Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Talk, 17 April 2019

my name is Rachel Kushner I'm here to do the introduction then Ruthie Gilmore will give her talk then we'll have a conversation Gilmore's 2007 book golden gulag draws upon her vast knowledge of political economy and geography to explain significant historical change and the drive to embark upon what in California turned out to have been the largest prison building project in history of the world it's a book about California but as a case study which tells us many things about mass incarceration generally what it is why it occurred how to think about it and what to do prior to publishing Golden gulag gilma organized and campaigned to diminish the scope of police jails and prisons in California where she was living she considers herself a scholar / activist and has continued her dedication to activism for the last 30 years when I proposed to write this profile of her for the New York Times I was aware of the depth of her experience working on grassroots campaigns and the breadth of her intellectual capacities but I was nonetheless completely bowled over by Ruthie on the many hours we spend together talking she knows about drama and opera and film and literature and economics and Marx and the black radical tradition I mean she's in the black radical tradition is part of it as a geographer which is the discipline she studied and teaches she is attuned to the way contemporary life is built and organized and how it operates she can tell you how a state budget actually works and I mean really tell you how it works when the New York Times fact checkers asked her how did you know that the population in California prisons increased 500% they probably thought she would refer them to some Policy Institute where she'd gotten her information and then the fact checkers could tell her she was wrong and tell the Policy Institute their methods weren't suitably rigorous instead Gilmore responded I looked through facility by facility and read their state reported population counts which come out monthly and I did that for every facility in California for every year between 1982 and 2005 at the end of a very intense week of fact-checking this huge article on Gilmore people at the New York Times were saying things like well I'm no Ruth Wilson Gilmore but I think the wording here sounds pretty good her name had become a placeholder for smart but not just people were using her ideas as if they were objective fact because they'd fact-checked her ideas and realized they were correct while working on the piece I called some of Ruthie's colleagues and friends Mike Davis author of City of Courts literally praised her for three hours finally I just had to get off the phone mm-hmm Ruthie knocked my socks off Mike told me her knowledge base is incredibly broad and I mean she can truly hold her own on any subject they had worked together in South Los Angeles in the early 1990s in that era according to Mike Davis Gilmore's involvement with prison work was massively against the flow gang sensationalism had swept the country Ruthie did not jump on a popular cause the opposite she became involved in the most difficult demoralizing and unpopular movement the work she did Mike Davis said requires extraordinary moral stamina when I called Angela Davis no relation obviously to Mike Davis she told me that Ruthie had been the first person to receive the Angela wide Davis prize in mentorship and teaching and that she Angela was extremely honored that the recipient of a prize with her name on it went to Ruthie Angela said to Ruthie I would love to one day receive the Ruth Wilson Gilmore prize the scholar Avery Gordon told me her ability to teach others how to think is in my opinion what's special about her speaking fee is an exceedingly smart woman her knowledge base is deep across a range of areas including sports where her expertise might be more surprising but it's her analytic precision that's most striking Gordon went on to tell me that she thinks party Ruthie's power is that she doesn't use either jargon or manipulative rhetoric she's not playing on people's emotions to get her ideas across finally for my favorite quote from all these phone calls that I made to write this piece she's got hospitality the Yale professor of American Studies Caleb Smith told me he did not mean that Gilmore will offer you a cloth napkin when you dine at her place he meant she reaches out to people without standing courtesy with diplomacy with a shared and common goal of understanding this form of hospitality is not the thing for which a world-renowned scholar becomes known and yet I believe it is one of the rarest and most impactful qualities a teacher and influential thinker can have Ruthie's vision for the future for what in our world needs to change requires a messenger who can talk and listen find out where people are and make with them a path away from destructive institutions and precarious livelihood and inadequate resources Ruthie Gilmore is one of those people it's an honor to introduce her tonight oh good evening how is everybody I can't see you at all so you're gonna have to let me know you're here for the next 35 or so minutes while I'm talking before then Rachel and I sit in those nice comfy chairs and talk some more I'm I'm delighted to be here I'm delighted to be back in Santa Fe for the first time in about 38 years and I'm delighted to know that some of my oldest and dearest friends are in the audience and I hope a lot of new friends people who will be newly dear to me are here as well so what I'm going to do for the next 34 minutes or so is to give you a sense of the kind of work that I do and the way I'm going to do that is to describe some campaigns that I have been part of over the years and my part in those campaigns has been quite varied so sometimes my part has been to do the fundamental research that other people take other times my part has been to do the actual organizing of people on the ground and all kinds of things in between and I'm not going to say I very many times in what I present to you this evening I'm going to describe the work itself and the purpose is to give everybody here in the audience a rich sense of what abolition consists of because I suspect that many people in the audience thinks abolition means absence rather than presence so I'm going to talk about presence the kind of world we want is the kind of world we need so again a couple of stories in great detail then several stories with just some highlights and then depending on what time it is perhaps a little more detail perhaps not I'll save it for the Q&A all right here we go and this is in memory of the great rosemary brass the greatest organizer the world has ever known everyone was surprised when the United States Supreme Court upheld a federal Ninth Circuit Court ruling that declared California could not build itself out of the predicament that had made the immense prison system so deadly that at least one person a week every week for decades died prematurely because of medical neglect premature death comes from causes that can be taken care of but are not meaning people of any age can die prematurely the organized abandonment which is to say the deliberate and compounding neglect of people locked up by the California Department of Corrections provoked a difficult 20-plus year legal journey through the federal courts the result gained quite a bit of attention mostly because the Supreme Court said you cannot build your way out what brought this but the question that I want to put to you this evening is what indeed brought the state's Building broom to a halt after it had it had opened a prison a year every year for 23 years the media both mainstream media and social media remained fixated by the top-down actions such as the court order or Sacramento California State Capitol reluctant response hardly anyone wondered about what kinds of social relationships had changed in California's long thickening carceral geography the geography in which prisons as those kinds of buildings are produced and filled much less were people wondering how those changes had developed into a provisional abolitionist geography so in this lecture we're going to explore how organizing from the ground up interrupted California's prison building boom and we'll think about what some of the questions are and problems that organized those puzzles over and what kinds of tasks they set themselves how did combining legal and political struggle on the one hand and connecting late environmental gender and municipal effort on the other raised barriers to prison expansion and thereby radiate consciousness and strategy to repurpose common sense about how and where to fight carceral geographies developed deliberately but not inevitably deliberately but not inevitably so if the prison fix is a spatial solution to social economic and political problems it is necessarily then indicating places power and processes far beyond any group of buildings that are surrounded by an electrified fence therefore spatial challenges consist not only in trying to figure out power targets in various jurisdictions but also in identifying alternative scopes of activity that combine people working on a variety of problems across many different kinds of places toward ends that might not Center on prison as such so the first example oh I have one more thing to read then the first example practical abolitionism demands constant attention to the volatile interactions of subjectivity how people think about themselves and structure the kinds of constraints that people struggle with in holding racial capitalism as the slippery foe it always has been as we shall see people who organized in the unstable gaps between carceral and abolition combine to make power by making connections or what we might call an abolitionist Popular Front through militantly practical pursuit of transitional goals so the first detailed story there's always warm at the outset there we go this is by Fernando Marti fantastic designer at the outset the California prison moratorium project which started in the summer of 1998 wasn't certain where begin after many fits and starts using research done for the first edition of my book California prison moratorium project zeroed in on the South San Joaquin Valley so that's in central California they did outreach in the vast region by way of classified ads in weekly newspapers that invited people who wanted to stop a prison in their town to call a local number where a voicemail would take their information and promise a human would soon phone them back the cost for the outreach was low as befit a tiny organization made up entirely of volunteers who supplemented them their modest resources with an annual afternoon bola fan fundraiser what they didn't know excuse me while they didn't know who they'd find they knew every town had at least one prison opponent often a small business person sometimes the chronic malcontents in other places a journalist a schoolteacher and union organizer or a priest but there was always one stranded by the flood of intuitive common sense that insisted local expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars could not fail to improve modestly educated local people's lives so big dollar numerators and small population denominators suggested something terrific could happen if people could only figure out how to make some of the flowing cash stick failure turned out to be the rule not the exception in most almost all cases so various kinds of people frustrated for various kinds of reasons called the California prison moratorium project number some were not even from places facing new prisons but rather from towns that had said yes and then lost their night-sky or their calm roads or saw affordable housing swept away by new developments intended for highly paid guards others called to complain about a new culture that disrupted the community violence attributed to guards families correctly or not as well as the fact that for whatever reason starts families didn't settle near where they worked the calls were not many but they added up and the organization responded and offered to meet a quick ran down the valley by six organizers over three-day weekend turned up a number of people who eventually participated in a mini conference held at Berkeley to discuss how best to stop prisons and that then formed the knowledgebase for a handbook that the prison moratorium project wrote is still available online if you're trying to stop a prison in your town at about this same period between 1996 and 2001 the organized labor movement across the United States had been recruiting young people mainly although not exclusively college students to immerse themselves in training the periods were called Union summer to become field organizers the Union history of rural California from the Coachella Valley up across the transfers range and through the San Joaquin Valley up into the woods and mines of the north is a story of stark antagonisms repeated across sectors and periods but never settled nor abandoned young people joined the United Farm Workers by way of Union summer and news networks that radiated through universities and labor councils to share strategies connect campaigns and issue calls for solidarity and struggle California prison moratorium project learned from a prosperous farmer in the valley small by Valley standards he only had a couple of thousand acres and from colleagues of colleagues who worked with the United Farm Workers that new prison a new prison was being proposed in Tulare County in the South San Joaquin the farmer didn't want the prison because the small city which is what a prison is if the city would use too much water the farmworkers unemployed because a freeze had destroyed several crops didn't want the prison because having made or known others who make the long circular Mar Gration through the valleys fields and crops and other new prison towns they were convinced they would not get jobs in the prison but more likely would find themselves either incarcerated or visiting locked up love while meeting with the farmer who had defeated several earlier proposed prisons in this county the prison moratorium project organizers learned that the small group of anti prison growers had made the conscious transition from not in my backyard to not in anybody's backyard why mostly they were perplexed that year on year after defeating one prison proposal a new one would pop up in the county a different host town same vulnerable water table one of the farmers a grandmother decided in 1999 20 years ago to learn a new skill and so she had her college grandson teacher to surf the web she discovered and shared with her group that the eminent RAND Corporation hardly left delooney showed that locking up more and more Californians wasn't really solving problems in other words they the RAND Corporation and they this group of farmers did not believe either that achieving some carceral goal would end something called crime or that the pipeline of criminalized people existed because crime was out of control this is a huge shift in consciousness they did not argue as they might earlier have done this is the farmers now that the prisons should be in the communities that the prisoners came from rather the farmers decided yet the only that only a barrier to new prisons altogether would compel urban California which they tended to call Los Angeles urban California to do something else with their money and their people these relatively small but prosperous family farmers neither embraced nor oppose the welfare state somewhere else but at the same time is deeply dependent on seasonal labor they hardly wanted wage competition or alternatives to weaken their labor market control they spoke approvingly about the de facto porous borders that ensured an adequate supply of migrant farmworkers despite what our immigration laws might be current it's very complicated in the same County the United Farm Workers meanwhile was working to link hungry households with food remember there had been a freeze and people were out of work meaning people at distribution centers or going door-to-door to ensure people realize they were eligible for food and not embarrassed to receive it the union organizers became aware of members anxiety concerning the new prison they put out a scattershot call for help prison moratorium project got the message a few different ways at once it bounced through a think tank in Washington DC it relayed between former college roommates and it surfaced at a dinner of casual acquaintances here's the situation who can help call this number as it turned out the public hearing on whether to approve the prison was slated for the Monday following is a September weekend that prison moratorium project organizers had scheduled to drive around the valley and meet some lonely opponents who had called the voicemail in back-to-back meetings with the farmer and the UFW organizer in the corner of a diner California prison moratorium project laid out a strategy they derive from their militant research and cut a solid argument against any prison into two or three sentence pieces each of which would fit the 2-minute limit imposed on public comments all of the sentences were translated so that people could testify in the to major but hardly exclusive town languages Spanish and English other languages there might well have been Hmong mixtec or order the farm worker spoke the farmers spoke they laced their remarks in ways that demonstrated their mutual dependence in a world that can't much control as well as their unequal power and commanding the undivided attention of the decision making Bali but everyone said their lines and at the end of the hearing the council deliberated and voted unanimously against the prison I never want to hear about a prison for this town again one of the councilperson said in exhausted disgust sharing their experiences later at the small statewide mini conference strategy session with other organs advocates and scholars two of the people who testified a United Farm Workers regular organizer and her teenage daughter explained how the region's fraught geography gave them no alternative but to speak up for the record and encourage others to do the same their need as migrant workers to be in fairly constant motion across space meant that every household had stories of people stopped detained threatened by local and county police who despite not being federales wheeled immigration enforcement along with the many other tools of organized violence meanwhile the organized abandonment of transportation and other infrastructure promised to get better of course with a proposed prison but never doing so made both moving about and staying at home difficult the daughter explained how her high school education seemed in part a seemed design to channel her ambitions too individualistic ends in part by thwarting her effort to organize a student ufw chapter in her school so anybody here organizing chapters of red nation and so forth can take heart from this story they talked about how they have had to be creative in order to mitigate the difficulties they and their families and neighbors endure in the region but also how standing up to the council in a time of hunger shifted some people's consciousness of the Union even more than the fact then the Union had been feeding the hungry the observation brings to mind the Black Panther Party for self defense motto survival pending revolution or the words us communists organizers spoke to the people whose doors they knocked on after work hello my name is Ruthie Gilmore I'm from the Communist Party and I'm here to help you solve your problems the practical work and attended shift in consciousness was enabled by although not fully realized as the food program the mode of organizing if not the outcome was reproducible in California prison moratorium project organizers traveled around California sometimes one at a time sometimes in twos and threes to work with communities facing similar challenges in cases some kind of organizational organizational infrastructure already existed even if the person who put out the alarm a photographer a grumpy grandmother was not part of a group while small groups found ways to connect with other organizations over common concerns but more the mobile organizing unit put communities in touch with one another and before cheap social media made intense collaboration at least seem easier people use telephones and fax machines automobiles and email to make common cause with strangers across counties and regions and eventually in other states as well and now beyond the borders of the United States the scale and scope of convergence is in this small story offers a glimpse into the dynamics of change on the ground of the Golden State's prison terrain so you see from this story the kind of detailed work that we had to do the sorts of surprises that we encountered and the kinds of provisional but not guaranteed solutions that we devised so I have one more story that's got some detail in it and then I will give you some highlights of other stories that Rachel might ask about later or might not but you can read about it all in the second edition of my book that should be out next year all right the second one is called 70 million or more a handful of people from critical resistance and the California prison moratorium project set out to stop a particular new prison a different one from the one I just told you about the proposed new facility had been a thank-you gift to the California correctional Peace Officers Association from newly elected governor Gray Davis in appreciation of the guards two million dollar donation to his campaign by the way this is a Democrat so don't do the Republicans Democrats thing doesn't work that way prior research has already with the had already revealed by me the state's next prison would be put in Delano alongside another new era mega prison and it mega prison is built designed for five or six thousand people the multi-generation organizers turn their accumulated experience across a wide variety of long duration campaigns local national and international to the task of getting advice and contacts from and about already organized people who might be summoned to stop to the stop Delano to campaign the they brought strategies and histories from anti-apartheid black power agricultural boycott university anti-racism and anti-sexism campaigns to bear on how they approached people in faith communities worker centers and hiring halls social justice and environmentalist groups schools and colleges municipalities and development agencies and of course unions the Indian summers which I've already discussed a little bit brought new technicians into a variety of large-scale organizations that focused on a broad range of people who were vulnerable for any combination of these attributes they were low wage high value-added contingent on insecure jobs women non-citizens people with records public servants across specialties isolated workers of various skill levels weather truck drivers our home health care providers long-term or novice rank-and-file organizers set their sights on workers for home buttressing their side of power relations on the job would be worth the risk so outreach involved both identifying and persuading possible members planning campaigns winning elections within unions and getting to the bargaining table the effort to grow unions ran against strong trends in opposite directions worker outsourcing call it collective bargain and give backs narrowing interpretations of rights eligibility and discouraging decisions by external governing bodies especially the national labor review board unions also competed with each other to grow membership and some justified criticism argued that raw number seemed to mean more than securing reliable wages benefits and job security within these labor institutions members fought over what the union should do how and to what end for many years members of the California State Employees Association struggled to reinvigorate their unions democratic principles and practices some of the opposition vying for leadership within that union included non guard prison workers the guards had their own union noggin guard prison workers especially teachers who had provided education inside the walls their entire careers they had first-hand experience of the system's rapid growth and witnessed the CCPOA consolidate its power as the system acquired square footage and prisoners educational opportunities withered the teachers and their comrades in the struggle knew firsthand the role education played in enabling people to go home and stay home from prison at least under earlier regimes of criminalization indeed they knew that their students were among the people who at most recent count add up to about half of the u.s. workforce listen to this 70 million people in the United States workforce because of arrest or conviction records have impediments that keep them for many jobs available to modestly educated people in the free world so if you add those people together with people who are not documented to work so think of the 70 million is people who are documented not to work add those together with people who are not documented to work you have more than a little more than half of the US workforce think about that despite good arguments the teachers faced a set of structural problems that couldn't be solved by petitioning management or even teaching bigger classes resources drained away from elementary and secondary level classrooms and many of the instructional spaces filled with bunks while during the same period federal money that had been available to pay for individuals college education disappeared when President Clinton another Democrat eliminated Pell grants for prisoners in 1994 the guards union depended for its size and dues and therefore its political donation clout on maintaining a steady flow of people into in growth of the system both best practices guidelines and contract agreements specified the ratio of custody staff to prisoners with higher security prisoners producing the highest number of Union jobs in addition the fate of people released on parole lay in the hands of members of the guards Union as parole officers were police rather than the social workers County probation officers had been trained to be famously people on parole in California in these years were twice as likely as people on parole anywhere else in the USA's 50-plus jurisdictions to be sent back to prison on technical violations 70% is compared with 1 and 3 for an additional 6 to 12 months less than a year might seem a short relative relative to growing sentences but as has been vividly reported in jail studies even a brief custody period completely up ends people's lives costing them shelter employment court expenses mental well-being and household and community relations and I think there are probably people in this audience who can attest to this at the same time frizzen short-timers not unlike lifers at the other end rarely had be a chance to participate meaningful if at all in the remaining classroom opportunities at the outset the stop delay no two organizers had tried to incite enthusiastic response to outreach from non prison state employees whose agencies and individual jobs were facing the kind of squeeze the prison teachers endured opposing program cuts and layoffs was part of the ongoing fight to save the welfare state from organized abandonment but it didn't appear that those whose jobs depended on the forces of organized violence ie people who worked in the prisons would be particularly receptive given the substantial year-over-year increases their wedge of the budget enjoyed but there's always intra institutional competition as we who labor in higher education know it's a real thing with real consequences complementing efforts to build the Popular Front anti-d Delano - organizers also tried to starve the project of legislative votes it needed for funding and love stacks of reports issued by reputable think tanks from office to office showing that California's didn't want the prison Californians didn't think they needed the prison and Californians didn't want to spend the money on the prison the goal is politically to link these sentiments with the needs of state social welfare employees and their clients in order to raise questions and spark debates about the proper use of the social wage which is say all our tax money that said it came as a surprise when the legislative director of the local union representing non guard prison employees agreed to a meeting and five organizers drove to Sacramento to see what was going to happen despite long preparation for a day that was never ever guaranteed to come the organizers were stunned to find that the combination of persistent and targeted outreach with the noisy public face of the campaign meant the meeting with several dozen strangers was far beyond entry-level why is this prison a problem rather the people at the meeting who consisted of all different kinds of representatives shop stewards including from prisons and so forth already had reached a conclusion that they in this group at least shared that the guards were a problem that building this new prison was a problem and indeed a proposed renovation and extension of San Quentin the state's oldest prison was something else that should be opposed that we hadn't even put on our agenda for the union members who agreed to fight the guards union on the terrain of a new prison the issue came down to renovating the union's larger purpose the discussion in the room and knowledge excuse me the discussion in the room and knowledge prison workers and others brought into the room compelled the analysis to radiate beyond the direct Department of Corrections and focus instead on the opportunities for the Union and its members wherever they might work at the moment in the free world put another way while the guard members absolutely required prisons or people on parole the same was as absolutely not true for the other Union members a locksmith is a locksmith a janitor is a janitor a secretary is a secretary at teacher is a teacher so that's the end of the detail now I'm just going to quickly in seven minutes give you brief insights into a number of other campaigns one of the projects that we took up was trying to work with teachers especially in kindergarten through 12th grade to figure out how to bring abolition into curriculum organized around stopping this particular prison and we built on work that had had emerged from the struggles of the Black Panther Party for self defense from La Raza and other groupings in the late 1960s and early 1970s and as you can read on this slide which is not a beautiful slide but it is an informative one a mere 12 right 12 years after the National Defense Education Act had sort of put forward a promise to expand higher education for all different kinds of people and for especially first-generation college seekers under the aegis of fighting communism by 1970 the very people who had in some cases participated in this expansion were worried because as mr. Freeman said and educated proletariat is dynamite and that's what I do what I do the Panther the Panther Party and the tune of gentlemen on your right my left are people who were assassinated at UCLA in 1969 had a very broad educational campaign program and one of the campaigns had been to change the curriculum and particularly to have some influence on what the shape of black studies at UCLA should be in 1969 70 50 years ago John Huggins my cousin and bunchy Carter were assassinated for that work that they were doing thanks to the machinations of COINTELPRO the FBI and LAPD so moving forward for many many months many people worked with organized teachers and a social justice part of the State Teachers Union and others to do number of projects including develop curriculum for k-12 students that they could just bring into their classroom it's not about prisons it's about the world we want it's a different thing than saying we're just against prisons and then organizing that thinking around how to stop prisons having students college excuse me k-12 students go and lobby their representatives and do many of the other kinds of things that many people who are involved in radical movement in the 1960s and 1970s here in the United States tried to do they struggle length of vulnerability of young people in many ways and in linking those invar the vulnerabilities we started to think as well about the other sorts of vulnerabilities to life and well-being that people had throughout California so the next these are not chronological they're mostly simultaneous in fact this chapter is called meanwhile because everything kind of happens meanwhile meanwhile a group of organizers approached a group of loosely organized people called the Central California environmental justice Network to ask if it might be possible to present at their annual conference that was held in the Central Valley a few words about the problems with this proposed prison and granted twenty minutes the organizers presented five minutes spoken to in English and three in Spanish and then a 15 minute documentary that an artist named Ashley hunt some of you are probably familiar with this word work had made for the campaign and at the end of that the people in environmental justice did not need one more minute of explanation they said we get it we are with you and out of that came an organization Central California environmental justice network and an ongoing ongoing projects that lasts even today the struggle length of vulnerability of young people low-wage field workers aging populations with diminished Haas diminished hospital and other medical access the casual toxicity of the regional economy from agriculture to Goods transport aquella and Amazon have warehouses near there the threatened water air and the well-being of many kids and other creatures including the very non-charismatic before awhile very famous tipton kangaroo rat another member of the Black Panther Party for self-defense Michel Shenzhen had figured out about how pesticides used in urban environments especially roach spray and and certain kinds of poisons used to try to kill rats and and mice in urban public housing with contributing to the illness of children particularly exacerbating childhood asthma which causes fatalities in the United States of America and it never should so picking up from the thinking developed across these various campaigns the next project was to bring it all back home Los Angeles County the urban California to the Tulare County farmers was planning to increase attacks on on residents a sales tax on residents that would enable hiring 5,000 additional police so in organizing people in the county to stop that measure and to stop the increase in police the question went out what are you doing in your community that you could do more of if resources went to your community community instead of to the police and to prisons and so people came in to talk about what they do with young people with formerly incarcerated people with gender non-conforming people with all different kinds of people and the fight which went on and on and on is kind of symbolized in the way that people talked with money made out of post-its to say what it was they actually want in the world so this too is a picture of abolition and at the end the group managed to defeat the measure for the 5,000 additional police and have consistently defeated measures to build new prisons for women in the area and prisons for women and this is a picture by Trevor Paglen invisible as well as people organizing on the outside people who are locked up have been organizing themselves as well and they've been doing so in a variety of ways so for example people in the prisons for women in California when they heard that the state was going to build lovely new gender responsive prisons for them managed at great risk to themselves to produce petition with 3,500 names that was smuggled out of the prison blown up made into a huge role and dramatically unfurled at a legislative hearing to try to stop those prisons similarly people locked up in the prisons within prisons in one of the prisons for men in California Pelican Bay State Prison had at first tried to figure out a way that they could beg the prison authorities to give them some kind of path way out of a prison prison within a prison where at the time there were three ways out you could snitch you could parole or you could die there was no other way to get out and in their effort they first petitioned upward and all of their pleas fell on deaf ears although they had organized their petition through hunger strikes and one of the hunger strikers had died after calling off the hunger strike after receiving no kind of meaningful response from the prison authorities they decided to start again they reignited the hunger strike at a time when the whole world again seemed to be coming up in protests and opposition to intolerable circumstances so the so-called Arab Spring the uprisings in North Africa and West Asia sparked the imagination of people in a prison for prison who never can touch a human another human being who don't see each other can only hear each other who are never in the dark and who get to go outdoors if at all maybe one hour a day and their second time instead of throwing their demands up to the prison administration instead they decided to look at the organization into which the Department of Corrections had set them an organization that presumed there were racial and ethnic gangs who ain't agonism whose antagonisms were permanent violent and unchangeable and they said oh we can change this thing so they put out a call to end the hostilities among the races so my very last words have been a few minutes over time capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it the Pelican Bay State Prison collective the one that I just told you the story of hidden from each other experiencing at once the the torture of isolation and the extraction of time from their lives refigured their world however tentatively into an abolition geography by finding a basis on which to rework their experience and understanding of possibility in other words through which they change their consciousness in part by seeing where their power actually lay the fiction of race the fiction of race projects a peculiar animation of the human body and people take to the streets in opposition to its real and deadly effects so you all know black lives matter you all know red nation and so forth and in the end as the relations of racial capitalism which is all of capitalism take it out of people's hides the contradiction of skin becomes clearer our largest organ vulnerable to all ambient toxins skin at the end is all we have to hold us together no matter how much it might seem to keep us apart thank you thank you thank you very much you

Channel: Lannan Foundation

Views: 11,155

Keywords: slavery, prisons, social justice

Id: YeOY9Z3rZ94

Length: 46min 34sec (2794 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 21 2019