events in Michigan, meaning when it rains more than two inches in a day, are on the rise, with a wettest consecutive five year period occurring between 2016 and 2020. The kinds of very heavy rain events that make up the heaviest 1% of storms now drop 31% more precipitation in the Midwest than they did 50 years ago. This is undeniably‚—well, unless you're a climate change denier, that is‚—a product of human intervention, pollution, and extraction from the environment. Global warming overall increases atmospheric water vapor across the planet, which causes more extreme rainfall and more extreme floods.
Secondly, flooding devastates more vulnerable populations more often because Black Detroiters, for one, are concentrated in higher flood risk areas of the city, a direct product of the ways racism has been used as a tool of social and economic power. In large part, the reason for this racialized vulnerability is that high flood risk areas align with redlining maps which long dictated where Black residents were allowed to buy homes. And still, to this day, align with racial segregation patterns in the region. Here's Jacob Napieralski, again:
We looked at history and we wanted to look at the history of the landscape, but also history of the people. And in one particular aspect to our research, we were interested in what we did in the 30s and 40s, which was called redlining, where bankers and lenders were very curious to know what the risk was for investing in communities all over the United States. I think there's over 200 some cities that had this done in their own city. So in Detroit we have a really large metro, Detroit's large. So we have large areas that underwent this determination of of economic risk. And if you were scored an "A" that meant you were in a community that was definitely worth investing, banks should certainly give you great deals. It was worth investing in, living in. If you were in a "D" neighborhood you were considered in, in some of the more difficult neighborhoods. A lot of times that was low income minorities, immigrants, non-English speaking and so on. So that practice was eventually outlawed. But we were very interested in whether the remnants of that still have some contribution to flood inequity, so why some communities get hit harder with floods than others. And so just to give you some background, you know, we looked at social and environmental indicators, so if we just looked at "A" versus "D," so the "best" versus those that were considered the "highest risk." "A" communities right now, if you live in an "A" community, there's about 10% poverty and there's about 8% vacancy. If you compare that against all of the "D" communities that we have in Detroit, that is about one third. So it's about 36% poverty rate, 24% vacancy. And the median home income is less than 25%. So it still remains an issue, so we think that there must be a connection‚— if that's the case, there must be an environmental connection, and sure enough, if you look at tree canopy cover, if you live in an "A" neighborhood, it's really green, it's lush, over 25% tree canopy cover compared to 8% in "D" neighborhoods. So we went at this and asked the question, well, if that's the case, then we probably have more concrete, we have far more summer heat, and so we have communities are probably going to get hit much harder with these floods than really comfortable, green, lush neighborhoods. And it turns out that tends to be true.
And finally, the city hasn’t done much to protect residents from these floods. What it feels and looks like is that they leave Detroiters to fend for themselves and recover by themselves after these storms. The severity of some recent floods—particularly the ones in 2021—was unquestionably a function of aging, unmaintained water and sewer infrastructure and floodwater management systems in the city. This isn’t to say that, with better infrastructure, we “can” conquer or control nature, rather that it takes incredible investments in infrastructure to keep up with increasingly intense rainfall events amid climate change.
When I talked to people who lived on the east side about floods that summer, it was almost as if the Great Lakes Water Authority, which manages regional storm water, had just sat by and watched it all happen. People described watching the water levels rise high enough to submerge their cars parked on the street all night. And then sometime after midnight, the water suddenly just began to recede like someone had unplugged a giant bathtub drain. It was as if someone was either asleep at the helm or they purposely let the water rise up until that point. But the water authority denied every last one of the 24,000 claims filed by residents and insurance companies after the floods on June 24th and 25th of 2021. Here's Fox 2 News coverage in that year:
But the GLWA report concluded that the amount of rainfall, about seven inches in five hours was beyond the system's capacity of 16 pumps, especially here at Connor's Creek pumping Station on Jefferson.
It says they had a total of 16 storm pumps. They admit that for a bulk of the time, only three were working. Then, at best, five were working. So how they can say with 3 or 5 working, that doesn't cause or substantially aggravate all this flooding, that that just strains credibility.
Yet, GLWA says, even if every pump, piping and equipment was working, flooding would still have occurred because.
Once the storm pumps started running, the water quickly left.
And even though the report acknowledged electrical problems affecting operations at the Freud and Connor Creek pumping stations, GLWA said this, "even before the release of the final report from the independent investigators, GLWA began working to implement key infrastructure and process improvements to help address the stresses put on an infrastructure system not built for this level of rain."
That's going to be the fight in this case, whether it was a substantial cause of the flooding.
Well, Charlie, it doesn't really all add up. I mean, if the GLWA admits it has been working to fix the infrastructure and it was previously and that wasn't built for extreme rain, how can it just blame the rain and not the equipment? I mean, it seems pretty simple.
It is pretty simple, but it's actually it's not, though. The problem is, is that they are saying basically that there's a lot of it's too much rain‚—we had too much rain and that ANY place would have flooded. It doesn't matter. And so they also have another argument. I don't want to get into it too much, but it's governmental immunity. Basically. You can't sue the government unless you show that it is a major defect and it's more than 50% the cause of all the damages. So that's a legitimate argument too. So, listen, they do have arguments and listen, they admit that their pump stations weren't working. They admit that they had some electrical problems. We covered that. They also admit that they fixed them later on. But on the date, these two days, June 24 and five, back last year, right here, they say it just wouldn't have mattered. It was just too much rain. I don't know if a jury is going to believe it, but that's their story. And apparently they're sticking to it.
The focus on pursuing blame for this infrastructural failure seems to be an attempt to address grief and loss, to repair damage caused by human negligence, and to acknowledge that we need more from the system. The emphasis in this account and in many others is on assigning culpability through the legal systems and getting the water authority to pay for damages. And at the end of the day, the authority failed to protect people and is doing all kinds of acrobatics to avoid responsibility here. It's suspicious that now in this predicament, we're willing to admit that we can't control nature. Right? "It must have been an act of God herself that overpowered our systems. There was just nothing we could do." As Jacob Napieralski points out, there might be some truth to this.
But in other words, could we could we build our way out of these problems, in your opinion?
Oof, that's a that's a very good question because I think it's human nature for us to think that we can outwit and outsmart Mother Nature.
Right?
And I don't think that that's always possible. And I think we would be playing with people's lives if we take that gamble and think that we can out-engineer and capture all the water and minimize flooding. The reality is flooding is actually a normal process. It's just something that's inconvenient to humans and the way we see life.
But let's be real. The truth is that we could never really predict and out-engineer nature. Not that there's nothing we can do to live alongside it resiliently and in relation to its fluctuations. Acknowledging nature's persistence and strength doesn't mean we don't come up with other ways to live with nature, that might not look like out-engineering or outsmarting it.
You know, we talk about engineering and capturing everything. Maybe that's not necessarily our goal. Our goal is to accept that nature is going to do what it wants to do once in a while, we accept it, and so in some places, we have nature-based solutions.
Plus, if we already know that extreme rainfall events are more frequent than ever before, what's the point of pretending that the Authority doesn't own some responsibility for how severely so many people were affected? And how might this be different, if we prioritized public institutions taking accountability for people's well-being instead of doing everything possible to shirk responsibility for finding ways to manage our relationship with water differently? What we know to be true now is that climate change is making extreme rainfall events more and more frequent, and we don't have the resources to fight nature, prevent flooding entirely, or to go back in time and unmoor the city from its foundation on top of ghost waterways. Here's Carol Miller in conversation with Ari Shapiro, again:
There's tons of money that look like it's going to be heading in that direction. So it should, I'd say it all depends on the people that are making those decisions.
The infrastructure package includes billions of dollars specifically to address flooding. There's $3.5 billion for FEMA's flood mitigation assistance program over five years. Another billion for a FEMA program called Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities. Half a billion for flood mapping. The list goes on.
It is better than what it was, but it's not enough.
Water engineer Palencia Mobley says this is a good start, but she could use all of the flood money that this bill sets aside for the entire country, just fixing Detroit's issues alone. As we take in the neighborhood in the midday heat, I ask her whether people around here associate these record storms with climate change.
They may this summer, this summer might might have made it happen. I think now people contextually understand, yes, something has happened. The 100 year storm now kind of looks like the ten year storm because the recurrence interval has changed.
She says she's trying to imagine infrastructure for a future that's uncertain.
We don't even know what to design for now. This stuff is so far off the curve that you don't even know, like what's the right level of service to try to provide?
You're saying if a 100 year storm is now a ten year storm, how bad is a 100 year storm going to be in a decade or 2 or 5 years?
Your system is not designed to respond to something like that.
These days, when rain starts to fall, her friends text each other: I'm praying for you.
So what is the point of all this? I'm definitely not saying that prayer is all we've got. I'm also not arguing Pollyannishly that we should all just return to nature by burning down the city and pulling up all the concrete. We're here. The concrete is here. The water is here. This is where we find ourselves: amid conditions shaped by the ways that we've treated nature throughout time. What I am saying is: let's figure out how to navigate this shifting landscape in a way that doesn't rely on control and coercion. And when flooding events do occur, because water is going to continue to remember, we don't have to add insult to injury by failing to care for people in the midst of crisis.
I think one of the things that I'd like to, you know, put out there for dialog with a number of the different concepts and ideas and solutions and imaginations that people in different, you know, abolition based communities have offered is this idea of protocol and what does it mean when we develop relationships‚—kinship bonds, as I put it‚—that are so strong that it almost creates that sense that people just automatically are able to fall in line together with each other when a crisis occurs as opposed to being in the, you know, a situation where the most immediate crisis may not be the worst thing about it. Right? Like with regard to injustice, you know, there may be like—even, even though I, I challenge this term—but there might be a "climate-induced crisis" like flooding, but then the worst part of it is not the flooding. It's the injustice that occurs when you attempt to to deal with the flooding.
That's the voice of Kyle Whyte, who you may recall from Part 1. He's an environmental justice scholar and faculty at the University of Michigan. He's also an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. When the worst part of a major flood isn't the destructive force of nature, but the dehumanizing response from folks and institutions who are tasked with caring for residents' well-being, something's got to change. And we have to change not just our responses to these kinds of crises, but also how we interpret how our actions influence the conditions that shaped flooding in the first place and the ways we conceive of our relationships and responsibilities to the environment.
One thing I can't stop thinking about is how both literally and metaphorically, ghost streams leave Detroit on fundamentally unstable footing, in geological terms because of the city's construction on top of waterways that will never forget where they once ran. But this unstable, water-bound foundation isn't unique to Detroit.
I lived in Mexico City for a while in 2018. When I think about Detroit's water and colonial history. I'm reminded that Mexico City also sits atop the ruins of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital city besieged by colonial war and disease brought by settlers. As a consequence, the foundation of Mexico City is quite literally sinking. The physical infrastructure of the entire city today is precarious because of how it came to be. After a massacre, the Spaniards destroyed what remained of Tenochtitlan's infrastructure. They drained the lake on which the island city once sat and got to work constructing their empire. Today, as the soil and clay that one sat beneath the city compacts, Mexico City drops another foot and a half per year. The physical infrastructure of the city we know today is compromised, at least in part because of how it came to be, how it was founded and who was erased to bring it to life. Major earthquakes have rocked the city throughout time: the earthquake in 1985 and the one that hit the same day 32 years later, both unmoored the city's perilous physical foundation and the destruction was amplified by the disaster of colonialism that preceded it.
I can't help but see a parallel precarity here in Detroit. We share with Mexico City, no doubt a pattern of colonial genocidal destruction and a vast network of ghost waterways that enabled the foundation of this city.
You know, I think we're living on an open wound right now, you know...
And to borrow from adrienne maree brown here, it's as if Detroit and Mexico City were constructed atop open wounds both geologically and relationally speaking. And yet we wonder why they won't hold, why they keep fracturing, flooding and remembering.
I'm critical of the United States because we were founded through a genocidal colonial act and we never actually repaired it. And then we kept building on top of it with more harm. I'm here because of harmful acts, and we kept building and building on top of it and we never repaired. And so without that repair, now, it's normal to live in an extremely violent, extremely unjust world because that's what we created. That's what was founded. Right. So I think we need deep repair. And then I can believe, "Oh, this place actually cares about my existence." And then care is built into our society: health care, educational care, my care for how people live and die, care for how people feel. I'm like, I don't want to feel like you're just manipulating me with acts of care. I want to feel like you really see me from birth to death as something that belongs to you and you belong to me. And if things go awry, I will repair them. And I can care for you. And you can believe me. Because I show you in my actions, not just in my speeches every four years, but in every day actions. You see my care.
You’re practicing care.
You’re practicing care. And I'm a facilitator, so to me, it's like facilitation is the way you care for a group. I would rather...
These foundational sins of corralling water and genocidal violence are also analogous to more recent cycles of erasure in Detroit. The construction of the new Detroit atop the Detroit that's been here in ruin for the better part of a century. What's notable for the sake of what we're exploring in this series of audio essays is that the social, political and spatial relations in Detroit and Mexico City are presently being shaped and reshaped by the same kinds of capitalist speculation, overpolicing and pervasive surveillance.
The thing that irks me about this new Detroit discourse is that nearly any time I mention that I live in Detroit to folks from outside Detroit, the first reaction is something like, "Oh, cool, I hear the city's 'coming back,' especially downtown!" And I cringe every time because where do they think the city went and where exactly do they think it's going? And what about the people who've been here all along?
Listen. Everybody likes nice things and Detroiters want their city to look and feel like it's thriving and cared for and invested in just as much as the next person. But it's undeniable that the capital-fueled remaking of downtown Detroit, of Midtown and other neighborhoods that are marked by a recognizable resurgence is not for many of the people who already called Detroit home. It's a tactic meant to attract new capital and the people who have it.
I've spent time in Elmwood Cemetery that has one of our last open air creeks, which most folks will tell you is called Bloody Run Creek or Parents Creek. But all those names, I mean, you look at that and you're just like, "That's not what your name is. That's not... That's what that's what some‚— that's what someone who like, who's been indoctrinated in this world that like that like we get to name something Bloody Run Creek." I mean it's it's too beautiful to be called Bloody Run Creek. And and it's just it's struck me that like all there's there's literally a whole other reality happening underneath the reality that that in some ways you know to this idea that we know too much it's almost like we know too much about only one reality.
Part of what Nate's offering here is a reminder that whatever is erased or subsumed under colonial conquest of people and land cannot and should not be forgotten. What was Bloody Run Creek before it ran red with French and British soldiers blood? And how does the fact of that violence inform what surrounds the creek now? He's also pulling apart the precarity of the fictions that construct our colonized reality, in a place like Detroit.
These reflections can also serve as a reminder that the erasures we witness and the so-called renaissance some would use to describe Detroit of today, are not the first. Bloody Run Creek is named to commemorate a battle between two colonial powers that attempted, in the larger arc of their efforts, to erase Indigenous claims to the land that surrounds it.
This idea that we know too much about only one reality is also a provocation to question that one reality‚—or imaginary‚—in the various places where it shows up.
In a sense, we have refashioned time itself, making it a function of our spatial infrastructure practices. If we cannot literally play the role of time, we try to trick time altering environmental rhythms and cycles, choreographing material flows. But the trick is on us. The world is filled with protagonists known and unknown, who are not subject to design intent.
Anytime we intervene in the environment, when we, quote, "reorganize space for human needs or transform the landscape into a desired state, whether intentionally or not, we're engaged in a kind of temporal sorcery," according to landscape architecture professor Brett Milligan. This happens when we pave a road, burn a bunch of fossil fuels, attempt to contain water or plow a field. Doing so constitutes a kind of acceleration or deceleration of our landscapes. Slowing and diverting water through damming, for example, bends time or say, building entire cities on top of ghost rivers and then building giant inflatable dams to slow down flooding a couple hundred years later. This is to say, that our attempts to control nature, water especially, constitute attempts to manipulate time in addition to space. In our episodes on Safety and Interdependence, we examine how the systems we design to care for human needs too often attempt to isolate our needs from one another. Similarly, our technological attempts at controlling weather events and water are predicated on decontextualizing or fragmenting those events from their complex contexts, abstracting them from time and space. To be clear, in Milligan's writing, he's not arguing that we shouldn't be involved in accelerating or decelerating landscapes. Rather with reference to other scholars like Laura Bear and Barbara Adam, he does argue that we need to approach the ways we act on time more skillfully, with better knowledge and more ethically. He asks, for example, "why and how should a landscape's evolutionary path be shaped? For whom and by whom? Are the knowledges and techniques derived from and applied within this landscape equitable, representative and participatory?"
So far, all the language that I've used to describe the climate transformation surrounding these floods is couched in linear or clock time. I've mentioned the increased frequency with which these flooding events are happening. The 500-year flood that became the 50-year or five-year flood, their severity has heightened compared to years past, right? But, building on the work of Barbara Adam, who proposes that we see the world through timescapes Milligan points out that linear or clock time is actually inadequate for capturing the complexity of the embodied, spatial ways in which time is experienced when grounded in place, and the rhythms and tempos of a specific, ever-changing landscape.
In a similar vein, Indigenous knowledge has a lot to teach us about:
Consent and responsibility as a way to understand time.
You're listening to Kyle Whyte again. He posits that narrating climate change in linear units of time leads us to shortsighted, irresponsible attempts to mitigate climate change. He writes that "when people relate to climate change through linear time, that is, as a ticking clock, they feel peril and seek ways to stop the worst impacts of climate change immediately. But swift action obscures their responsibilities to others who risk being harmed by the solutions." Instead, Whyte offers a framework for narrating climate change and, more broadly, for understanding change over time in terms of relationality rather than clock time: it's called "kinship time." Unlike linear time, kinship time challenges us to conceive of time in terms of how it shifts relations between different members of our natural ecology rather than in chronological terms, as we typically interpret time in the U.S. and other Western contexts. We usually hear about climate change as described in terms of statistical changes in weather based on quantities of temperature, precipitation and wind averaged over 30-year periods. Basically, like I did when describing the heightened frequency of flooding earlier. To illustrate the difference between linear and kinship time, Kyle Whyte shares an anecdote from Melissa Nelson, an indigenous ecologist, writer, editor, media maker, scholar-activist and professor at Arizona State University, who describes climate transformations based on Anishinaabe intellectual and scientific traditions:
For Anishinaabeg, Mishipizhu, the underwater panther, has always been a guardian of the waters and keeper of balance between the water spirits, land creatures and sky beings. What is his role today, given these human-induced changes in long-term climatic cycles? As the climate shifts and weather patterns are disrupted, there will be stronger thunder beings in some areas and less of them in others. They will come at different times of the year and disrupt seasonal cycles. This is already happening and wild rice gatherers are finding that their lakes are flooded and the rice is stunted in some areas. Their lakes are dry with no rice in others. Hunters are finding that moose, bear and other animals are migrating farther and farther north because of the heat in the South. Other animals and birds, traditionally unknown to the Ojibwe, are migrating up from the hotter South. Increased temperatures also mean increased insects and diseases for some game animals like deer and moose. The temperature of the sky is heating up and changing the behavior, habitat and health of land and water creatures. Mishipizhu has traditionally controlled the well-being of natural resources, especially fish and those others living in and around the waters. In Ojibwe hydromythology, Mishipizhu has always been an enemy of the thunder beings. Today they are being aggravated and multiplied by what we call climate change.
In this story, Nelson refers to relationships between plants, waterways, beings and humans. If we even just take a narrow view to ask ourselves how relations between air, water and people have influenced each other, it's hard to ignore that what humans have done to nature has had disproportionately harmful consequences on nature and on us.
Contaminated air shortens our lifespans and increases Earth's temperature. Rising temperatures change rainfall and water remembers and returns. But the list goes on. Settler colonialism and Western expansion were violent not only toward Ondigenous peoples, but also toward the land, animals and waterways across the Great Lakes region. We made the landscape suit our needs. We covered up rivers, took down trees and built our infrastructure wherever we pleased. Industrialization and Michigan's prized auto industry have both polluted air and water quality locally and shaped the culture and dominance of car dependency worldwide. Downriver, oil refineries like Marathon have a long history of air quality violations and have earned the 48217 zip code, the sometimes-debated title of "Michigan's most polluted zip code." Contemporary consumerism contributes to the global pattern of climate change, too. And Detroit sits on the border with Canada at the busiest international border crossing in North America in terms of trade volume.
These are all pretty undeniable facts that shape how this city and others globally will experience higher temperatures and severe rainfall events, to name just a couple of ways that nature responds and relationships shift. As Kyle writes in "Time as Kinship," "Nelson's description covers why interdependence through mutual responsibility matters when there are various ecological tensions such as that between Mishipizhu and the thunderers. Humans' Interventions into the climate system are disrupting the interaction between the responsibilities and tensions."
Whyte goes on to say that the word kinship in "kinship time," "refers to a sense of responsibility to bonds of mutual caretaking and guardianship." Orienting ourselves to time as a set of relational responsibilities can change how we think about our role in mitigating climate change. Instead of understanding time as a ticking clock, for example, it asks us to see our responsibility to other members of the natural world and recognize our interdependence, another concept we explored in great depth in another episode of this series. This is the difference, I think, between the ways we've talked about attempting to control across nature, covering up waterways with concrete, forcing water to do what we want, for example, and managing our existence alongside water in a way that acknowledges that water is just going to move. Water will remember its old pathways. And water will make rivers of our freeways.
To step back a bit, how we remember and tell the story of climate change is important too, because it shapes how we respond to it.
One of the key themes in the class that I work with the students on is that memory is probably the most important concept to sustainability. And what I think is really important is that, you know, everybody, no matter who you are, is depending on their their memory. But, I think that Indigenous people, Black people and others are are actually the ones that are pointing that out and being explicit about it, right. Actually, you are using your memory and how you use your memory matters and how skilled you are as a activator of your memory means a lot to what types of of solutions, what types of actions, what types of mobilizations you advocate for and you favor.
History too often frames the narrative of climate change in terms of the technological feats that enabled environmental extraction and degradation in the first place. Here's Kyle again.
So, for example, when white or other privileged scientists describe something like the origins of human caused climate change, is one of the things they might tell is the history of when the U.S. and other countries were able to create these technologies, especially extractive technologies that were able to put so much greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. You know, one of the main causes of of climate change. And so that's how we describe it. They'll say, well, there was somebody that discovered this relationship, and then there were other people discovered how you would, you know, create the technologies to do it. And there was these other people that had the political or economic, you know, brilliance or genius to mobilize at a mass scale. And before they knew it, they were polluting so much that it was was too late.
This version of events places more weight and value on the technological accomplishments that produce climate change than the relative environmental degradation and harm they leave in their wake. But it's not the only way to remember how we got here.
For Indigenous people, for example, but also for for Black people and for others that also share in that history. That's not exactly what we remember. We remember actually, it's not anybody's brilliance that was responsible for bringing about these technologies. Actually, we remember people who, because they didn't care for our consent, because they didn't care for our land tenure, because they didn't care for the labor conditions that we would have to endure because they didn't care about a number of things, they just built all of these technologies quickly because they could displace us or they could not pay us or they could not take extra measures to address health or other issues, or they didn't have to include us in decision making. We didn't have a veto right to any of these things, and so we were wiped off of our own land and had to suffer health and other issues that historically we didn't have to suffer in that way prior to industrialization and colonialism. And so what we remember is that the climate crisis was actually caused by a mass violation of people's consent, a mass lack of responsibility, a complete. Yeah, depending how one wants to say it, either a breakdown of relationality or just the never having established any relationality whatsoever, any kinship whatsoever. And that's why we're in a climate crisis. That's why it moved so quickly.
Kyle invites us to question: How does remembering what brings us to climate change in this way change how we respond? Maybe it shifts our focus. If our framing for understanding climate change is couched in this belief that technological innovation and human accomplishment are worth the cost of climate degradation, then we might be led to think that technological innovation and human accomplishment are viable ways out of this crisis that we've created. Basically to save the planet and ourselves, we just have to innovate harder. And this is precisely what happens now. But if instead we enter the question from a frame of reference that foregrounds the problem as a violation of consent or a breakdown of relationality, as Kyle says, might we consider how we respond to the fallout of climate change in a way that seeks enthusiastic consent or in a way that moves forward from a place of grounded relationality? Instead of thinking about how quickly we ended up in this mess and how quickly we can get out of it, what if we contemplated slowing down in such a way that cultivates responsibility and relationality?
Throughout this episode, we've discussed nature's power, human vulnerability to that power and nature's vulnerability to human manipulation. Thinking of land and water as something that has the capacity to remember really shifts the traditional dynamic a bit. It gives them more agency than we typically afford.
You know, I've been thinking about Anishinaabe tradition, right, like water is is a being and water is an animate thing. It's a it's not a thing! It's a being, right, so in English only, only things that get to be beings are literally like mostly like mammals. Really like people.
Or, corporations.
Yeah. Right. They have rights.
But in other languages and other spaces, you know, nature is a being, and in some ways, I'm like, yo, like what is the water trying to teach us here? What is it trying to tell us—
We acting up!
Not just like, the literal, like, "Oh, we need to go." But, like, I. I'm like, almost like, if we can spend time with it, is it may be telling us how we could also learn how in some ways like, like allow, how do we allow like some of that, some of the healing that needs to happen is literally in in the earth that we inhabit that we have been gifted, that it's it's the healing not only of our of our functional systems like schools and prisons and food, but also like our physical bodies and then like the physical land that we are on. Like if we are able if we're really trying to get some abolition going, it probably means we're also going to have to like, free the land. If we honor the land as a living being and if that land also has rights, just as we have rights, then‚— and then that water has rights, just as we have rights. And that it is a gift that no one can pay for. No one can own. Right? Like, then then that's a real opportunity to actually‚— for things to be different. Yeah, but it's it's like if we know‚— if we can start to know of this place as that place, and not the colony and not the space that is just a part of America, then there's possibility. Right? Because in that place, this world can be‚— and we live it, right? It literally can be whatever we dream it to be. And right now, we have dreamed, dreamed it to be this Detroit.
But if we can imagine, know that this that Detroit is just one. It's is one outfit, right? That's just one outfit that, like some people that we have‚— that has happened here. But like this place can be so many things.
Here, Nate points out nature's capacity to hold memory for far longer than our feeble human minds can contend with, much in the same way that we talked about ghost streams and flooding as a resurgence of water's remembering. The place we know as Detroit hasn't always been Detroit. And this place, regardless of what we call it, carries with it a series of very specific colonial legacies and the Indigenous legacies that preceded them and continue here. Part of what Nate's invitation challenges us to do here is to question what is the land around me asking me to remember? What are those carceral fictions asking me to forget? And how might remembering a different set of histories expand my own capacity to imagine otherwise toward an abolitionist future?
Nate's also saying that if we're all resigned to the so-called fact that the place where we're situated is called Detroit within a state called Michigan within the United States, it limits our thinking. Because what if the state, too, needs to be reimagined or altogether abolished? How do we make space for that possibility in our imaginations? So when he says:
This place can be so many things.
Part of what he's speaking to is the space that exists beyond these myths we often internalize about neoliberalism and, to extend it to the purview of this series, carcerality and punishment as prominent features of neoliberalism. It would follow that these systems are permanent, inevitable even with a life of their own that human beings can't possibly transform, as we discussed in Part 1. So, if they can't be transformed, why even try, right? Just fall in line. Luckily for us, we know the reality is that neoliberalism isn't natural. And just like the rivers that run beneath Detroit, it's not fixed. Neither are our imaginations and neither is time.
All right. So to sum things up, as clear and present as climate change now feels, isn't this the time to remember how to work with nature rather than against it? And what would it look like and what might we gain from narrating our experience of those transformations through kinship time instead of clock time? Until next time, remember what's real: we can't control nature as completely as we'd like to believe; nature acts on us just as forcefully as we act on our landscapes, if not more; and we have to reckon with the relational harm we've caused to the environment and to each other, otherwise, we'll keep piling on top of deeply unstable footing. While we may not be able to control nature, we can control how we respond to the fallout of climate crises. And we can do so in ways that don't exacerbate existing social and economic disparity. And last but not least, this place can be, has been and will be, so many things.
Thank you for listening and thank you to the many people who've made this show and the wider body of work possible over the last three years. Thank you to all the futurists featured in this episode who participated in this project three long years ago in this episode that includes Myrtle Thompson-Curtis and Nate Mullen. Thank you especially to PG for helping me facilitate these conversations. And thank you to Kyle White for participating in an interview this fall. You'll hear more from him on other episodes, too. And I have to give a shout out to my friend Amelia Yang, who collected sounds from the streets of Mexico City for this episode. This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by me, Lauren Williams. Essays were co-edited by my dear friend and Ayinde Jean-Baptiste. And the audio was engineered by Connor Anderson. Excerpts from several references were read by the voice actor Joy Vandervoordt-Cobb. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.
This project is presented in partnership with Respair Production and Media.
In this episode, we meet neighbors and residents who have organized themselves to nurture lands they belong to, while Lauren Williams outlines seductive narratives of pioneerism, emptiness and care that beg the question of whether all property might be virtual. In her eyes, land speculation, the financialization of housing markets, and urban “blight,” all feel more than a little esoteric, as if confusion is the point. Here, Williams clears the smoke and cracks the mirrors, braiding histories of property valuation, colonialism, and displacement from the Detroit River to the Mediterranean Sea.
Featured guests in this episode include Myrtle Thompson-Curtis, one of the co-founders and executive director of Feedom Freedom Growers, and Nate Mullen, an artist, educator and founder of People in Education.
In the second part of our episode on Safety and Interdependence, I told a story about the neighborhood-initiated park across the street from my house that was bulldozed by the city in October of 2024. The park had been forced off at least two other vacant lots before, and in both cases, according to them, it was because someone had bought the land they sat on and maintained in the owner's absence. All of the lots they once occupied now sat vacant again. Those fabled improvements never came. The park across from my home was constructed and cared for by neighbors, demolished by the city's Blight Removal Team in the name of the environment‚ and because it was a so-called mess‚ and is, at the time I'm writing this now listed for sale by the Detroit Land Bank.
I was initially encouraged by the fact that immediately after the city destroyed their space, my park neighbors were right back at it the next day. But two short weeks later, several police cars showed up to forcibly remove them all from their folding chairs and from the park for good. The next day, a for sale sign went up. The park's demolition and really the longer history of folks claiming and congregating in vacant space in the city and then repeatedly being forced off to other lots is symptomatic of a larger system of real estate speculation and an accompanying phenomenon called "organized abandonment," coined by Marxist geographer David Harvey. Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines organized abandonment as the effect of sustained disinvestment, leaving people without the capacity to, quote, "keep their individual selves, their households and their communities together with adequate income, clean water, reasonable air, reliable shelter and transportation and communication infrastructure." What's risen up in the crevices of this cracked foundation of security, she says, has been policing and prison.
This kind of abandonment and disinvestment leaves neighborhoods marked by the kinds of ruin porn and vacancy that Detroit has become known for, and it often precedes housing speculation, meaning many of these vacant homes and lots, for example, are owned by faraway commercial real estate investors who buy up packages of properties and let them sit unattended until it's profitable to do something with them. They let them rot. Either because they're not here or don't care, or because they think the profit from flipping them will outpace the blight tickets they'll receive in the interim. They become uninhabitable eyesores. Other property values around them might suffer. Trees grow through windows and front lawns turn into fields of wildflowers. And Sara Saransky's book, The City After Property, she writes about the many names Detroit has been given over the years and the various ways they've been used to construct it as terra nullius, a blank slate to be conquered or claimed‚ which we'll talk more about later‚ especially after the 1967 uprising.
At a time of guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, a journalist at the Los Angeles Times observed, Detroit has shown us how close we are to the jungle. The use of natural metaphors to explain urban change was not new since at least the late 1920s, commentators had used the lexicon of blight borrowed from plant science to explain the spread of urban decay. But the jungle comparison, long a motif in travel and colonial writing, did something different. It represented the city as a whole, not just parts of it, as a wild place, only fit for savages, providing justification for white and capital flight, as well as for discriminatory and punitive public policy.
This language and the lexicon of blight that Safransky refers to predates the park. It predates my life in Detroit, and it predates the rampant real estate speculation of the current neoliberal hellscape. That said, it still persists today. In the 2010s, journalists began writing about how, quote, "Detroit, for all its problems, or perhaps because of them, has become nothing less than a new American frontier. Once, easterners heeded the call to 'Go west, young man!' To leave behind the comforts of sophistication of all the established citadels in search of adventure and fortune, and to tame this great continent. Now that same whisper is starting to build around Detroit."
In the 1960s and 70s, jungle and battle imagery signaled the city's descent into darkness or Blackness. By contrast, the return of nature in the 2010s is its salvation. In American myth, the prairie conjures the pioneering spirit, nation-building and settler land rushes. Repurposed in the urban context, it recycles a settler colonial trope that has long pacified the violence of Indigenous genocide and land theft to make the resettlement of Black spaces seem heroic, like representations of ruins, rewilding narratives, deemphasize the ongoing struggles of hundreds of thousands of the city's human inhabitants, or in many cases, omitted them altogether.
Other discourse described Detroit's industrial ruin in the context of natural disasters like post-Katrina New Orleans or Pompei, places consumed rapidly by natural disaster, floods and volcanoes. Regardless of the century, this language has "political stakes," Safransky writes. She continues, noting that "geographer Nate Millington has drawn attention to how such representations become particularly problematic when resurgent nature is celebrated as cleansing a discourse with racial connotations." Put simply, they rendered a space predominantly inhabited by Black residents as empty, valueless and available for appropriation and new modes of capital accumulation. In a sense, in Detroit, nature has been pitted against people in a way that is ultimately detrimental to both.
Welcome to Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities, a series of audio essays about making room for abolition. "Making Room for Abolition" first appeared at Red Bull Arts in Detroit in October of 2021 as a month-long installation of speculative artifacts set in a home and a future without police and prisons. This series reflects on conversations from that space with Detroit-based organizers and futurists, people committed to food justice, water access, educational equity, restorative justice and Black liberation more broadly. When Black folks in Detroit manufacture better lives for ourselves, whether that's healthier food, safer neighborhoods, new technologies for moving through conflict, it's usually described as an act of survival or desperation, rather than being classified as an act of resistance or feature making or speculative design. But each and every one of them is practicing a future that especially poor Black Detroiters have been told is impossible. In each episode, we'll look closely at the kinds of fictions that shape our current attachments to policing, prisons and punishment to examine where they come from and how they affect us. At the same time, you'll hear us propose abolitionist realities that counter these fictions and open up other ways of being.
My name is Lauren Williams. I'm an artist and designer based in Detroit, Michigan, and I work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power.
This is part of a two part exploration of nature. When I refer to nature, I'm talking about it in a sense that would probably annoy scholars of the environment and climate change. But, I'm really just referring here to elements of nature that concern urban space in Detroit, which means in large part land, water and the wider dynamics of climate change. I'm also talking about our relationships to these elements of nature in the context of our focus on carceral abolition, namely: how we can witness carceral tactics at work in our approaches to living with nature today; how these carceral conditionings shape cities like Detroit; and how abolition might demand that we relate to nature differently. In this episode, we'll explore how nature shows up in Detroit, how our beliefs and practices around controlling land through ownership inform our relationships with nature in urban spaces, especially; how the land that became Detroit has been subject to colonial logics of frontiers throughout history; how powerful a fiction real property is and how these very same tactics are at work in Palestine.
In order to talk about nature and urban space, we have to talk about property. The history of property relations in Detroit is fraught, to say the least. Waves of dispossession have defined the experiences of Black landholding in Detroit. Black folks fleeing the South, a place where their ancestors had been property themselves, came to the Midwest seeking jobs amid the Great Migration. Black workers were, quote, "ghettoized within the auto industry and given the worst jobs," end quote. Their freedom to make a home and more importantly, to own homes in Michigan was kneecapped by redlining. Racist police brutality instigated the uprising of 1967, which had an indelible impact on the city's property landscape. The foreclosure crisis that hit the country worked over Detroit, too, in 2008 and 9. In the years leading up to the city's bankruptcy and fiscal conservatorship, the city began, quote, "ratcheting up tax foreclosures, privatizing and cutting back public service delivery, and aggressively recruiting private investment to the city's core, leading to the eviction of low income residents and an increasingly divided city," end quote. For context, Detroit was home to almost 2 million people in the 1950s. By 2012, the population had dropped to below 700,000‚ by more than half‚ and it had been hit hard by the foreclosure crisis a few years prior. At that point, the city labeled over 100,000 lots. A third of the city's area has either vacant or abandoned.
But let's be clear here. Vacant or abandoned doesn't always mean vacant or abandoned. These properties may have just been foreclosures, but many were still occupied.
From Safransky's book again, "In 2014 alone, the county issued tax foreclosure notices to an astounding 80,000 homes, approximately half of which were occupied," end quote. Beyond that, vacant or abandoned also doesn't necessarily mean empty or uncared for. There are many accounts of resident-led caretaking, sharing and stewardship that sprung up in the cracks exposed by the breakdown of the private property system. This could have been a moment to imagine otherwise. To explore creative strategies for commodifying property, to develop systems that reject extraction and accumulation, and to learn from what had already been going on amid Detroit's neighborhoods to collectively care for and steward the abundance of land left in the wake of so much flight. This could have been a chance to imagine what it might look like to construct a relationship to land outside of capitalist logics.
This is why the park situation bothers me so much. The city has had countless opportunities to rethink the ways we relate to land, to take notes from its residents. And time and again it rejects that and clings to both capital and carcerality, both of which have really, truly fucked it over in the past. The way the city demolished the park was violent. That space was covered with equipment: benches, tables, grills, basketball, hoops, a merry go round those tiny plastic cars kids can zoom around in, garden beds. And instead of moving it, even if it was going to be trashed, they took bulldozers and crushed everything while pushing it into a small mountain in the middle of the park before clawing it into dump trucks. They had two police units present just in case, and they were rude as hell to the folks standing by the folks who belonged to that park. When my park neighbors took over those lots, they made them productive, but in a social sense. And if you'll recall from our very first episode on Safety and Interdependence, there's a way in which the kind of activity that took place there constituted a form of being seen, not watched, of cultivating relationships, of maintaining a relationship to a space that many of these residents have been disconnected from by way of displacement, as Mia Birdsong told us:
Again, Black folks being driven away from land and family through to the prison industrial complex to Child Protective Services, there has been this American project of trying to make Black people unfree by separating us from each other.
They were producing a form of safety and practicing a form of freedom through their connections to one another and to the space they occupied. Clearing the park was about property and wealth in the way that neoliberal property is meaningless if not spinning on some kind of profit for its owners. But it was also about dignity. Sara Saransky, whose book I've quoted multiple times at this point is a writer, human geographer and professor at Vanderbilt who studies urban politics and race, especially in Detroit. In an earlier article about the spatial politics of dignity, she calls for attention to the ways dignity is either "restored or taken" in space. Citing a South African scholar, Bernadette Atuahene, "dignity taking is defined as what happens when a state directly or indirectly destroys property or confiscates various property rights for owners or occupiers, and the intentional or unintentional outcome is dehumanization or infantilization," end quote. Bulldozing the park with no notice, and so aggressively scoffing at my incredulous argument that the park-goers take care of the space, all of that constitutes acts of taking dignity.
I don't think we can own the land. I think it's a shared responsibility to care for.
That's the voice of Myrtle Thompson-Curtis, who I call Mama Myrtle, a co-founder along with her partner, Wayne Curtis, of Feedom Freedom Growers, a community garden in Detroit's Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood. Full disclosure, I'm a long-time volunteer at Feedom Freedom, and the folks who founded and run this space are a large part of what endeared me to the city of Detroit and led me to move here in 2019. I was drawn to what felt like a tangible expression of political action and daily life, of seeking sovereignty by growing your own food. And I felt at home with the quality of fellowship with Mama Myrtle and the other volunteers every weekend.
To say we can't own land probably amounts to blasphemy in the Church of Neoliberalism, but let's hear her out:
I think about my interdependence and connectedness to the thing that keeps me alive and to other people. I've been touched by the injustice system. And so to think of a society, a place to dwell. A place to thrive. Where your every action may not land you in the back of a squad car or in this system means a great deal for the future of my family, your family, our families. And the least that I can do is to sound a warning bell, to educate, to understand that we can grow food that is not violent towards our very bodies, to utilize the resources that we had available, which were plots of land.
Here, Myrtle's talking about a very different orientation to land than contemporary ownership. More like stewardship than ownership, a mutual relationship that's less extractive and more about expressing and receiving mutual care.
It starts to undo some of the damage and violence that is perpetrated against us being forced to say you have to own the land to grow on it. I say, "No, you don't!" And I practice that revolutionary love and I advocate for others to do the same.
If we can't own the land, where does that leave our precious beliefs that enable us to profit from the sale of land and homes? It's worth noting here that Myrtle sees her relationship to land as a means of repairing the harm of, quote, "violence that is perpetrated against us:" the disinvestment by the city, the inaccessibility of healthy food, the separation historically of Black folks from their land, among other violences. What could it mean to conceive of land in this way as a relation through which we repair ourselves instead of as an asset through which capitalists enrich themselves?
And Myrtle, I mean your point, which is something that I think that the beauty of like black space in Detroit is that like in our bodies, we know this, right? Like you said it from the jump land can't be bought. If it can't be bought, it also means it cannot be controlled. And I think that like in a, in America that is a wild thought. Of course you can! Of course you can, right!?
In Jefferson Chalmers, where Feedom Freedom is located, we see abandoned, boarded up homes and public schools and overgrown lots throughout the neighborhood. We contend with the jagged, overgrown sidewalks lining the streets, pitted with gaping potholes and standing water after major floods in the summer of 2021, families across Detroit, but especially in Jefferson Chalmers, encountered basements transformed into toxic sewage filled swimming pools. There were these bright orange, failed Tiger Dams installed by the Army Corps of Engineers‚ water-filled tubes that were supposed to stop water from flowing through the canals into the neighborhood. But those were swept across the lots adjacent to the Feedom Freedom garden, like giant, hideous, deflated inner tubes that definitely didn't do their jobs. These visible markers of disinvestment are evidence of multiple compounding, orchestrated crises, including an action by the state to address long known infrastructural and environmental problems facing this area of the city. We'll talk more about these floods in our next episode. But for now, here's what Nate and Myrtle have to say about disinvestment and organized abandonment on the East Side:
It's not a place for care for you. It's not a place for care. Like, there's...
I remember being able to walk to school. Yeah, my primary school, my elementary school, my junior high school and then my high school and all out of all those buildings, I can walk through that neighborhood and it's like, my goodness, it looks so devastated. And the only thing to come and spur some investment in that area is a factory that's producing fumes that are causing asthma and hurting people, harming people.
And I mean, think about it. So my daughter's five years old, and if we think about like, let's say if we lived, we don't‚ but let's say we lived around the corner from my middle school, then for all of her life and actually my middle school has been closed for at this point, it's 2021, probably closed for close to, let's say, 15 years, right? So every person in the city of Detroit under the age of 15, that is the world that they have always known. And there's also something very real about the city that‚ and this is this goes into it, and this is why, like, abolition is all over into everything, right? Like‚ our young people also are not free and safe to move freely throughout the city. So most of them only see what's immediately around them. So if you live in a world where everything around you is disinvested in, where, like people don't provide you with fresh, healthy options for food, water, air, then there is a moment, right? There's a little bit of a moment where in which like you start to internalize that, that you think that that is what you deserve and that is what the world is.
Living in this state of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore refers to as devolution is like taking resources from institutions, programs, streets, households and lives and throwing it all into permanent crisis. In the words of a resident interviewed by Rea Zaimi for their article on organized abandonment and real estate speculation in Chicago, "living amid organized abandonment feels like you're being punished, almost like the city is punishing poor people for being poor." This kind of abandonment, whether it's in the North End or Jefferson Chalmers or Chicago, is often what makes way for neighborhoods to be cleared, for folks with more capital to come in and render them profitable.
In a perverse way, real estate speculation in Detroit today has been further enabled by a tendency to frame the city as a new frontier, an urban wilderness to be tamed terra nullius akin to the westward expansion of the settlers in the age of Manifest Destiny that conquered nature as it cleared that land of its Indigenous inhabitants.
This is made possible in part by organized abandonment itself. Since I moved to Detroit five years ago, one of the common refrains I've encountered when I tell non-Detroiters that I live here, if it's not some version of the city's coming back, it's a sense that the city is some kind of blank canvas a terra nullius, a land belonging to no one, and open to claim by anyone. "Capitalizing on organized abandonment, many have redefined this majority-Black city as an urban wilderness waiting for gentrification," to quote Andrew Newman, a professor of cultural anthropology at Wayne State who studies the processes by which neighborhood residents act collectively to reshape the social, political and physical terrain of their cities. In A People's Atlas of Detroit, he and other authors add that, quote, "The trend to portray Detroit as an urban wilderness, its lands empty and open for the taking is a myth steeped in Indigenous erasure and anti-Blackness," end quote. Much of the discourse on gentrification focuses on Detroit's urban core. But outlying neighborhoods like Jefferson Chalmers may better demonstrate the way displacement of residents and dispossession of their homes, not growth, is a means of profit accumulation on its own. By draining the capital held in homes by predominantly Black homeowners.
Blighted wilderness observed in neighborhoods like Jefferson Chalmers, a product of organized abandonment, came to be presented as a problem to be solved by design, as well, a technical problem of ordering wilderness and identifying easy targets. Mapping apps developed by Loveland Technologies, like the Motor City Mapping Project and its predecessor, Why Don't We Own This? have done the work of presenting land and homes as easy to access consumables. In doing so, they further enable modern day settler colonialism or pioneerism in this so-called blighted wilderness. Loveland's founder, a guy named Jerry Paffendorf, came to Detroit after becoming disillusioned by Silicon Valley's startup scene and dreaming up a plan to play with the city's extremely affordable real estate, like a video game. The very first Loveland project began in 2010 when they purchased a $500 lot on the East Side and started selling 10,000 1-inch square lots for a dollar apiece. They called it inchvesting or micro-real estate, which Paffendorf mused might be better described as an improv art project, and based its design on virtual gameplay, inviting its micro-investors to make up stories about what would happen on their one square inch of property.
Detroit, for me, it was kind of one of those places that initially it was kind of like [inaudible], I was like, I don't understand anything that's, what's going on in that city. I only know kind of like ambiently messed up things about it. You know, I was very interested, I was reading these articles about like crazily priced properties, right? This kind of concept that was like, "Well, what are you talking about? Like, you know, a hundred dollar house, fifty dollar house, your house, one dollar house, free house, house where we'll pay you to take the house." And I was kind of acquainted with this idea of virtual real estate, you know, in Second Life the primary means of how the company makes money and how you be creative with it is you kind of buy virtual property, and then you build whatever you want on top of it. And there was something about being in the Valley and what was going on at the time‚ this is going back like 2008, 2009‚ virtual goods were big things and Xanga was a much bigger deal as like a company. And so this idea of like incredibly cheap property in Detroit and then kind of micropayments for virtual real estate where in lots of cases I'd see virtual real estate that was selling for more money than real properties in real cities. My brain didn't know how to make sense of it all, I was very naive. I fancy myself a very naive person and sometimes you keep hitting your head against the wall long enough, that can actually be an advantage on things. But anyways, trave‚ travel to Detroit with this kind of ambient concept in my head that I wanted to do something to put real property onto the internet in a new way and not knowing anything about the city, my initial lens for it was to try and like marry a micropayment with a real property, and the concept was to take a micropayment and literally a micro piece of property. So we had this kind of ridiculous novelty property fantasy, not real ownership system where you could inchvest in a square inch of land in Detroit. You essentially, if you put a dollar into the computer, you would get a square inch parcel that corresponded to a real parcel in Detroit and you could log onto the inch-tranet, we called it, so you could see to the other investors which parcels they had around you, and you could either make up what was going to happen to the property by telling story about it online or if you were adventurous, you'd come in and actually visit the property in Detroit.
Paffendorf says he was inspired to create and model inchvesting on Second Life, a virtual reality game wherein the majority of the company's profits are made from selling property in a virtual world. He remarks that property prices in Second Life were sometimes higher than the abysmally low property values in Detroit for actual homes and land. But Detroit isn't a virtual world. Real land, real homes and real people were implicated in this seemingly playful experiment in real estate speculation.
In 2011, Loveland launched Why Don't We Own this website that mapped all the properties available on the Wayne County Tax Foreclosure Auction, built atop Loveland's proprietary software called Site Control, which allows them to enter data and produce comprehensive maps showing information about property owners and the tax status of properties on the auction. Why Don't We Own This? eventually scaled up to become Motor City Mapping in 2013, when Loveland secured $1.5 million in public and private philanthropic funding to visually survey and catalog every property in the city. Mama Myrtle remembers this surveying well, recalling that those around her who participated optimistically anticipated that the project would improve the quality of the neighborhood, but she regarded it with skepticism, pretty sure the neighborhood's need for deep infrastructural repairs was still going to go ignored. It's not lost on me as I examine the dialectic between so-called fictions and reality that this vision for Loveland was modeled on a virtual world.
The real estate market is a strange web of fictions, if I ever saw one to start with. Land in the U.S. was stolen by force from its earlier inhabitants based on a myth that God herself had destined to be theirs. It was then given away or sold for arbitrary amounts of money to white men. Eventually, land ownership was made a prerequisite for citizenship and voting rights. White men who owned property came to make foundational decisions about American policy and economy for hundreds of years, long before anyone other than white men were even allowed to participate. And that doesn't even get into the financialization of the housing market that ramped up in the 1970s with the introduction of, you guessed it, neoliberal deregulation. This entire foundation rests on myths of Manifest Destiny that drove westward expansion; delusions about gender and humanity that imagined women as less than men; racial categories around Blackness and Indigeneity. They were constructed and iterated upon in the early American colonies, largely to control who could and couldn't own property. When financialization entered the picture in the 1970s, the fictions really kicked into high gear. When I say financialization, I'm referring to a major transformation of the economy that made it such that financial actors, financial institutions and financial logics gained increasing influence over the economy. In the words of Noam Chomsky:
The economy changed dramatically, in the last 35 years. There's been a major process of, conscious process of, financialization of the economy and the kind of exporting of productive industry. That's very conscious. And this not particularly obscure. Why? By about that time it was possible to make more profit in the shenanigans of money manipulation than in doing anything productive. And in market societies, people with capital go for what's profitable. One correlary to that was that the political pressure just to dismantle the regulatory apparatus with the support of economists in working with economic theories that‚ I mean it's astonishing that they're not ashamed of themselves, but anyway, that's what happened‚ one consequence of this one aspect of it is that for roughly 30 years, a little over that for the majority of the population, wages have real wages have pretty close to stagnated, a little growth, but not much. That's most of the population families get by with to a husband or wife working. We have very limited support systems as compared with other countries. So that means families are in trouble and that shows up in all kinds of ways. People, you can keep your income up by asset inflation, you know, just‚ and by debt. The asset inflation, of course, can't last. So you have repeated bubbles collapsing, the last one was an $8 trillion housing bubble, which amazingly, almost no economists could see.
Put simply, today, money is increasingly made through speculative financial investment rather than by making things.
Shelterforce, a nonprofit news organization that publishes journalism about housing, justice and community development, has written about what precipitated financialization extensively. With the rise of neoliberalism in the 70s, policymakers relaxed controls that used to regulate finance and separate commercial banking from investment banking, which is by definition, more risk prone. At that point, we saw riskier home loans like subprime loans rise dramatically; financial innovations led to novel types of tradable securities predicated on connections between real estate and financial markets; new types of investment vehicles were developed based on delinquent and other types of high risk loans; and tax policy shifted to encourage capital investment in real estate. This is where we've really turned up the gas, on the fictive nature of capital. Housing, the tangible thing, the wood and the bricks and the mortar and the pipes, plays a critical role here as collateral for debt, transforming it into an increasingly intangible asset. And the cultural and ideological imperative to treat housing as a commodity‚ a complex financial commodity, not a right‚ has opened up space for banks and hedge funds to start imagining these creative new derivative asset classes to take flight. But we shouldn't take it for granted that housing is a so-called commodity. This is another fiction we've rendered reality alongside the one that there isn't enough housing for all the people who need homes.
And at the end of the day, this matters because financialization of housing makes it harder to secure decent, affordable housing. It turns housing into a commodity, something people buy to make money, not to live in. It enables large corporate investors owning massive portfolios of housing to focus on extracting as much profit as possible from their properties instead of investing in them. So we see the quality of multifamily housing decline. It makes way for corporate investors to buy up properties and manipulate the scarcity of housing across the board. And it also makes way for the subprime mortgage crisis to dispossess millions of Americans of their homes. And finally, it makes way for us to criminalize homelessness. As we discussed in another episode of Safety and Interdependence. In short, this shit‚ the real estate market, which I take to refer to both the sale of land and the improvements upon it‚ is all made up. To be clear, my point here isn't that people shouldn't imagine new systems or that imagined systems are inherently bad. My point is: we shouldn't create the kinds of systems that require and produce such vast and intractable suffering across the board, and then pretend as if there's no way out, as if that system is a permanent fixture of our realities. Without acknowledging that we can and should dream up something else entirely.
Where do our ideas about land ownership and property rights come from anyways? And why is it that today people stewardship, labor and care for land has no bearing on their claims to that land? Neoliberal theorist Ludwig von Mises argued that, quote, "private property is absolutely fundamental for the existence of liberalism," end quote. And today we tend to operate accordingly, as if private property ownership constitutes freedom itself. But neo liberalism, as you'll recall, is relatively new. It's only been around since the mid-twentieth century, and before that, distinctly American constructions of private property were shaped by John Locke's theories on private ownership. Perhaps most instrumental was the idea of terra nullius, again, a Latin phrase that means land belonging to no one. Terra meaning earth and nullius deriving from nwhullus or no one. This word has been operationalized to frame Indigenous land in the course of carving out the United States and elsewhere as empty, abandoned, uncared for and open for the taking. The only way for such land to become valuable, he'd argue, is by making it productive through "improvements." Locke believed that, quote, "land left wholly to nature that hath no improvement of pasturage, tilling or planting is waste." Edward Said, the Palestinian scholar and author of Orientalism, coined the concept of "imaginative geographies" to describe how colonial powers perceived their own self-proclaimed sovereignty over new territories. He writes:
It is perfectly possible to argue that some distinctive objects are made by the mind and that these objects, while appearing to exist objectively, have only a fictional reality. A group of people living on a few acres of land will set up boundaries between their land and its immediate surroundings and the territory beyond which they call the land of the barbarians. In other words, this universal practice of designating in one's mind a familiar space which is ours and an unfamiliar space which is theirs, is a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary.
It doesn't matter, Said says, "if the barbarians acknowledge the distinction." For Said, imagined doesn't necessarily mean false or made up. I'm using the label of fiction throughout this series in a similar way. These fictions, like imagined geographies, are a matter of perception and enforcement that colonizers could perceive land as empty or uncared for was only significant insofar as they had the power to enforce that perception upon the places and people they encountered and enforce it, they did. To turn back to Locke to look in order for land to be valuable, it has to be quote, "improved upon by labor." You have to do something to it. In and of itself, it's worthless, he says.
Okay, well, if we look in our collective memory as Indigenous people, there could never be such a thing as ownership. The burden of history shows that something like ownership is not even possible. The accumulated environmental knowledge and environmental governance knowledge Indigenous people have suggests that there's no way that you could take something as crude and simplified as contractual property ownership and somehow use that to create a sustainable arrangement between a human owner and whatever area of land is supposedly owned by them.
You're listening to Kyle Whyte, an environmental justice scholar and faculty at the University of Michigan. He's also an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. These concepts of ownership are incongruous with other Indigenous ideas about responsibility to land and its inhabitants, also known as kinship ties.
I think that the topic of, of land ownership is a major fiction within the United States. And when we get into the details as to why it is the type of fiction that it is, it seems like obvious in a lot of ways. How has like, the US government, private industry and others done everything they can to make something obvious, like not‚ not obvious, you know, I mean the, you know, the concept of like contractual land ownership it can't possibly work in any which way you try to understand it, you know, for example...
When Kyle says it can't possibly work, he's pointing out the fallacy of John Locke's theories of private ownership. The notion that land that seems empty and unused to white people is inherently up for grabs.
For example, there were, you know, previous Europeans and others that you had the idea that a certain type of like individual ownership and they actually thought this, that if you just people owned something in a certain way, then that would mean that they would use it in the best way. But, we know that that's completely false. And there's no way that just by somebody having a contractual ownership over a demarcated area of property, that they're going to do the best things with that area of land. In fact, history has shown us that that's like the opposite. It's actually literally not true. In fact, it's people that have that ownership that do some of the worst things to the land and have caused the climate crisis. You know, we also know that land refers to everything that's inhabited and migrating through and dwelling in and stopping by in that area, you know, most of which are not beings that have any cultural connection or anything like ownership whatsoever.
To pick up where Kyle left off, much like Indigenous Americans, Palestinians' attachment to land emerges from a different place, not a place of productivity or profit seeking, but a place of relation. To many Palestinians, olive trees symbolize a profound cultural and historical Anchorage, the land rather than a means of improving it and increasing its productivity. While Palestinians see the trees in this way, Zionist settlers interpret them as evidence of an illegitimate and ultimately inferior form of land usage. Israeli and American settlers both characterized the geography they encountered as empty, vacant and offer this as a valid rationale for taking it. From the Detroit River to the Mediterranean Sea, terra nullius keeps rearing its ugly head. It feels like one of the most egregious and foundational fictions beneath this whole charade. It validated the original dispossession of Indigenous Americans' land, and it's been deployed over and over and over again as economies and states take on new formulations to validate new kinds of theft and extraction in the name of capitalist accumulation and wealth.
In Palestine, for the last hundred years or so, a similar logic to what enabled American settler colonialism has been deployed to dispossess Palestinians of their land and justify an apartheid occupation. Amid the ongoing genocide perpetrated by the state of Israel, real estate development has shown up in ways that extend the fictions levied to justify the destruction of Gaza since October 7th, 2023, the killing of over 40,000 Palestinians at the time I'm writing this in October 2024, and the deaths of over 100,000 more by some counts as a result of malnutrition, lack of medication, and unsanitary living conditions as a product of the nonstop assault.
Let's back up.
Locke's rationale about the improvement of land substantiating one's claims to it has been taken up by Zionist thought since Israel's founding in 1948 to justify reestablishing a, quote, "long lost connection with the ancient land of Israel," end quote. To return to Edward Said's imagined geographies, both Palestine and the territories which became the United States, were imagined as, quote, "unimproved, under-productive, wasted and vacant lands, thereby activating the settlers right to appropriate them," end quote. Zionist leaders have long emphasized the barren nature of Palestinian land as justification for establishing the state of Israel, expelling nearly a million Palestinians and gradually stealing more and more and more land in the Palestinian territories it occupies. Gaza and Detroit are very different places, but they're both places that are subject to forms of extraction and dispossession, animated and accelerated by colonial, carceral, and capitalist logics.
On the one hand, in Detroit, where we see organized abandonment at work, it's a speculative long game, the slow degradation and eventual clearing of homes and neighborhoods to make way for new investment. Gazans experience military bombardment so severe that it's produced as of April 2024; 37 million tons of debris, clouds of toxic dust, fumes and microparticles released into the atmosphere; the destruction of wastewater management and resulting daily release of about 130,000 cubic meters of raw sewage into the sea; toxic soil, air and groundwater caused by munitions; to say nothing of the death and displacement. If any part of this colonial endeavor were really about who can care best for land and environment, they're doing a pretty shit job. It's uncanny how much in the same way that Detroit has been painted as a vacant frontier land ready for the taking by wealthier newcomers, Israel unashamedly paints Gaza as a potential blank slate, a geography that could have been valuable if only the people there knew how to make it valuable. A place that could be valuable if only they could clear it of its inhabitants. A place that can be valued only in the ways capital knows how to value land. A wasteland.
Come visit beautiful Gaza. With its stunning beaches and charming boardwalks. You can stay in one of our five star hotels and get a taste of the best in Middle Eastern food. Embrace the vibrant nightlife of the city and experience a culture rich in tradition that. This is what Gaza could have been like without Hamas.
This Israeli ad paints Palestinians in Gaza much in the same way that Detroit's Black residents and Indigenous Americans before them have been painted as inept at managing their own land, sprinkled with accusations of terrorism, of course. The logics that enable this interpretation are shared by the American political machine, the real estate industry, and the wider neoliberal logics around property as represented here by Donald Trump's son in law, Jared Kushner:
And Gaza's waterfront property, it could be very valuable, too, if people would focus on kind of building up, you know, livelihoods. You think that all the money that's gone into this tunnel network and into all the munitions, if that would have gone into education or innovation, what could have been done? And so I think that it's a little bit of an unfortunate situation there. But I think from Israel's perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.
Embedded in Kushner's comment is the same gross colonial assumption that Palestinians are inept caretakers of their own land; that someone else, ostensibly Israelis or American real estate magnates, would be better equipped and therefore more worthy to do so. His comment about the sense that Gaza is essentially being wasted as homes for Palestinians can't be taken alone either. It must be understood in the context of the primary mechanism propelling the clearance of land in Palestine at this moment in time: a genocidal military campaign that has displaced nearly 90% of Gaza's population or 2 million people as of September 2024, according to the U.N. A campaign that's been couched as a defensive attack.
What I would do right now if I was Israel is I would try to say, number one, you want to get as many civilians out of out of Rafah as possible. I think that you want to try to clear that out. I know that with diplomacy, maybe you get them into Egypt. I know that that's been refused. But with the right diplomacy, I think it would be possible. But in addition to that, the thing that that I would try to do if I was Israel right now is I would just bulldoze something in the Negev. I would try to move people in there. I know that won't be the popular thing to do, but I think that that's a better option to do so that you can go in and finish the job.
In case you missed it, he's saying they should either ship all the Gazans to Egypt or bulldoze the Negev Desert, dump Palestinian refugees there, all so Israel can finish "the job," which, by the way, is removing Palestinians from Gaza, period. And it's not at all disconnected from us here in the U.S.. The Gazan genocide is an American and Israeli genocide. The Israeli state is funded by the American people, and the Israeli real estate machine is enabled by American industry, too.
This is the Marketplace Morning Report, I'm Nova Safo. Amidst an escalation of violence and protests in the West Bank, there is increasing scrutiny of money and resources flowing from the U.S. Jewish community that supports the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. According to settlement tracking group Peace Now, the Israeli government has seized more Palestinian land for settlements in the West Bank this year than at any time in the last three decades.
Back in March, a tense scene unfolded at Congregation Ketterer Torah, an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Teaneck, New Jersey, a suburb of Manhattan. "One, two, three, four, occupation no more!" Outside the synagogue, behind police barricades, hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists were protesting what was happening inside an Israeli property fair. Visitors browsed glossy real estate displays, pitching houses and condos in Israeli cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa and occupied West Bank settlements like Efrat and Ma'aleh Adumim.
To spell this out again, this land grab is predicated on the fiction that the Gaza Strip would be better off in Israeli and American hands; that they must clear it of all Palestinians in order for that to transpire; that they should appropriate part of the desert to dump the Palestinians they've dispossessed of land and home. And once Gaza is cleared of its Palestinian inhabitants, they'll start building luxury high rises on the beach. And keep in mind, this proposition only moves from fiction to reality because of the unconscionable degree of violent military force exhibited over the last year. In December of 2023, an Israeli real estate development company known for building illegal settlements in the West Bank posted a fake ad on Twitter for beachfront real estate in Gaza. It features a loose architectural rendering of luxury homes superimposed on top of images of a Gaza neighborhood reduced to rubble by Israeli bombings. At the top of the image, the ad reads: "A house on the beach is not a dream." It's been debunked as a publicity stunt or a quote unquote joke. To me, it doesn't really matter if it's real or not for it to help articulate the ways in which settler colonial fictions ordain who deserves to occupy land and neoliberal capitalist fictions privilege housing as an investment vehicle rather than as a home. The vile substance of whatever humor a person might find in a joke so gruesome is real enough for me. The fictions it stands on like terra nullius or the mythologies that uphold the apartheid Israeli state, or the logics that enable the hundreds of illegal settlements already dispersing the West Bank, are real enough. The genocide is real enough. And it's no secret that the Zionist vision for Gaza is for it to become a part of the Israeli state at the expense of Palestinian life. In the words of Daniella Weiss, the so-called grandmother of Israel's settler movement:
Arabs will not stay in the Gaza Strip. Who will stay? Jews!
At this point, it's hard not to see this as a real estate grab disguised as a genocide disguised as self-defense.
The genocide in Gaza is an unconscionably violent form of clearing land for neoliberal profit making. A dignity taking, as we referred to it earlier. It's not comparable in the scale and pace of horror and demolition to what we see happening in Detroit. I would argue, though, that there fueled by similar logics and enabled by similar fictions.
When I was in grad school, I curated a small art show with some friends and one of the artists, a Mexican-American painter and illustrator named Danny Brown, showed a piece titled "Gentrification is Genocide." This wasn't abstract for him. He was commenting on the consequences of displacement and dispossession. What it costs you, in years of your life, to be uprooted economically or displaced without recourse. We got some backlash. People with ties to particularly violent, horrific genocides didn't like the idea of equating gentrification to widespread killing. But if we take the U.N. Genocide Convention's definition, genocide contains two parts, a mental and physical element. It involves acts committed "with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" to include "killing members of the group, causing serious bodily injury or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." If we take this definition and look at how Black folks got here to the U.S., if we look at the long arc of incarceration and police brutality and the ways they extract and kill Black people, if we look at American eugenics experiments, if we look at failing infrastructure locally in Detroit, at lead poisoning and systemic dispossession of housing, at the dignity taking, at the ways Child Protective Services extracts Black kids from households, and the attendant psychic and physiological fallout of displacement and failing infrastructure and wealth extraction, it's certainly possible to interpret the way Detroit and the wider United States treats Black Americans as genocidal.
And I want to be very, very clear. This isn't the oppression Olympics and I'm not pointing this out to diminish the horror of the unabashedly violent killing of Palestinians or Rwandans or Armenians or Indigenous Americans or Cambodians or European Jews or... you get the point. But it's something I think of often because it's a provocation that makes us uncomfortable. And I think about the various ways violence embeds itself in our world and the ways it morphs into new forms as economies, societies and cultures shift. If only for that reason, it's worth sitting with that discomfort.
I have to admit, I keep getting stuck on this recurring contradiction as I write and record this essay: I'm pointing out to you the city's disinvestment that leads to an environment in which nature reclaims parts of the city. And I'm framing that as a problem. It's a reflection of their lack of care for their inhabitants. I'm then telling you that terra nullius isn't a valid argument for taking land that doesn't belong to us, whether by martial or economic force, whether on Turtle Island or in Palestine. I'm then telling you that I think my Park neighbors did in fact deserve to stay on that park land, in part because it had been left on cared for by the city or anyone else who had a so-called ownership stake in it. To reconcile this, part of what I'm parsing is the holes that keep emerging in the logics of capitalist real estate markets. The function of designating land terra nullius unclaimed wilderness for the taking is only ever invoked for the sake of profit and for no other reason not community benefit, not returning land to the commons, not social life, not a legacy of stewardship that proves a relationship with the land. None of that. Nature's reclamation of space in a city subject to organized abandonment such as Detroit, is evidence of a lack of care for each other, not some cleansing spirit of nature come to make the city and its inhabitants whole again. The notion of nature as a cleansing force in a majority Black city radiates racism. But it also conjures a definition of policing that we referred to back in our episodes on Safety and Interdependence. That is, according to Merriam-Webster "as a transitive verb, one definition of policing remains to make clean and put in order." But, when combined, both of these uses of the cleansing of the city, policing it in order to rewild it are deeply racialized and classed employing carceral logics, fictions and force to manipulate nature into a tool that disconnects people from land while simultaneously denying land any agency.
So, to return to where we started. What if we can't own land? Like Myrtle said. What if we belong to the land instead of owning it? And what if these systems and regimes we regard as unchangeable and naturally occurring aren't? What else might be possible? And what if the church of neoliberalism is actually a cult and we're all just one mortgage payment away from showing up in a documentary exposé about how we fell prey to our cultic leaders' enterprise? As Nate Mullen walked through the Making Room for Abolition living room installation in 2021, he picked up the third edition dictionary and brought it to the recording studio.
But I would I think that one of the things that your piece really brings to me, which is actually that I'd love us to bring, is that like, America also doesn't want us to know the truth of the place that we're actually in. And that's why like I brought, the Ojibwe dictionary.
You got the fake one, though!
Right! I got the fake one because it's the third edition.
It is.
Right?
Nate's point isn't about denying the fact that colonialism happened. It's about acknowledging that the only thing separating the colonial reality we've inherited today from the countless other possible realities we could be living is a violent, genocidal approach to claiming and defining land and people. It's about recognizing that it isn't somehow inherently true that this place is Detroit. It's a fiction that's been violently carved into the earth and into our ancestry. If this place can be a tree and that place across the water can be Windsor, why can't we just imagine them as something entirely new again? And more importantly, what would that actually require?
Next time, we'll explore what happens when nature itself snaps us out of this trance, reminding us of these fictions with a force we can't ignore. Before we close, here's a dispatch from an abolitionist reality:
In a far future, year unknown, in a home on the landscape where Detroit once sat, a side table is stacked with treasured books that never sit untouched long enough to gather dust. The home is situated in a Detroit that is no longer Detroit. A Detroit where the shoreline was swallowed by a great flood that reorganized our landscape in such a way that water is now more abundant and ever present than land. A third edition Ojibwe Dictionary lays next to a copy of Grandma's memoir about her life of organizing in Chiapas and Detroit, a tale that's as much about two places transformed by water as it is about Black and Indigenous solidarities. The third edition dictionary is spread open atop a first edition Ojibwe dictionary published over 100 years ago. The pages are used often, but cared for. Someone in the home is studying meticulously and they turn to this reference. Often it's unpopular to be unable to communicate in Anishinaabemowin these days.
Thanks for joining us for this episode of Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities. Until next time, remember what's real: We can't actually own the land. Like borders, property rights are only real in our current paradigm if they're violently enforced. Land doesn't have to turn a profit to be valuable. The people who take land aren't inherently more qualified to care for it. In fact, the opposite is often true. Detroit and Waawiyaatanong were never empty to begin with, and there are countless other ways to relate to land besides the carceral colonial tactics of control, theft and extraction we've all been taught.
Thank you for listening and thank you to the many people who've made this show and the wider body of work possible over the last three years. Thank you to all the futurists featured in this episode who participated in this project three long years ago. In this episode that includes Myrtle Thompson-Curtis and Nate Mullen. And also thank you to Kyle White, who participated in an interview in the fall of 2024. And finally, thank you especially to P.G. for helping me facilitate these conversations. This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by me, Lauren Williams. Essays were co-edited by my dear friend Ayinde Jean-Baptiste. And the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Excerpts from several references were read by voice actor Joy Vandervoort-Cobb. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.
This project is presented in partnership with Respair Production & Media.
Something sinister ties the pristine to the policed: landscapes, bodies, and the neighborhoods born from their mingling. In this second meditation on safety & interdependence, thoroughly cited from both academy & community, Williams draws our focus to disappearance as an evolving method. Put another way, employing violence workers to delete the native, the trafficked, the poor is American as cherry pie, and the attendant systems of prison and policing may actually be working just as designed. What would our world look like if we reconstituted safety as connectedness, freedom as togetherness? Will there even be a world if we don’t?
Featured guests in this episode include Nick Buckingham (Co-Executive Director, Michigan Liberation), PG Watkins (organizer and facilitator extraordinaire), Angel McKissic (Founder, Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network), Monica Lewis-Patrick (President & CEO, We the People of Detroit), and Nate Mullen (artist, educator and founder of People in Education).
HOUSING IS A HUMAN RIGHT! Every citizen deserves the right to sleep in the richest country in the history of the world.
In part one of Safety and Interdependence, we talked about the ways we're alienated from ourselves and each other amid capitalism. We talked about the neoliberal myths that uphold that alienation and how we isolate even the systems we need to care for ourselves from one another and the ways systems of policing and incarceration enforce that alienation. We talked about the concept of necropolitics or the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die, and how. Denying people access to water, for example, is one such necropolitical move we've witnessed in Detroit.
To pick up on that thread, necropolitics are enabled by the cultural imperative that punishes people for poverty and the attempts at survival that Monica Lewis Patrick mentioned before. It goes something like this: We commodify water, people can't afford it, and then we make it a felony to get water at your own home, for example. Or we commodify housing, people can't afford that, and then people who can't afford homes are criminalized for living on the street. Policing, surveillance and prisons all get employed as tools to enforce these fictions of deservingness as determined by ability to succeed amid capitalism. And then we dispose of and disappear those who are undeserving according to these logics.
We are in front of the Supreme Court. Homeless advocates from all over the country in a collective voice to say: Homelessness is not a crime.
Look no further than this summer's Grants Pass versus Johnson Supreme Court ruling.
A landmark decision from the U.S. Supreme Court on the issue of homelessness. In a 6 to 3vote, the high court cleared the way for cities to enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outdoors when there's no shelter space. The case centered around Grants Pass where Helen Cruz was once homeless.
Just because we don't have a home, we don't have a white picket fence doesn't mean that we don't deserve the same respect and dignity as everybody else.
The southern Oregon City tried to block people from sleeping and camping in public spaces, including sidewalks, streets and city parks. On Friday, the high court found those rules did not violate constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
Right now, this whole community, the homeless community, is in fear right now that they're going to start being arrested and going to jail.
Homeless advocates complain local ordinances similar to the laws enacted in Grants Pass, essentially criminalize homelessness.
Criminalizing homelessness essentially gives the state license to disappear people who don't have homes. Disappearance is a fundamental tool of carcerality. In the same way that homeless people are already likely to be arrested and jailed and now even more vulnerable to that same threat. Charity Hicks, who you heard from in part one, for example, was disappeared from her neighborhood when she became inconvenient for the state.
It's a way to‚ it criminalizes you for being alive.
She hadn't caused harm or committed a crime. And lest we confuse criminality with harm, even if she had turned her neighbors water back on, which was made a felony in Michigan, securing a life making resource like water just shouldn't be a crime in the first place. Who gets to decide anyways that so-called stealing water is a crime, and speculating on real estate isn't? And what about cases of actual harm? What if someone hurts me or someone I love? What if someone breaks into my home? The truth is, carcerality doesn't currently solve for that either.
Welcome to Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities, a series of audio essays about making room for abolition and making room for abolition first appeared at Red Bull Arts in Detroit in October of 2021 as a month long installation of speculative artifacts set in a home in a future without police and prisons.
This series reflects on conversations from that space with Detroit based organizers and futurists committed to food justice, water access, educational equity, restorative justice and black liberation more broadly. When Black folks in Detroit manufacture better lives for ourselves‚ whether that's healthier food, safer neighborhoods, new technologies for moving through conflict‚ it's usually described as an act of survival or desperation, rather than being classified as an act of resistance or feature making or speculative design. But each and every one of them is practicing a future that especially poor black Detroiters have been told is impossible.
In each episode, we'll look closely at the kinds of fictions that shape our current attachments to policing, prisons and punishment to examine where they come from and how they affect us. At the same time, you'll hear me propose abolitionist realities that counter these fictions and open up other ways of being.
My name is Lauren Williams. I'm an artist and designer based in Detroit, Michigan, and I work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power.
This episode builds on part one of our exploration into safety and interdependence. In part one, you heard us examine the ways capitalism drives alienation and the fictions that teach us that we thrive by separating ourselves from each other and from ourselves. We talked about the mythologies that privilege individualism over collective well-being, and we talked about how privatizing basic necessities like water and public safety actually undermines our safety. In part two today, we'll look at a few new themes disappearance and punishment and how both are used as tools to uphold expansive carceral fictions about safety.
We'll end with some musings about what others are already doing and what we can do to shake the kinds of capitalist alienation explored in part one, and return to ourselves and to each other.
But first, here's a dispatch from an abolitionist reality.
If cop-aganda defines our media today, what would we consume in a world without police and prisons? What kinds of abolitionist media would shape kids' imaginations? In this home, in 2047, a pristine graphic novel written and illustrated by Glenn Miles, peeks out from beneath a pile of a child's drawings scattered around on the living room floor. Chrysanthemum City, the cover reads. In the background, a city landscape overgrown with towering trees and thick moss sets the scene of a far off Detroit. Three Black and brown kids, one on a scooter, one on roller skates, and one hijabi girl in a wheelchair with their robot sidekick make up the main characters as they race toward a dark underground, where a stash of defunct police robots have come back to life, threatening once again to terrorize the city and its inhabitants. Yellow caution tape emblazoned with We Keep Us Safe divides this Detroit from its police infested underworld. This band of kids committed to keeping themselves and their city safe are prepared to do everything in their power to stop the zombie cop robots from decimating their world.
Carcerality as we know it rests on the belief that disposing of people and disappearing them from public view is an appropriate response to any and all situations of harm. In reality, it's a false proposition, a false solution that sweeps the root issues under the rug and obscures the observable symptoms of these issues by erasing the person from view. As Angela Davis has written, prisons don't disappear problems, they disappear people. Incarceration denies the messiness of reality when it comes to harm. Because neoliberal capitalism demands a quote unquote, clean fix, at least one that appears clean on the surface. But the thing is harm and accountability, that's messy. And so instead of dealing with the mess, the carceral state and the prison industrial complex will rather function by disappearing the mess‚ the people‚ into prisons and out of communities counting on their absence, equating to their erasure.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, as a transitive verb, one definition of the word police remains "to make clean and to put in order." This orientation toward cleanliness persists even in the language we use to talk about prison and the people we incarcerate.
So I stay away from using the term returning citizen. I hate that word.
Can you tell me a little bit about why?
Yeah. One, the term is often used to, to lighten our appearance. It's also a term that many funders like to hear. And it gives me this sense that, you know, we give the power of our narrative over to other folks. Rights create these languages and these terms for us to be used as right. Another is I don't like is because the folks in the South, you know, when they like Florida, for example, when they come out of prison, they don't have their rights restored. So they can't go vote.
So they're not really even returning as full citizens, yeah.
They're not a citizen, right, like if we say, that these are the‚ voting you know, your voting rights is like the thing that that proves your citizenship.
Sure, yeah.
Then the folks coming out of prison, so why are they "returning. So it pivots the...
So, it's not even a true term in that situation?
Right, and you know...
You're listening to Nick Buckingham, the co-executive director of Michigan Liberation, who was once incarcerated himself.
I never‚ I didn't leave Michigan. I just bounced around from prison to prison. I've seen some really great places. Like I've never been up north and experienced the beautiful air out there. And so I was like, I got to get incarcerated to experience this, right?
Mm, that's wild.
But then I came back to Michigan and so it's I'm not returning. I just walked out of prison. Like I was caged and oppressed away from society and I wanted to escape that's... Don't give me the "Oh, yeah, you're returning!" No, right?
Nick's point about referring to himself as formerly incarcerated instead of as a returning citizen may seem like a bit of a digression here, but bear with me. It's an observation that reveals our cultural discomfort with acknowledging what incarceration actually does. By sanitizing language we use to describe the people we send to prison, avoiding naming the fact of their incarceration by describing them as returning citizens, we sanitize our language in the same way we attempt to sanitize society by removing them in the first place. We use prison to dispose of people. But even in the wake of that disappearance, we strive to clean up the ways we articulate what we've done to them by calling it a different name. This softening of language to make incarceration seem more palatable, noble and rehabilitative than it actually is represents another kind of disappearance. It quite literally erases both the person and the fact of their caging, referring instead to an ambiguous, neoliberal, disembodied citizen, another avoidance of the mess of harm and prison and policing.
To bring things full circle, disappearance is also a foundational feature of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism operates as an "invisible doctrine." To borrow from the title of George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison's book by the same name. Shaping nearly every facet of our world and culture while invisibizing itself in the course of doing so.
But the fact of disappearance in the context of incarceration is in and of itself a carceral fiction. A person who caused harm and ends up incarcerated still exists just out of view. They've just been siphoned off from society, from their families, from their communities, and hidden from view and from freedom. And in the process, that extraction causes another kind of harm, that just like any other echoes through generations. Carceral logics convince us that if we remove a person from society, we've removed the problems they've caused or the problems that drove them to cause harm in the first place. But neither is truth. The belief goes something like this If we subsume all of our problems from mental health crises to homelessness to murder, to turning on your water within carceral solutions and then leave them to police in jails and prisons and juvenile detention centers and courts, then we can escape the shared responsibility of learning to navigate conflict, learning to care for each other, hold each other accountable, or cultivate safety amongst ourselves.
Removing the individual rather than addressing the context in which they commit harm also transforms harm and the preservation of safety into individual problems rather than collective ones.
This functions much in the same way that neoliberal capitalism shifts responsibility for large scale global pollution and climate degradation onto individual people, convincing us that our daily acts of consumption from plastic recycling to drinking out of those stupid paper straws, are the only things standing between climate collapse and the survival of the planet, all while big oil carries on with calamitous extraction and corporate lobbyists block any form of meaningful change. Hear me when I say, the task of producing safety through policing and imprisonment is an impossible one. It's a fool's errand. They're set up to fail at it, frankly. Or put another way, the fact that these systems are tasked with producing safety in the first place is itself a fiction. In truth, what their job is, is to control society, protect capital, and serve the interests of the state. So they disappear inconvenient people, and they're doing a pretty good job at that. In the words of an incarcerated writer named Stevie on Dreaming Freedom and Practicing Abolition, an online publication through the Network of Abolition Study Groups in Pennsylvania: Safety requires "being in right relation" and disappearing people from society, family and community, by definition, disrupts any possibility of that:
…safety from harm, including homicide and sexual violence, is achieved through right relations. Right relations lead to safe communities.
…it is broken relations that enable harm. I stress that creating and maintaining safety requires developing and sustaining right relations. Because policing and imprisonment are about caging and exiling people, making the creation, development and maintenance of right relations impossible, they can never effectuate safety. Disappearing people precludes safety.
And this phenomenon of institutions failing at the very tasks that they're at least fictionally charged with isn't limited to police and prisons.
Here's Nate Mullen, an educator, artist and founder of People in Education.
So in some ways, that institution is forced to do what is the most efficient and maybe what they would now call the most effective. Which inherently means you have to kind of dehumanize the people that are within its walls because you've been tasked with something that you actually can't do. And the same thing is actually true, I think of like the police state is that we created an institution that was like, Yo, you take care of safety. Even though safety is something that like all of us are responsible for.
As Nate reminds us, neoliberal systems like schools and policing require dehumanizing the people within them in order to function. The institutions we have today, from those that protect and serve to those delivering education function by hiding, obscuring and disappearing, instead of truly grappling with the complexity of their tasks and the people they're tasked with serving. They prioritize an efficiency that considers the needs of the market first and people last, if ever. They operate by stripping people of their humanity: Seeing students as widgets to be churned through a machine and turned into workers rather than young people who need care in order to learn turning people who cause harm or fail to succeed at capitalism into prisoners to be disposed of from society held in cages, put to work for free or killed instead of people who need transformation or care, or seeing humans as consumers of a commodity called water instead of people who quite literally would die without it.
In this whole equation, punishment is, unsurprisingly, a central feature of both the carceral state and neoliberalism. Typically, neoliberalism rejects government intervention in markets, arguing that it's inefficient and should be avoided altogether, except, however, where punishment is concerned. In a book called Neoliberal Finality: a Brief Genealogy by Bernard Harcourt, he writes that the primary function of punishment in a capitalist society is to prevent people from bypassing market or causing some kind of inefficiency that violates the market's so-called natural order.
The logic of neoliberal penality facilitates contemporary punishment practices by encouraging the belief that the legitimate space for government intervention is in the penal sphere. There, and there alone.
We see this kind of intervention to curtail market inefficiencies at work, in the logics of broken windows policing, for example, where police target so-called quality of life issues that are said to threaten Detroit's revitalization or the War on Drugs, where police target a form of underground commerce from which neoliberal darlings couldn't profit. We also see it at work when people are criminalized for homelessness, when Charity was arrested for protesting water shut offs or when kids are arrested for loitering.
This is precisely where a central part of the neoliberal fiction falls apart. The idea that neoliberalism as an economic system operates best without intervention in some autonomous, self-regulated natural order is just not true. It actually takes tons of government intervention to make the system work, just not in the ways proponents of neoliberalism would have you think. When it comes to any other social service, from welfare to health care to utilities, state intervention amid neoliberalism is lamented. But should we need to punish someone? Carceral interventions are gleefully encouraged to maintain the illiberal economic function. In a book called Neoliberalism and Punishment by Ignacio González-Sánchez about the origins of the penal system in Spain, he points out that neoliberalism doesn't mind state intervention in policing and incarceration, but recoils at it in the context of social policy.
It is thus possible to understand that the neoliberal paradigm does not have irremediable problems with state intervention in penal matters. Since this is aimed precisely at preserving or even producing the appropriate conditions for the functioning of the market, in other words, the neoliberal paradigm is concerned with fomenting respect for legality that is based on private property and allowing for a degree of investment security on the one hand, and persecuting those who try to make a living outside the market on the other. This marks a fundamental difference with respect to social policy traditionally oriented towards intervening in the disruption operated by the market and which, as will be seen in neoliberalism, tends to reconfigure itself with a marked orientation towards the commodification of social rights.
And if we take another step back, we can also see how we embed the same logics of punishment into institutions designed to meet social needs. We punish the people they fail to serve, when the systems fail at their impossible tasks: we punished the city of Detroit with bankruptcy and conservatorship. We punish educational systems when they fail to hit their goals after withholding the necessary resources for them to do so. But you know who doesn't get punished? Any part of the prison industrial complex?
Safety is something that like all of us are responsible for! It is not disconnected from food, from water, from history, from love. And so when you create institution it and say you're responsible for that, those people with an institution of automatically they have to dehumanize the people because that's a task that no one institution can be responsible for. And the same thing is what's happening inside of schools, right, is that we basically have passed these people with an impossible task and then we punish them when they fail at it. And they have and then they are given the tools to‚ we say that we're giving them the tools to do the job, but really they're just given the tools to just kind of, dehumanize the people that are within those systems, right? Like if you don't if you are educating what we call educated, let's call it educ‚ or caring for, right, within a school, hundreds of children every day. Right. And the ratio of of caregivers to people with something like maybe 15 to 1, maybe 20 to 1, I mean, some Detroit classrooms we know that there are more than 40 young people and 1 adult. Right. How is one person supposed to take care of the care of 40 people? Right, I'm a parent of one child...
I'm a solo adult and I can barely take care of myself!
Right, exactly! I can barely take care of ourselves and I'm, quote unquote, college educated right! But, like my kid, we've got two parents and we can barely contain her reality. So how is it supposed to be possible that one person can do it for 40? Or in a prison state, Right. Like one. One person can take care of like, all of the folks that have ended up in that space. It's those folks that we actually need care from our society. And yet our decision is that we kind of like disappear them and we kind of put them in one place and we we pay these people and say that that's your responsibility, right? And so I think one of the most powerful I think I just think that that connection is just really important to point out. And it and it replicates itself across all these systems, really replicates itself and food replicates itself inside water replicates itself inside of‚ I mean take your pick. Right. Is that we we have started to under... We have started we haven't started, we have committed right, to in this country at this moment to thinking about things incredibly separate from one another. Thinking of ourselves as really separate from one another. And we've, we've kind of‚ buying into this idea that everyone's out for themselves. Right. And that inherently is a system that is not human, because human beings can't survive in our world, period, by ourselves. So, the moment that we disregard our connection. We begin to lose our humanity.
We're disregarding our connection to one another. As Nate says, when we fail to build a fundamental capacity to care into school, this happens when we overcrowd classrooms and deprive students of the necessary attention to learn. It happens when we close schools or when we outsource public education to for profit operated charter schools without any oversight. It's worth noting, too, that these tendencies are characteristic of neoliberalism as drive to shift the function of education. It becomes about developing human capital in order to add value and compete better in the labor market rather than to provide a social good for the benefit of the collective.
In the state of Michigan, poorer school districts don't get enough funding to address the educational needs of students. Research has shown that schools need to provide at least 100% more funding for low income students than for high income students. But here, low income students only get an additional 11.5% of the average statewide allowance. That's way below what they need to meet their needs. Detroit's public schools have long remained racially segregated, and there's ample evidence that this fact denies an equal education to black students compared to white students. Then if we evaluate school quality based on test scores, Detroit's public schools have long been failing. The state's solution during bankruptcy or punishment, rather, was to take away public control of the schools, to privatize them, transforming many public schools into charters. But their performance isn't substantively any better than public schools. And 80%—let me run that back—80% of these charter schools are run by for profit management companies that take billions in state funding and don't have to report on it at all.
So in other words, Detroit's public schools are set up to fail. But, and this is a huge but, unlike schools, policing and prisons are consistently rewarded for failing at the task that they claim to perform: producing safety.
Prisons and police jails is experiment a horribly failed experiment that continues to get funding. If you are in any sort of academic space, you know, if you had outcomes like the police and jail, nobody would fund you ever again, just. You know, so we have standards in other sectors. And yet for this one, it produces such destructive, horrible outcomes and yet somehow it keeps getting support and money.
You're hearing from Angel McKissic, who directs the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network and was at the time working on her own doctoral dissertation and intimately familiar with the burden of proof expected to demonstrate academic rigor. What Angel's calling out pinpoints a double standard that exists between police and prisons and every other social service. In the wake of the 2020 uprisings, in response to George Floyd's murder and many others, despite calls for promises to defund police in accordance with demands, the opposite actually happened.
But our ABC owned television stations analyzed budgets for more than 100 police agencies and found defunding never happened in most cities.
This pattern, however, what may seem like a failure on the part of policing and prisons, a failure to produce safety, is actually just exposing the fundamental fiction underlying both systems: they were never meant to produce safety in the first place. There is, as Stafford Beer has written, "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is what it fails to do." If the purpose of a system is what it does, then we might instead come to the conclusion that the purpose of police is to arrest people for being poor, to protect capital, to file administrative reports after car accidents, and to escalate conflict, because that's what they do. They continue to get rewarded because they're not actually failing. They're doing exactly what they're supposed to do.
In 83% of the budgets we reviewed, funding actually increased by at least 2% between 2019 and 2022. And defunding often means different things for different departments. In some cities, funding was shifted to different areas of the police department or to social services not reduced. But some candidates are hyper focused on appearing tough on crime and supporting police officers. In Texas, governor...
And Detroit was no exception. The DPD or Detroit Police Department's budget increased from $321.6 million in fiscal year 2019 to $330 million in 2020 alone. And then just in the last year, between 2023 and 2024, it increased another $22 million, bringing the current budget to $388.8 million.
In part one, we heard from Charity Hicks, who was arrested and imprisoned for attempting to prevent her neighbors water from being shut off. Charity's story revealed that what we're observing with water shutoffs is intimately connected to the privatization of collective resources like water, education and safety across the world, all in service of driving capitalist profit. Why would we think that commodifying water, something everybody needs to live and then selling it back to people at ever increasing rates in a city where poverty stays around 40% would produce anything other than scarcity. Detroit sits at the banks of the largest group of freshwater lakes on the planet, and yet water rates rose over 119% from 2009 to 2019, making water unaffordable in a place so rich with water is a product of social and political processes, not actual resource scarcity. This is not about economics. It's about power.
They will use everything at their disposal because the very people that are privatizing public education and satirizing it, like the DeVosses, they're the very people that are part of buying up the aquifers all around the globe. The very banks that participated in the bankruptcy, the contrived bankruptcy in Detroit, they're the very banks‚ if you go look up an article called the Water Banker Barons, they're the very banks that benefited from the contrived bankruptcy, but they're also the very banks buying up all the water on a global scale. So we've got to connect these dots that this privatization and this commodification of water is connected to the commodification and the control of all assets and all resources. And these are the things that they will make into a criminal act to then justify dehumanizing things like water.
So the danger of overlooking the connections that Monica is pointing out here between the privatization of water, education, finance and everything else is that we might lose sight of the fact that the ways these systems harm the people they're ostensibly supposed to serve aren't blips or mishaps or irregularities. They are very much features of capitalist design. And just as we send the educational system, policing and prisons and providers of public resources like water on these fools errands, we declare that doing it any other way is also an impossible task. We lock ourselves in a cycle of inaction and possibility. We manufacture a crisis of imagination. In Mark Fisher's words, "this is capitalist realism. The widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it." In other words, as attributed to both Frederick Jameson and Slavoj Zizek, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
So, returning to disappearance as a tool of neoliberalism and carcerality, we see this at work in neighborhoods, too, as they're cleared or sanitized for gentrification and by gentrification to make way for wealthier residents. Neighbors are disappeared by the many carceral strategies that extract them in the name of broken windows policing, for example; we see neighbors disappeared by economic eviction and foreclosure; neighbors are disappeared by illegal property tax assessments, which led to over 100,000 families in Detroit losing their homes, for example. And this is all to say nothing of the ways in which the city's inadequate services push families seeking a decent quality of life out as well.
These kinds of forced disappearances are tied with neoliberalism, financialization of housing markets, real estate speculation produces blight and disinvestment, and then it criminalizes both blight and people's attempts to survive, in light of that disinvestment. It dispossess them of the very things, home and neighborhood, that stand between them and obliteration. And then it erases them and calls it the rebirth of a city, a renaissance. This kind of disappearance also occurs in an aesthetic sense as houses are flipped, sans serif house numbers are installed, slat fences go up, bike lanes appear on main thoroughfares and old commercial spaces are repurposed. In these moments, we can see traces of designers esthetic interventions and commitments to capital made visible. In large part, this is a cosmetic endeavor that does the political and cultural labor of rendering neighborhoods seductive and exclusive to wealthier, whiter homeowners who can afford these aesthetically appealing homes. In this way, gentrification also advances the task of sanitizing neighborhoods by disappearing remnants of what existed before. In some ways, the logics and technologies that enable these processes bear some resemblance to those that disappeared the first peoples of these lands, the Anishinaabe, Potawatomi and Ojibwe, enabling Detroit to supplant the memory of Waawiyaatanong.
I live in Detroit's North End. It's a gentrifying neighborhood in which I am, without question, the newcomer with more wealth than many of my longtime Detroit neighbors. Most of the people I call my neighbors don't actually live in the neighborhood, though At least not anymore. I live near a park and people can be in here every day. And by every day, I mean every day of the year. Rain, shine, snow, it don't matter. This is Detroit, after all. And they come from their homes in farther out neighborhoods and outlying suburbs. The park's unofficial mayor, the guy who builds all the furniture, cleans up, keeps folks acting right, and checks on me regularly, grew up down the street, and he worked at his grandma's party store as a kid for $3 a day. Another neighbor takes care of the park's landscaping and mine for a reasonable enough price and keeps an eye out for my packages. If he thinks I'm doing too much yard work alone, he'll yell at me and then pitch in to help. Another neighbor, an elder woman who maintains two small garden plots at the park and does still live about three blocks away, I think, came by to chastise me about planting my tomatoes too close together after she saw me setting up my garden, but she dropped off some butternut squash starts the next day. This park is a third space. It's popping all the time and it's loud as hell sometimes, but most folks will quiet down if I ask... most of the time.
I see the park and my neighbors persistent presence as a refusal to be disappeared in spite of clear attempts to do so. There's a way in which so much of Detroit's physical infrastructure similarly offers persistent reminders where ruins of factories and ruins of homes stand as monuments that refuse to allow us to forget the potential scale and breadth of damage to be done by capitalist industry to its laborers who once filled these homes, and how the financialization of real estate speculation specifically turns homes into shelves from which to extract future value.
I feel so sorry for people who are not living in Detroit. People always striving for size be a giant, and this is a symbol of how giants fall.
That's the voice of Grace Lee Boggs in the introduction to her documentary. To be clear, the point I'm trying to make isn't about glorifying capitalist ruins either. Nor is it about arguing that new people shouldn't be allowed to enter and thrive in long standing communities. If we're being honest about disappearance, we have to first acknowledge the much longer history of disappearing indigenous peoples like the Anishinaabe, Ojibwe and Potowatomi, who first populated this region called Waawiyaatanong in Anishinaabemowin. We also have to grapple with the disappearance of living Anishinabe, Ojibwe and Potawatomi peoples who remain to this day as the settler colonial project of constructing race would have us believe that they have in fact completely vanished.
What it is about, is questioning why we should accept the notion that in a place with an abundance of land and homes and space, people who have lived here their entire lives are effectively barred from affordably remaining in place.
So on my birthday this year, I slept in, washed my hair, and then went downstairs to start what I thought would be a pretty chill day filled with my new favorite activity: editing this audio. I looked out the window to find out what all the commotion was on the block. On one end, I could see that DTE was putting in a new gas line for one of the three apartments being renovated on the street. Meanwhile, immediately across the street from my house, two guys in dark hoodies with "Blight Removal Team" emblazoned in yellow on the back stood with their arms crossed, watching smugly as bulldozers and one of those giant claw machines crisscrossed the three city lots that make up the park facing my house. They were bulldozing every inch of the park into a pile of rubble in the center, making sure to demolish everything in their path before clawing it into their dump trucks.
I forgot to mention before, it's a park that residents made. It's not a city park. They had built or acquired every single piece of furniture: a merry go round, a zip line, a play set‚ multiple playsets, actually‚ basketball hoops, picnic tables, grills, trash cans, a porta potty. So I came downstairs with deep conditioner in my hair and my bonnet on my head to ask what was going on. And the blight removal overseer looked pretty annoyed at my question. "We're cleaning up this mess," he says. I told him people use this space every single day of the year. "Where are they supposed to go?" "It's an environmental hazard," he says. "We're cleaning up this junk."
And if you know me, you know I have complained about this park before. The noise or the cars blocking my driveway, whatever. But again, these are my neighbors. Neighbors are annoying! They're like siblings. They get on your nerves, but that doesn't mean they don't deserve to be there. And like I said, many of these folks have actually lived in this neighborhood for longer than I've been alive. But tenancy and stewardship of land and space and social life has no bearing in the context of capitalist constructs of land ownership, right? And let's be real. The city only cares now because this land isn't fulfilling its profit producing duties as a taxable property. The fact that the park was being so aggressively demolished at the exact same hour that the gas line was being installed for three newly renovated apartment buildings adjacent to these lots is no coincidence. If the City and Land Bank actually gave a shit about the park being a so-called mess or junk or an environmental hazard, there were some pretty easy ways to address that. You could give them the resources to steward it, better install some decent park equipment, put city resources behind, making it not a mess if that's all they can really see when they look at this space.
The only redeeming part of this saga, I'll say, is that the next morning the park neighbors were right back where they have been every day I've lived in my house. They brought their folding chairs and set up just like usual. And they have every day since day one. If nothing else, this park is a case study in refusing disappearance.
There are many ways to respond to this and other kinds of disappearance mentioned throughout this episode.
"Buying Back the Block," for example, is a strategy that some Black folks employ as a response to institutional harm: things like redlining, housing discrimination, dispossession and wealth extraction. But it's founded on extending the fiction that privatizing problems is the only way forward. It succumbs to the neoliberal premise that there's no alternative to the means the systems afford us. In other words, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
And in the Black narrative, too, is that it‚ it is about also us, for me, I will say it's for me it's about contending with all the pain of the denial that exists as a part of being a Black person.
To be fair, Nate's right. And I get it. It can seem futile to resist the ways we see other people thriving amid capitalism and instead push back through more collective reparative or reciprocal strategies. But...
Also recognizing that my freedom from that is not about replacing the white person on top of the capitalist hill. But it's about like, like if I'm going to really free myself, I got to, I actually have to— and that's really hard to do, right? I have to imagine beyond even what like white folks has told us is what success looks like or what freedom looks like.
Malcolm X once said that "you can't operate a capitalistic system unless you're vulturistic. You have to have someone else's blood to suck to be a capitalist." He went on to say that a capitalist has to "get it from somewhere other than himself, and that's where he gets it from somewhere or someone other than himself."
And when he says this, he's zeroing in on the extractive nature of capitalism, the imperative to take from the earth, from workers, from communities, from someone other than ourselves without their consent, without fair compensation, or without regard for the consequences of that extraction. And in another sense, we do need to get things from somewhere other than ourselves in order to move outside of or past capitalism and carcerality and cultivate abolitionist possibilities. And practices of mutuality and collectivism and shared responsibility can offer a way to look at what we might need to do to move toward meeting more of our own needs more of the time.
So, when I think about what we actually need, I think about becoming reacquainted with our alienated selves.
More than a call to simply withdraw funding and resources from policing and prisons, I understand the abolition of police and prisons as a practice of freedom. And as we'll explore elsewhere in the series, a practice of imagination. Neoliberalism teaches us that economic freedom is the basis for every other kind of freedom. Hayek and Friedman, who are two of the founders of neoliberalism, argue that without free markets, we couldn't have individual freedom. In an opinion piece for The Atlantic entitled "Freedom for the Wolves," the writer Joseph Stiglitz counters that "neoliberalism's grim record includes freeing financial markets to precipitate the largest financial crisis in three quarters of a century, freeing international trade to accelerate the industrialization and freeing corporations to exploit consumers, workers and the environment alike." Put another way, as Nate, Monica and many others you've heard so far have made abundantly clear: neoliberalism denies people's humanity, which inherently undermines our freedom.
So, in the same ways that we try to sever ties between problems in order to treat them through the siloed systems we currently have, bonds are severed when people are disappeared from neighborhoods by way of gentrification. They get severed when people are removed from their homes through incarceration driven by criminalization of property. They get severed when systems are separated from each other ideologically in ways that don't serve those who would benefit from their services. Or in a quote that's often also been attributed to Malcolm X, "When 'I' is replaced with 'we' even illness becomes wellness."
...the etymological root of the word friendship? And the word freedom is a Sanskrit word that means beloved and just that in and of itself. I was like, oh friendship and freedom, they used to, like, sit together, right? They, like, came from the same womb. And I was just like, I don't know how to think about that. But yes, like my spirit just said yes to that information. And then the other piece was that pre-1500s. Right, in a like very different Western context from the one we have right now, someone who was enslaved was understood as being unfree, partly because they were in bondage, but also because they had been separated from their people. So that to be free was to be in connected community. And again, this like totally resonated with me. And it just made sense to me because of what I know about human biology and who we are as people, right? Like, that's just like our state of being is with the collective...
You're listening to Mia Birdsong, interviewed by Dan Harris on his podcast, 10% Happier. Mia is a pathfinder, writer and facilitator, who steadily engages the leadership and wisdom of people experiencing injustice to chart new visions of American life. Her remarks on the common etymology of the words freedom and friendship offer a nuanced way to understand the kind of relationality often denied us amid neoliberal capitalism that might bring us all a little closer to freedom.
So the first piece, was it really cast for me, my understanding of Black people's experience in America. And if we think about your people as not just being, you know, the human beings that you like are in proximity to, but your ancestors, the land that you're on, your relationships with other living things. Right. So that when Black folks were kidnaped and trafficked from African continent across the ocean, we were obviously being separated like deeply from our people. And then if you look at the way that slavery was practiced in America, like there was this intrinsic piece of it that was about the constant threat of being sold away from your people. And then obviously, for many people, the experience of being sold away from your people. If you look at the, you know, kind of post-Reconstruction white supremacist terrorism in the south, that created a refugee crisis that we call the Great Migration, right. Again, Black folks being driven away from land and family through to the prison industrial complex to child protective services. There has been this American project of trying to make Black people unfree by separating us from each other. And we see this, too, with like Indigenous folks and, you know, boarding schools with practices at the U.S. border with Mexico, people being separated from each other as a way of making them unfree. And then, of course...
So if capitalism can't save us, if carcerality separates us, if surveillance isn't actually safety, if the systems that are supposed to meet our needs are too siloed to actually do so, what do we actually need? For starters, we need each other in a way that capitalism just doesn't allow for. We need more reciprocity in relationality than the carceral state lets us have. We have to take responsibility for each other in ways that we're socialized not to and in ways that neoliberalism tells us just aren't our responsibility.
What would this country be like if we believed that to be free was to be in connected community? What would our economy look like? What would our school system look like? What would our health care system look like? What would our neighborhoods be like? How would we think about designing right Like cities? How would it change the way that we what we expect from each other and what we expect from, you know, government or other institutions? And I was like, well, that's the world I want to live in. I want that one. The one where we believe, as Fannie Lou Hamer said, right, "nobody's free unless everybody's free." Where we recognize, right, that like, my wellbeing actually is dependent on the well-being of my neighbors. And that when I you know, and the example I gave of that cantilevered everybody sitting on each other's laps thing, right, when I hold you, everybody else is holding me. That's the world that I want to live in.
We have to imagine beyond what capitalists and carceral fictions teach us is and is impossible. We have to imagine otherwise. The good news is these are worlds in relations we're already imagining, practicing and inhabiting. In other episodes, we'll talk about the ways people are insisting on and cultivating these kinds of connections across Detroit.
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities on silos, alienation, safety and interdependence. Until next time, remember what's real: capital isn't productive, people are. Neoliberalism requires a ton of heavy handed intervention from government, including police and prisons, to carry on the way it does, and punishment is one of its favorite tools for maintaining economic order. Police don't serve to protect anything other than capital. Prisons disappear, people, not problems. Poverty isn't a crime and surveillance isn't safety. Mastering capitalism is not the way to liberation from capitalist oppression. Water, food and housing are human rights, and there's enough of it all to go around. And lastly, safety is all of our responsibility. We need each other to survive, and our needs are intertwined.
Thank you for listening. And thank you to the many people who've made this show and the wider body of work possible over the last three years. Thank you. Most of all, to all the futurists featured in this episode. People who participated in this project over three long years ago. In this episode that includes Nick Buckingham, PG Watkins, Angel McKissic, Monica Lewis-Patrick and Nate Mullen.
And I want to give a special shout out to PG, who helped facilitate the interviews that became a part of the series. And finally, thank you and rest in power to charity. Hicks, who was killed in a hit and run in New York City in 2014. This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by me, Lauren Williams. Essays were co-edited by my dear friend Andy Jean-Baptiste, and the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.
This project is presented in partnership with Respair Production & Media.
Joined by a chorus of voices and visionaries, Detroit-based artist Lauren Williams invites us to consider roadmaps to futures we hope for, through a focus on the everyday & the contradictions of neoliberal philosophy. Should everything really be for sale, will the market protect the worthy? First, a foundation: How do our ways of working separate us from our power and possibility? What exactly is neoliberalism, how did it become the dominant social and economic logic of U.S. civil society? What does any of this have to do with abolition? To answer that last question first, it comes down to criminalization and control. Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy and civic fights about water access serve as examples of how accepting a logic of separation weakens our ability to challenge social problems that affect people in very connected ways. Williams illuminates the short path from privatization to deprivation, before limning the difference between the state’s compulsion to watch & the human need to be seen.
Featured guests in this episode include Nick Buckingham (Co-Executive Director, Michigan Liberation), Curtis Renee (Founder, Detroit Safety Team), Tawana Petty (social justice organizer, poet, and Senior Policy Advisor at Algorithmic Justice League), PG Watkins (organizer and facilitator extraordinaire), Angel McKissic (Founder, Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network), Monica Lewis-Patrick (President & CEO, We the People Detroit), and Nate Mullen (artist, educator and founder of People in Education).
In a far off future Detroit, a Great Flood has transformed our landscape. Belle Isle, our beloved island park, no longer exists. The shoreline of the Detroit River has crept in to overtake it. We live with water differently in this Detroit. Floating markets, water-bound transit, and a network of Water Stewards, people who manage filtration of a distributed water harvesting and conservation system—are fixtures. In a home in this future, flung over the back of an armchair, a faded bluish uniform jacket lays limp. It’s unremarkable, besides the light dancing off the decal on the back — an iridescent silhouette of Sankofa, the Adinkra symbol that reminds us to look back in order to move forward. On the mirrored table at its side, a worn textbook, notes littered with coffee stains and a jumbled collection of water samples bear evidence of someone’s careful study to become certified as a steward themselves, a role we all fill at some point. In this world, water belongs to all of us and in return, our collective labor keeps it that way.
Abolition really does require that we change one thing, which is everything.
So, when Ruth Wilson Gilmore says everything, she really does mean every-single-thing. And for a lot of people, this is probably overwhelming in a way that inspires fear, conjures doubt or reeks of impossibility. But, for me and for many abolitionists I know, the imperative that everything must change is also an invitation to imagine and practice new ways of being in every aspect of our lives; it’s a reminder that the range of opportunities we have to cultivate something different are just as overwhelmingly abundant as the things we need to change. It offers more chances to get it right.
What I find more overwhelming than the scale of this challenge is the sheer absurdity of what we’ve got now and the fictions that uphold it. In a country that boasts about being the so-called free-est nation on the planet, we have police who operate with absolute impunity; police who escalate violence rather than prevent it; police budgets that rise year over year even after the uprisings of 2020; we have the largest share of incarcerated people in the world; people who can’t afford water, food, rent, and other basic necessities getting jailed for just being poor; and then we’ve got the richest billionaires on the planet; and everyone else fashioning ourselves as so-called “middle class” by way of conspicuous consumption; and then we have civil rights and protections once upheld by the Supreme Court being rolled back on a regular basis; and at the same time, countless other contradictions.
We are living in the most abundant time human history has ever seen, we have more resources than ever before at our disposal, and yet, so much suffering still persists. And so many of us are sick and tired of living in these incessantly unprecedented times.
So, yeah, we really do have to change everything.
I take this refrain that everything must change as a reminder of interdependence and enmeshment of both systems and people: abolition can’t just be about prisons and jails and police because it concerns aspects of our lives that are so intertwined that they cannot be separated from one another. I take it as a challenge to the ways in which capitalism would have us believe that safety —which we’re taught the prison industrial complex is designed to produce and preserve—can be isolated from any other human need:
And so like that's also true for our movements is that like there is no education liberation if there is no water liberation and there's no water liberation, if there's no abolition of prisons, there is no abolition of prisons until we acknowledge the atrocities that have happened on this land.
You're hearing from Nate Mullen, an educator, artist and founder of People in Education, whose work in Detroit Public Schools has clarified the extent to which public systems that serve our needs are interrelated:
...in a world— in a capitalist world where we love to commodify everything we also like to put everything in silos. Right. We like to say like, Oh, that's that's a school problem or like, oh, like that's a that's a water problem, right? And it's even it's it's so insidious.
The fiction that we can isolate our basic needs for survival, like water, food, care, safety, and love from one another operates much in the same way that capitalism alienates workers from themselves, other workers, the means of production, and labor itself, to borrow from Karl Marx. Bear with me for a second, in Marx’s view, under capitalism, workers are estranged from our basic human nature because competition pits us against each other, brings down wages, and enriches capitalists. As a result, we internalize the fiction that we don’t need each other to survive; that we are disconnected:
Oh, it's that house's problem. THEY didn't pay for THEIR water, so THEY shouldn't have water, right? Ignoring the fact that we are all intricately connected to one another. Right. That that's like the foundational function and one of the best— one of the best tricks that, like the world that we live in, is is that it really gets us lost on the idea that we are disconnected, right? It really tries to sell us that we're disconnected rather than understanding that flourishing is something that we all do together. It actually can't happen by yourself.
In practice, this kind of alienation Nate’s speaking to prevents us from building class consciousness and drives workers to be good little capitalists, and privilege profits and self-interest above collective well-being.
And then beyond distancing us from each other, capitalism also alienates workers from the products of their labor, which further enriches the capitalist class and even precludes workers from enjoying meaningful fulfillment from the act of production. And then on top of that, workers are further alienated from the act of labor itself, having no control over what they produce or the nature and quality of their working conditions. And finally, Marx has argued that labor under capitalism alienates workers from themselves, because, taken together, these other dispossessions mean that work becomes simply a necessary means by which to earn wages to survive. And in all of these ways, capitalism fundamentally dehumanizes workers because it prevents us from freely realizing our full humanity.
At this point, you might be wondering why I’m talking about Marxist critiques of capitalism in an essay about carcerality and abolition. As a quick aside, here’s why: I understand that all capitalism is racial capitalism, a concept that interprets the history of capitalism as one that requires theft, exploitation and exclusion from racialized people in order to function. Carcerality—this systemic practice of capturing people, throwing people away in prisons full of cages that prop up rural economies, and then extracting free labor from them to uphold the system itself—is a tool that makes racial capitalism possible.
Welcome to Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities, a series of audio essays about making room for abolition. “Making Room for Abolition” first appeared at Red Bull Arts in Detroit in October of 2021 as a month-long installation of speculative artifacts set in a home in a future without police and prisons. The excerpt you heard in the beginning offers a glimpse into the worlds materialized in that installation.
This series reflects on conversations from that space with Detroit-based organizers and futurists committed to food justice, water access, educational equity, restorative justice, and Black liberation more broadly. When Black folks in Detroit manufacture better lives for ourselves—whether that means healthier food, safer neighborhoods, new technologies for moving through conflict—it's usually described as an act of survival or desperation, rather than being classified as an act of resistance or future-making or speculative design. Each and every one of them is practicing a future that especially poor Black Detroiters have been told is impossible.
In each episode, we’ll look closely at the kinds of fictions that shape our current attachments to policing, prisons, and punishment to examine where they come from and how they affect us. At the same time, you’ll hear us propose abolitionist realities that counter these fictions and open up other ways of being.
My name is Lauren Williams. I’m an artist and designer based in Detroit, MI and I work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power.
Today’s episode is about safety and interdependence, and the fictions that teach us that we thrive by alienating ourselves from each other, our needs, and ourselves. This is the first part of a two-part episode. It’s about the mythologies that privilege individualism over collective well-being. We’ll explore how, within capitalist and carceral logics, this kind of separation gets applied to both relationships and institutions, and how it deprives us of our humanity. We’ll look at where these fictions come from, how they get codified into policy and practice in the context of the neoliberal city and state, and set us up for a conversation about what others are already doing to escape the trance that convinces us to abandon our own collective interest.
Alright, so let’s get into it. I want to start by talking about some foundational capitalist fictions that separate us from ourselves and each other are also operative in and further exacerbated by neoliberal mythologies.
I’ll explain neoliberalism in a minute, but, to start—it’s important to note that: Much in the way capitalism dehumanizes workers, the neoliberal social systems and policies shaped by capitalism that we might assume meet foundational human needs for stuff like care and safety—here I’m talking about schools, policing, incarceration, to name a few—these systems also become severed from each other in ways that rely on further dehumanization of the people they’re supposed to serve:
...when I think about a school system, essentially what its role is inside our society, is it a space? It is the space where in which we care for our young people. It is the space that plays the role of care for our most vulnerable people. And we have created an institution and as a society said, OK, cool, you go do that, right? Y'all go take care of this care. This thing called care, you can go take care of that, right? But that's not something that one institution can take care of. Right. They can't do it. So in some ways, that institution is forced to do what is the most efficient and maybe what they would now call like the most effective, which inherently means you have to kind of dehumanize the people that are within its walls because you've been tasked with something that you actually can't do. And the same thing is actually true, I think, of like the police state, is that we created an institution that was like, "Yo, you take care of safety."
In other words, it’s a trap; a fool’s errand. As Nate points out, you fundamentally can’t take care of safety without talking about water and food and education and care and family and harm and poverty and.. and.. and. I reference neoliberal social systems here because neoliberalism does capitalism’s bidding. Neoliberalism is a set of beliefs and policies put into practice which contend that our economy and society are better off if run by capitalist markets and uninhibited by government intervention. Its central belief—according to George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison as written in the Invisible Doctrine—is that “competition is the defining feature of humankind” and that buying and selling things will somehow lead to social improvement for everyone who deserves it, because again— capitalism is a competition and people who “lose” don’t deserve to succeed or survive. In this way, neoliberalism presumes that our world is a meritocracy, that those who struggle or fail to succeed amid capitalism are inherently weak or incompetent, and that the wealth accumulated by the extremely wealthy will miraculously trickle down to the poor of its own volition. It individualizes survival and mythologizes wealth redistribution in a way that denies our connectedness and, again, alienates us from one another. Worst of all, it naturalizes these myths and teaches us to internalize them. Here’s George Monbiot in conversation with Owen Jones:
So just as the rich are told by neoliberalism you are rich because you're brilliant regardless of whether you inherited your money, you stole your money, regardless of your advantages of education, of class, of race, of whatever that you start off with. You know you might start in your 100 meter race at 90 meters. 90 meters down the track but it's still all down to you that you've become so rich. This self-attribution fallacy is at the heart of neoliberalism. Just as the rich are congratulated for their wealth, the poor are blamed for their poverty, and if you are poor it's because you're unenterprising, it's because you're feckless. your kid is fat is not because corporations are pushing junk food and the school has sold off its playing fields it's because you're a bad parent you're constantly sort of urged to internalize this this notion of blame and structural failure systemic failure these things are simply denied they're simply airbrushed out of the picture. It's all about the individual..
Even though most people couldn't tell you what it is, neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of our time.
As a policymaking framework, it encourages privatizing public resources like schools, loosening regulation on private markets, curtailing the power of unions and collective bargaining, and other tactics that shrink government, and free up the market and fundamentally driving the kinds of alienation from one another, the products of our labor, and ourselves that Marx warned about.
But, neoliberalism wasn’t the first to do it. There were other doctrines like “classical liberalism” and “laissez-faire economics” that promoted free markets in the same way neoliberalism does long before, but what sets it apart—according to Stephen Metcalf as cited in the Invisible Doctrine—is that the purportedly natural mechanisms of free market forces actually need to be very heavily administered, it takes a lot of work, they have to be controlled and enforced by the state. They don’t just happen naturally as the myth would have you believe. And this is especially true in the context of policing and incarceration, as they become tools to make sure markets keep running with as little obstruction as possible.
Another sinister reality about the way neoliberalism operates is that it often capitalizes on crisis in order to implement its policies. Naomi Klein has written about this concept of disaster capitalism quite a bit—here she is on the Big Think in 2012, discussing the history of the advancement of neoliberal policies:
… privatizing key state assets, deep cuts to these key social spending areas that people tend to protect, like health care and education, or these reforms to labor laws that take away protections, take away pensions, take away the safety net. What we know is that when politicians try to do this during normal circumstances, people tend to organize and resist, because they like their health care systems, and they actually like having labor protections. So the use of crisis for political-- ends has been a part of the advancement of this ideology in many lesser ways.
Detroit is no stranger to crisis: in the wake of the 2013 bankruptcy, the state of Michigan appointed an Emergency Manager named Kevin Orr and placed him in control of the majority Black city. When that happened, the state denied the entire city a quote “equal share of the financial support needed for essential public services.” In a book called Detroit after Bankruptcy, published in 2023, the author Joe Darden, calls out that this support was denied even though it was clear that Black students “in Detroit were attending grossly unequal schools compared to white students in the suburbs.” In that moment, he writes, “the Emergency Manager representing the Governor focused less on the inequity and instead advocated more charter schools as the solution, combined with a limited amount of choice o ver schools” . In line with a 1978 Amendment, called the Headlee Amendment, the state of Michigan continued to cut revenue sharing in order to balance its own budget. These reductions disproportionately impacted Detroit (which is a high-poverty, majority-Black municipality) much more than its surrounding suburbs.
The individualizing, silo-ing of neoliberalism was active even in the state’s decision to appoint an emergency manager in the first place—because it pinned the blame for the city’s troubles on incapacity and personal failure in spite of the fact that evidence didn’t support that theory:
The major premise of the Emergency Manager Law from the State of Michigan’s perspective was that Detroit’s fiscal distress was due to mismanagement and not a lack of financial support from the State. The State law makers who supported the law argued that Detroit should have cut pension obligations, cut personnel, and contracted out services traditionally provided by the City of Detroit. The law makers believed that the revenue side of the solution was adequate to provide for public safety and debt payment if only the city had competent management. Instead of assuming that there was mismanagement, some researchers have suggested that Michigan law makers should have paid more attention to monitoring the city early on— that is, before the crisis— and that they should have allowed the city to take the leading role in the path toward recovery.
These moves by the state, like pushing charter schools and withholding public funding from a high-poverty city on the basis of a perverse assessment of worthiness, are emblematic of a shift toward privatization: it’s a means by which neoliberalism constructs these silos, further alienates people from each other and the resources they need to survive, and manifests its fiction that we should privilege individualized, market-driven solutions for collective needs. This kind of disregard for people’s self-assessment of their own needs happens at the level of individual residents, too.
One way that shows up in Detroit is around water.
“They charge you like three times more than the water. If you use a hundred cubic feet of water…”
“Every year, the water department has been raising rates for at least 30 years now. Some people are paying up to 20% of their limited income just in water alone.”
I shouldn't have to say this, but water is a necessity for human survival. To state the obvious, beyond needing water to drink, having access to water is also a sanitation issue, a public health issue and it’s fundamentally a collective problem. People should have access to water irrespective of their ability to pay for it: water should be a human right. According to the UN, water is a human right. Privatization and the commodification of public resources we require to live, like water, is a means by which capitalist logics construct silos around interdependent needs and the resources that meet them.
In the wake of the bankruptcy in Detroit, the city also came under fire for shutting off access to water for residents who were two months behind on their payments. This wasn’t new, but it spiked during Emergency Management and in the years following. The UN declared these acts a violation of the human right to water. That’s Monica Lewis-Patrick, President & CEO of We the People—also known as the Water Warrior—talking about the city’s policies on water access as foreshadowing moves to privatize water worldwide:
…there was coming a time where water was going to be privatized and there would be be wars fought over water…But then what you saw happen is then Gary Brown. Along with Kym Worthy, the prosecutor got together and decided that even as we were seeing tens of thousands of Detroiters shut off from access to water, even though we knew water calls had gone up over 438 percent over two decades and 40 percent of the population in the city lives in abject poverty. Gary Brown and Kym Worthy went and actually moved from it being a misdemeanor to it being a felony if you in an emergency actually turned your water back on. And it was in that moment that we recognized that it was connected to what my mother told me after I told her about the massive settled and about the death of Charity Hicks. She's a retired master sergeant from the U.S. Army. She is a retired nurse, army and from the VA administration. And she told me in 2014, she said she quoted the Geneva Convention. She said, you can't even shut off your enemy in times of war from access to water. So if the American government and if municipalities have decided that they can shut off water from the American public domestically, then you must understand you have stepped into what is called a water war. And it was in that moment that I realized that they will criminalize, they will vilify, they will use everything at their disposal.
In what Monica’s saying here, we can see this same brutal definition of meritocracy underlying these kinds of policies, that if a person can’t afford the basic necessities to live on their own—water, food, shelter—they don’t deserve to live. Detroit is, an 80% Black city where nearly 40% of residents are living in poverty and it’s surrounded by a majority white and not nearly as poor state that took control of the city government and instituted an Emergency Manager in 2013, after which these shutoffs were highest. Considering this context, the tone of this underlying belief about who deserves to live and who doesn’t is undeniably racialized. Put plainly, it’s racist—it’s discrimination against poor, Black people. It’s a form of power that’s been termed “necropolitics” by Achille Mbembe, “the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”
It's it's abusive, it's ..it's and the quality, if you look at it internationally, it's a form of genocide.
That’s the voice of Charity Hicks, a beloved Detroit community leader and water justice advocate in an interview with documentary filmmaker Kate Levy from 2014.
It is a way to get people out of their homes.
Kate Levy: It criminalizes you for being alive.
So technically, we have to pay for our infrastructure, right? So there's cost associated with it. And I think the people's water board position is we collectively, collectively, all of us pay for our water system. The problem is, is when you massive shut off and you throw people out, so you take two, 300,000 meters out of service, what you're effectively doing is raising the rates on everyone else left. So you become it's a tailspin. It's like we're going to shut you off and then transfer the costs onto a smaller base of payers. And that's partially why the increase in water rates have been going up, because we're constantly throwing people out. So in 2006, Michigan welfare rights, crafted with some attorneys and some consultants, a water affordability access plan because we can't continue to deny people water, we just can’t. It’s a sanitation, It's a health. It's all types of things wrapped up in it. If you don't have running water, it's a form of neglect on children, minor children. It creates it's exacerbates health conditions. It's also a human dignity thing, too. The city council approved it, but the water board refused to implement it.
Back in May of 2014, Charity was arrested for protesting water shutoffs in her neighborhood in Detroit. If you’re wondering why we’re talking about water shutoffs from ten years ago—it’s because this particular moment, in the wake of the bankruptcy, was a central moment in which neoliberal logics could take over, as Naomi Klein explained. But also, it’s because water shutoffs haven’t stopped. The start of the COVID pandemic offered some brief pause in shutoffs, but the city resumed shutoffs for nonpayment in 2023. And, these shutoffs are also entangled with questions of safety, policing and incarceration in some disturbing but crucial ways.
But when Charity got arrested for just alerting her neighbors and her friends,
There’s Mama Monica again.
there was a mother that had just come home with a newborn baby just a few weeks old, and that baby required a certain amount of water and care. And when she just told them that there was a demolition company outside that was fully prepared to cut the whole block off. Not everybody, even owed a water debt. And they arrested Charity and Charity was actually taken not to jail, but directly to Mound Correctional Facility. She was taken to prison and held there for over two and a half days. I mean, nobody even knew where she was for over a day and a half. And then you had to send clergy, white clergy, and there had to be Alice Jennings, an attorney, going just to check on Charity just to make sure she was safe because she had injured her foot. She was bleeding. She also was diabetic, so she was having some other issues. But Charity came out and told the story of how the people were corralled in these cages and how they were sitting in their own waste and feces. And women had menstrual cycles and there was no water or anything to address these conditions.
Denying people water is a necropolitical move if I ever saw one: we need water to survive. Beyond that, Charity’s story exemplifies how this death-making logic pervades the American state and, in this case, is carried out by a water authority responsible for providing a life-making resource to people’s homes and the police, as enforcers. When Charity saw that these workers were about to shut off the water on her block, she came running out of her home to ask if they’d just let people draw some water in their tubs. In an act of civil disobedience, she and at least eight of her neighbors were arrested for blocking the entrance of the private company hired to cut people’s water off.
These arrests demonstrate the interconnectedness of both our human needs and the systems that manage safety and water. It exposes how the commodification of water, criminalization of poverty, and expansion of the prison industrial complex are intertwined. Being able to care for yourself and your family in your home—which requires access to clean, affordable water—is a matter of safety. We’re sold the myth that the systems of policing and incarceration are charged with serving, protecting, and maintaining safety. Instead, in this case, police apprehended and incarcerated a woman for demanding safety, for demanding water for herself and her neighbors. Before that, the Department of Water and Sewerage punished people who couldn’t afford exorbitant water bills by refusing them access to water: pay-to-play neoliberalism at work. It begs the question: what is ‘safety’, anyways?
people just want to be seen...particularly from women or people who are viewed as women, are like, "I want to be able to walk down the street and feel, OK, you know what I mean—feel like people have my back if something happened. I want to feel like, you know, safety to me means that I don't have to think about where I'm getting my next meal. You know, safety for me means that I don't have to worry about my neighbors taking from me, you know," whatever it is.
That’s my dear friend PG Watkins. In 2020 and 2021, PG was part of Green Light Black Futures, a coalition led by young, queer Black folks who mobilized neighbors, created media to shift harmful pro-Project Green Light narratives, and hosted community events, trainings and workshops about safety, justice, and abolition across Detroit. Members of the coalition launched a survey to better understand community needs around safety and harm that was published in 2022:
I think if we get to the root of it it's really about being seen it's really about being appreciated. It's really about feeling loved and supported. And like this collectivity that capitalism has taken from us. It's taken the collective priorities that, I mean, it's taken away the priority of the collective and instead called us to prioritize our individual experiences, our individual needs. And that means that when somebody else needs something, I shouldn't have to give up anything that I have to meet this need, right? Folks without homes who make homes on the street are criminalized for doing that when the solution is actually OK, can some of the tax dollars that we pay go to making sure that folks without homes have a place to stay? That actually is not the hardest thing to do in a huge ass city with a bunch of property.
Curtis: With a bunch of land and homes.
Lauren: Excess, excess...
PG: Excess land, right? This is not an impossible concept. But it feels impossible. You talk to people about abolition and you say, "The solution is housing everybody. The solution is feeding everybody without any questions." You tell people that and they're like, "Nah, that's too wild. That's never going to happen." You know, and there's this belief that that's never going to happen because some people aren't as important as other people. And also this idea that there's not enough of anything for all of us to have exactly what we want.
Lauren: Right, the scarcity...
Curtis: It is just not true.
PG: Which is not true at all, actually. You know, when we think about, I mean, one thing that the uprisings last summer in 2020 really forced so many folks who didn't have to think about this to reckon with is: the Detroit Police Department has a budget of 300-some-million dollars that just increases every year. And when people hear that number—when we were doing the work for the Coalition for a People's Budget and just were talking to people about how much money the police have, you know, we're doing these actions and we're just yelling out to the crowds "333 million dollars!" You know, people hear that number, they're like "What? That's wild!". [00:39:25][38.7]
Curtis: That's a lot of money.
PG: You know what I mean? Then you start having the conversations and it's like, yeah "Defund means we need to take some of that money away so that people can have houses. So that people can have what they need so that we don't have to shut off people's water." So anyways, I feel like so many of my conversations have been trying to get to the root of what people want. And again, I think I said this earlier, but just this curiosity about "why" and "what could provide that safety outside of the police." Can we imagine it? Can we get it in our minds that it's possible? And can we believe in ourselves and each other enough to fight for it, to work for it, to make that thing real?
So, PG is an organizer and facilitator and, as they point out here, having access to water, housing, and other basic needs is safety. At its core, for many people, actual safety at least begins with having your basic needs met: having shelter, having what you need to eat and drink—including water—and having people around you who can make you feel cared for and seen. In “Reclaiming Safety,” an article by Andrea Ritchie and Mariame Kaba, they remind us that we need to redefine safety in order to escape our carceral conditioning:
Abolition…requires us to unpack the notion of safety itself. While safety is a basic and universal human need, it doesn’t have a universal and singular definition. No individual or society can be “perfectly safe” at all times and under all conditions. All of us are vulnerable — to the elements, to natural threats like earthquakes or hurricanes, to harm caused by other inhabitants of this planet, to the uncertainty of human existence in a vast universe. Of course, we are not all equally at risk. Our vulnerability to natural disaster, violence, trauma — and our access to opportunities to heal from them — are structured by relations of racial capitalism.
To reiterate PG’s point from earlier, making water or housing available to people who need it is viable, in spite of the capitalist fictions that would convince us these are commodities or that there’s not enough of them to go around:
We also need to let go of the idea that safety is a state of being that can be personally or permanently achieved. Safety isn’t a commodity that can be manufactured and sold to us by the carceral state or private corporations. Nor is safety a static state of being. Safety is dependent on social relations and operates relative to conditions: We are more or less safe depending on our relationship to others and our access to the resources we need to survive. In her short film The Giverny Document, Ja’Tovia Gary asks Black women passing a subway station in Harlem whether they feel safe in their bodies, in their communities, in society. Their answers were equivocal and relative: It depends, they said, on conditions like who they are with, whether their health aide is nearby, where they are, what time of day it is, or if they believe God is with them.
In contemporary discourse about policing and safety, the ways we usually hear of safety described are actually security theater, a term coined to describe hyper-visible security measures that give an illusion of safety without actually protecting people. Surveillance is a prime example of this.
And the belief that surveillance produces safety is another central carceral fiction.
Ishmael Saleh is the manager of a Mobil gas station in Detroit. Like most stations in the city, Saleh rings up his customers from behind a wall of bulletproof glass. And that's just one of the safety measures taken here. The station is also a member of Detroit's Project Green Light program. That means the business has upgraded its lighting and installed security cameras that feed directly into Detroit's police department.
You’re listening to Laura Herberg on an episode of WDET’s “Tracked and Traced,” an investigation of Project Green Light.
Carceral logics would have us believe that more surveillance equals more safety and in neoliberalism’s drive to privatize public resources, safety is no exception.
Signage and a flashing green light atop the mobile sign outside are meant to tell potential customers and criminals that the gas station is involved in the program. Installation of required cameras, signs, and lights cost business owners around $5,000. On top of that, initial investment businesses have to pay for high powered Wi-Fi to transmit video.
And yeah, you heard that right, business owners pay extra for this service. Surveillance technologies like Project Green Light are sold to the public on the belief that they prevent or reduce harm or violence, but there is no evidence to support that they do. Fear-mongering about crime and violence predicated on a foundation of very real fears and experiences of harm has convinced countless cities—Detroit included—to invest heavily in them, funneling more money to police departments and discriminately focusing their attention on poor, Black residents in the process.
And Project Green Light really takes it a step further, by literally selling these security measures becomes emblematic of the neoliberal obsession with commodifying things that should be public resources.
As you heard in that excerpt from Tracked and Traced, Project Green Light’s selling point is that police will respond when something happens, which might sound odd because.. well, that’s literally what they’re supposed to do in the first place.
what Curtis and Tawana have said: "safety is more police safety is, you know, police responding quicker, right? Which, I think, to talk about the trauma that folks are experiencing, Project Greenlight really is out of the trauma of Detroiters for decades, not getting any response when something happened or getting a response that was hella delayed and just disrespectful, you know, in the ways that—if the police are doing what they're "supposed to do," air quotes, you know, they weren't doing what they were supposed to do, right. You're actually not even meeting the expectation of this community. You're taking days to respond to 9-1-1 calls. Project Greenlight is like, "Yeah, pay a few hundred dollars to us...
Lauren: "For a small fee...".
PG: "...and we promise. We promise we will come right away, you know, you'll see us in just a couple of minutes!" And that feels good for folks. They're like, "Wow, I'm seen!" Right? I pointed to Tawana and looked at Tawana because she's been doing all this work around being "seen not watched" and people just want to be seen.
As PG points out, the fear that was capitalized on to make the case for Project Green Light comes from a very real place. Project Green Light quite literally profits from a failure of the existing carceral system to address people’s actual desires for safety and people’s rightful fears of living in a city that has abandoned so many of its residents' basic needs that constitute safety. Call it “Policing Prime,” Amazon-like on-demand delivery of a timely police response.
Project Green Light convinces businesses and residents of the farce that more surveillance will produce more safety and then it charges them exorbitantly to deliver a service police were supposed to be providing all along. By charging businesses an extra fee for faster response times and then installing a surveillance system plugged directly into the department’s monitoring system and facial recognition software, it also renders private enterprises concerned with protecting capital and property—not people—into the primary beneficiaries of police intervention, while purporting to make everyone safer. Not to mention, this arrangement also allows DPD to skirt public oversight and regulation: according to Eric Williams, a managing attorney at the Detroit Justice Center, Project Green Light’s cameras—since they’re placed on private property—aren’t subject to the same kinds of regulations they would if they were on government property.
If you remember only one thing from today’s episode: let it be that Project Green Light doesn’t prevent harm or reduce crime. And, even if it did make it easier to identify and incarcerate people for so-called “crimes,” they’d more than likely be crimes of poverty—like petty theft from gas stations. And at the end of the day, disappearing people won’t fix what drove them to commit harm in the first place.
This obsession with surveillance isn’t limited to Project Green Light in Detroit, it also happens at home.
Oh my God, I hate Next Door, ugh, I hate Next Door so much. Next Door is the absolute worst.
So, if you don’t know, Nextdoor is one of many neighborhood-based digital platforms that allegedly helps build intra-community relationships. As described by two researchers Armando Lara-Millán and Melissa Guzman-Garcia in a study on “Digital Platforms and the Maintenance of the Urban Order,” the defining features of these platforms are that first, participation is restricted to residents in neighborhoods; second, the apps enable residents to make posts—things like video, live stream, photos, text, and reactions—about issues of neighborhood concern; and lastly, that they notify residents of potential security issues in real-time and allow them to see incidents mapped visually.
It's a terrible, terrible, terrible place. And it feels like such an important place to be aware of and stay present to because community is on there deep. You know, like there's — I don't know that there is another way that I could have felt so connected to my neighbors in a pandemic. You know, like literally the people who live on my block, as somebody who's a renter who moves every couple of years and hasn't been able to really solidify neighborhood relationships, you know, I get to know the person right next to me and that's pretty much it. Next Door is an opportunity to see each other and be with each other to support each other, and that shit is wild!
It's also a platform that creates space for conversation and connection that otherwise wouldn’t happen. That said, it’s also a platform that, especially when paired with home surveillance systems like Ring cameras, can “amplify paranoia, racism, and carceral impulses of American homeowners.” Most importantly, perhaps, they have significant partnerships with police departments and facilitate sharing home surveillance footage with them. They extend the long arm of policing and surveillance through people’s private residences and essentially allow residents to operate as agents of the state, knowingly or not:
PG: They be on this app—and this is why I'm saying the carcerality at home thing—they be on this app sharing their Ring camera footage. [00:15:30][7.7]
Lauren: Oh wow.
PG: Talking about "This person came up to my door and left. I should have called the cops on them." There was this whole thread that was probably like a hundred plus comments about these young kids playing ding dong ditch and the woman being so upset by the inconvenience of this game that kids have played for decades, maybe centuries, even, people have been playing.
Curtis: We was doing it in caves!
PG: OK! When we had doors as soon as anybody had something to knock on or ring to annoy their neighbors. I feel like it's always been a thing, but they were literally playing ding dong ditch: you could tell they were, right. It's the Ring camera footage. You can see them running up, laughing, running away. It was clearly some kids playing, right. But the way that the folks on these threads were so violently saying what should be done to these young kids for playing a game in their neighborhood was so hard to read. And I mean, I didn't read all of it, but it was just like, "Is this real?" I was really scrolling trying to see if there was going to be anybody with some sense on the thread, like if I needed to comment or somebody else had already said the things. But that's some of it, right? It's like: we have these opportunities to connect, to get curious about each other, to support each other, to assume the best about each other. Andinstead, we kind of go to the absolute worst and say, you know, they should know better. And because they don't know better, they deserve to be locked up. And even if, you know, it’s a game but getting locked up will teach them not to do xyz again. It’s just wild kind of the narratives we create that restrict kids from being able to play and that restrict us from being able to be more trusting and feel more safe in our neighborhoods. And I think that those types of narratives get perpetuated and it creates this lack of safety on our blocks and in our homes for sure.
At the end of the day, these platforms have the capacity to bring us closer, as PG described of the potential they saw in the context of COVID 19, but because of the ways we internalize the carceral fictions about the notion that, for example, surveillance and policing produce safety, so often they end up being co-opted to perpetuate those social fictions and reproduce state surveillance through individual households.
Alright, so we’ve touched on two ways that surveillance becomes privatized: Project Green Light and Surveillance at home. Finally, another way we see the privatization of public safety at work is in the ways surveillance is employed by private corporations to police public spaces and how those private corporations intersect with regional police forces to control people in urban space, for example. This came up in my conversation with Nick Buckingham of Michigan Liberation:
safety for gentrification means the criminalization of poor Black people.
That's Nick Buckingham, the co-founder and co-executive director of Michigan Liberation:
To see homeless folks get arrested now for sleeping outside in a park. To see, you know, these different institutions around high populated homeless areas, start to close their doors, or be limited with the amount of resources that they're able to have. Ironically, like you only see this in Gilbert-town. Right? As Gilbert comes into Detroit and starts to put up this invisible fence around his property now. Right? Property that, you know, one has belonged to, you know, many Black Detroiters. But before that, the indigenous population of Michigan. Now he gets to put up these invisible fences. He gets to set, you know, the standard of law within his invisible parameters. He doesn't need DPD anymore, Detroit Police, he has his own, you know, Dan Gilbert force that you know, they act as the police. They have laws and policies that they're able to follow just like the police, you know, they're able to to remove a person off of the street and like literally criminalize this person, you know, for being poor, for being homeless, things like that. So to see you know, to see that happening is a disgrace. [00:11:45][81.1]
What Nick is describing is neoliberalism’s public-private partnership wet dream. He’s right, Gilbert doesn’t need DPD, but he definitely still partners with them. In Brett Story’s book, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power, she describes the material relationships between downtown corporations’ surveillance systems and local police forces through a passage about what some Detroiters non-affectionately call Gilbertville: the sprawling expanses of downtown Detroit owned by billionaire Dan Gilbert, who made his fortune on Quicken Loans, now known as Rocket Mortgage:
In Gilbert’s billion-dollar downtown, a Rock Ventures security force patrols the streets twenty-four hours per day, reinforcing the unflinching gaze of hundreds of high-tech security cameras affixed to the buildings purchased by his companies. Meanwhile, a model of downtown Detroit in miniature sits in the boardroom of the Quicken Loans headquarters, with Gilbert’s properties illuminated in a bright orange glow once he acquires them. Situated in one of those buildings, the Bedrock-owned Chase Tower, is a command center where dozens of computer screens monitored by security guards link to live feeds from the arsenal of video cameras planted downtown. The monitors connect to approximately 1,000 different cameras in the streets and sidewalks surrounding Rock Ventures properties in seven different states, with over 300 of those cameras located in metro Detroit alone. The camera program is a collaborative effort that includes most of the big downtown property owners, including General Motors, Ilitch Holdings, and Compuware. Once a month, the representatives of those companies meet in a boardroom at the Compuware headquarters, the same building that hosts Quicken Loans, along with members of the DPD, Wayne County Sheriff, Wayne State University Police and representatives of the numerously deployed private security forces.
Brett Story goes on, writing, “The private-public security partnership is insidious, not only because it indicates the privileging of corporate property over ordinary residents—” much like Project Green Light, “but also because the limits of public law enforcement are offset by the private security guards, and vice versa. For example, the Guardsmark Inc. security guards employed by Gilbert’s companies are under no legal obligation to read detainees their Miranda rights, but they do have the power to use force. They tag team with Detroit police forces when removing unwanted people from the downtown, communicating via radio and sharing video feed from the multimillion-dollar surveillance system.” In 2015, Bedrock—Gilbert’s real estate company—was accused of placing security cameras on buildings they don’t own: Detroit Beer Company and American Coney. While it turned out it wasn’t Bedrock, it was Compuware, another corporation with whom they share surveillance footage and private policing resources: the distinction feels moot.
There’s a common refrain in anti-surveillance advocacy that focuses on the desire to be seen—validated, acknowledged, affirmed—not watched. In the space between these experiences, a contradiction exists between the ways in which surveillance makes us hyper-visible, targets its gaze at specific kinds of people—poor, Black, immigrants, and so on—and the ways in which disappearance functions to remove those same people from view through incarceration.
And it’s not just about surveillance, either. Dan Gilbert and his corporations have massive financial stakes in the broader scheme of policing and incarceration in Detroit: Bedrock was brought on to build a new jail and court complex with a major county investment and land swap as part of the deal.
Nick: You know, schools closed down and we built a $500 million jail, right? And we, the jail isn't being built in like a rural community, right?
Lauren: Oh no.
Nick: It's not being built in a area where, you know, the average child that's traveling through Detroit wouldn't see it. It's being built right where it's visible.
Lauren: It's like a monument!
Nick: Yeah, it's like a monument. It's literally like right there...
It’s a monument all right, but it’s also a threat. It’s a hyper-visible reminder of the punishment that awaits folks who disrupt the capitalist order; the ones we would disappear.
Alright, so to sum things up: capitalism turns the public resources we need to live into commodities we can’t afford; folks are being criminalized for just demanding things like water; and the neoliberal impulse to privatize collective needs has us convinced that safety can be bought and surveillance at every imaginable level equates to safety. So, where does that leave us? It leaves me, at least, with more questions about how these fictions become reality: what are the mechanics of these mythologies that keep us so.. Entranced? Delusional? Stay tuned for Part 2, where we’ll talk more about these delusions and several others.
Thanks for joining us for this episode of Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities on silos, alienation, safety and interdependence. Until next time, remember what’s real: capital isn’t productive, people are; neoliberalism requires a ton of heavy-handed intervention from government—including police and prisons—to carry on the way it does; police, they don’t serve or protect anything other than capital; and, for the love of God, surveillance is not safety.
So, thank you to the many people who’ve made this show and the wider body of work possible over the last three years: Thank you to all the futurists featured in this episode who participated in this project three long years ago: Nick Buckingham, Curtis Renee, Tawana Petty, PG Watkins, Angel McKissic, Monica Lewis-Patrick, Nate Mullen. Thank you especially, to PG for helping me facilitate these conversations.
And rest in power to Charity Hicks, who was killed in a hit and run in New York City in 2014.
This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by me, Lauren Williams; essays were co-edited by my dear friend Ayinde Jean-Baptiste; and the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Excerpts from several references were read by voice actors Joy Vandervort-Cobb and Jastin Artis. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.
This project is presented in partnership with Respair Production & Media.
Welcome to Carceral Fictions & Abolitionist Realities, a series of narrative essays that reflect on emergent themes from conversations with Detroit-based organizers and futurists committed to abolition of police and prisons. Interweaving research with brief dispatches from speculative abolitionist futures, each episode draws together the voices of people working toward food justice, water access, educational equity, restorative justice, and Black liberation to connect thematic currents surrounding the abolition of police and prisons. In each episode, we look closely at the kinds of fictions that shape our current attachments to policing, prisons, and punishment to examine where they come from and how they affect us. At the same time, you’ll hear us explore abolitionist realities that counter these fictions and open up other ways of being.
When you hear someone say they want to abolish police and prisons, what comes to mind? And more importantly, does it even seem.. Possible?
My name is Lauren Williams. I’m an artist and designer based in Detroit, MI and I work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power. You’re listening to Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities, a series of audio essays about making room for abolition.
You talk to people about abolition and you say, "The solution is housing everybody. The solution is feeding everybody without any questions." You tell people that and they're like, "Nah, that's too wild. That's never going to happen." You know, and there's this belief that that's never going to happen because some people aren't as important as other people. And also this idea that there's not enough of anything for all of us to have exactly what we want.
“Making Room for Abolition” first appeared at Red Bull Arts in Detroit in October of 2021 as an installation of speculative artifacts from a future without police and prisons. This series of audio essays reflects on conversations from that space with Detroit-based organizers and futurists. People committed to food justice, water access, educational equity, restorative or transformative justice , and Black liberation more broadly. When Black folks in Detroit manufacture better lives for ourselves—whether that’s healthier food, safer neighborhoods, new technologies for moving through conflict—it's usually described as an act of survival or desperation, rather than being classified as an act of resistance or future-making or speculative design.
Each and every of the folks you’ll hear from is practicing a future that especially poor Black Detroiters have been told is impossible.
It's hard. It's hard to dream when you think that this place is Detroit.
But it's not because we have some innate limitation in our imagination.
Detroit is a French word, but there’s actually a history and a truth to this place and there’s a name to this place that we have all been denied knowing.
...it's because you have huge systems of power for generations telling us that this ..punishment is a very strong logic that really has to be, you know, we have to try to cut right through it.
So, in each episode, we’ll look closely at the kinds of carceral fictions, these myths concerning nature, safety, interdependence, time, imagination and more that shape our current attachments to policing, prisons, and punishment in the many spheres of life where they manifest.
We parent carcerally. We school people, carcerally. Medical institutions, mental health are all operating on carceral logic. They're all punitive. So, it’s a pervasive, logic.
And the thing is, these logics aren’t just inherently true — they’re myths, fictions that we’ve constructed and materialized into reality. In this series, we’ll examine where these fictions come from and how they affect us. But, at the same time, each time we introduce a carceral fiction, you’ll hear us propose abolitionist realities that counter these fictions and open up other ways of being. So, if you consider yourself even the slightest bit abolition-curious, this series is for you. If you’d describe yourself as hopeful about abolitionist possibilities but struggling with the task of imagining how we get there, this series is for you. I hope you’ll join us for Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or on makingroom [dot] online.
This project is presented in partnership with Respair Production and Media.