Good evening. Can you hear me? Good evening.
I'm guessing that wasn't for me. Laughter Yeah, yeah. Right, right.
Alright, you're funny, funny. Yeah, thanks. Okay, I am Kathy Cohen, professor of political science and former director of the Center for the Study of Race at the University of Chicago.
Thanks. Okay. And it is my honor and pleasure this evening to introduce our speaker, Angela Davis. You gotta hold back until she speaks, okay?
All right. Before I say a very brief introduction about Angela, I want to thank a number of people and entities that made tonight possible. First, I want to thank the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, in particular a few staff members, but the entire group. Michael Dawson, the director. Tracy Matthews, who has done, I mean, exceptional work.
To pull this off, Sean Lee, project assistant. I also want to thank the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Yes.
Linda Zerilli, who is the director. Gina Olson, who is the other half of doing the incredible work to make this night happen. Thank you, Gina. and Ashley Cargill, Program Coordinator.
I want to thank the Rockefeller Chapel staff, Eden Sabala, and Dean of Rockefeller Chapel, Elizabeth Davenport, for hosting us this evening. The co-sponsors for this event, Political Science Department, yay for political science, Office of Multicultural Student Affairs, and the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. Thank you also to Cable Access Network, CAN TV, for videotaping tonight's event for broadcast. I want to thank Jada Russell of High Style Marketing and PR, all the volunteers, And all of you for coming out for this incredible event. Thank you so much.
Now, let me just say a little bit about the format. The format this evening is Angela will speak for about forty five minutes. Then we will have about 20 minutes for question and answer.
There will be two of us moderating questions, so let me hip you to this right now. No long speeches. There's one speaker tonight, all right?
Succinct questions. I will have the mic and cut you off, all right? All right, so we're all here. It's all love.
Okay. So how did we come here to be here tonight? The Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, headed by Linda Zerilli, is home to the Feminist Theory Project.
The project is devoted to the study of gender and sexuality. to exploring the history and continued relevance of feminist modes of critical thought and praxis. One crucial aspect of the project is the Classics and Feminist Theory Annual Series, which is devoted to a critical rethinking of the history of feminist theory and the thinking of foundational texts in the development of feminist thought.
This year, the Center decided to feature the work of Angela Davis as our classic and feminist theorist. Coincidentally, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, headed by Michael Dawson, decided to reinstate its annual public lecture this year. This lecture is the featured and culminating public event of the year and is designed to spark debate.
debate around key issues of race and ethnicity. of critical domestic and or international import. The lecture is also designed to bring into conversation and debate multiple communities, academic and non-academic, especially those who are not often in dialogue with each other.
The Ray Center similarly decided to invite Angela Davis to give its annual public lecture. So it seems only natural that these two wonderfully intellectually imaginative centers would collaborate. to bring Angela Davis to the University of Chicago this evening. So let me say a few words about our speaker, and then I will turn it over to her. Through her activism and scholarship over many decades, Angela Davis has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world.
Her work as an educator, both at the university level and in the larger public sphere, has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender and sexual justice. Professor Davis'teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College, and UC Berkeley. She's also taught at UCLA. Vassar, the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University. Most recently, she spent 15 years at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is now Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness, an interdisciplinary PhD program, and of Feminist Studies.
Angela Davis is the author of nine books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South Africa. South America. In recent years, a persistent theme of her research and writing has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws on her own experiences in the early 70s as a person who spent 18 months in jail and on trial after being placed on the FBI's 10-minute trial.
most wanted lists. She also has conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender, and imprisonment. Her recent books include Abolition Democracy and Are Prisons Obsolete?
about the abolition of the prison industrial complex. Now, of course, what Angela Davis is most known for is her timeless work for freedom, equality, and the liberation of oppression. people. She has a long history of struggle, which I don't have time to recount, but I will say, for example, Davis is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia, that works in solidarity with women in prison.
Angela has always found time and prioritized work and struggle in organizations for liberation. Again, there's just too much to say about her incredible life and incredible work. She is an icon, a scholar, and an activist.
And tonight she is here with us. So I would ask you to join me in welcoming our speaker for this evening, Angela Davis, who will speak. on feminism and abolition.
Thank you. Thank you so much for the amazing welcome. First of all, let me also say thank you to the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture and to the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. And I'd like especially to say... thanks to Tracy Matthews for being such a wonderful host during my days in Chicago.
And of course, I've known her since she was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. So it's wonderful to spend time together again. And of course, to Professor Kathy Cohen, whom I've I've known for some time and have been involved in a number of struggles, and she's the person who initially wrote me about the possibility of this visit to the University of Chicago. And let me say, this is the first time in many years that I have spent an extended period of time in Chicago. That is to say, four days, four whole days.
And if yesterday and today felt like the Chicago I've always known, Tuesday and Wednesday were the most beautiful days in the city I ever experienced. And I started to think, I can live in Chicago. Until the wind and the cold returned yesterday.
But I still like Chicago. And it is wonderful to be here no matter what the season might be. This amazing city has been here for a long time.
such a history of struggle. It's the city of the Haymarket murders, the city of radical labor unions, the city of resistance to the police assassinations of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. It's the city of Puerto Rican activism against colonialism.
It's the city of immigrant rights activists. And of course it is the city of the Chicago Teachers Union. Now, a few years ago, Chicago was the city that developed a revived national movement to support Assata Shakur.
And I remember Lisa Brock and Dara Cooper... Tracy Matthews, Beth Ritchie, Kathy Cohen, and others called for a renewed campaign to defend the rights and the life of Assata Shakur. Yesterday, May 2nd, 2013, 40 years after Assata was shot by New Jersey State Police and falsely accused of the murder of a man. murder of state trooper Werner Forster, she became the first woman ever to be placed on the FBI's most wanted terrorist list. Why, we should ask, was it necessary to put a woman's face on terrorism, especially in the aftermath of the tragic bombing of the Boston Marathon?
Why was it necessary to put a black face on terrorism, especially after initial news about the Boston bombing that the perpetrator was a black man, or if not a black man, at least a dark-skinned man in a hoodie, the ghost of Trayvon Martin? Assata is not a threat in the way she has been represented by the FBI to be someone who is just waiting to commit an act like the Boston Marathon bombing. Assata is certainly not a terrorist. But if she is in no position to commit acts of violence against the U.S. government, The fact that the FBI decided to announce with great fanfare that she is now the only woman on the most wanted terrorist list should cause us to wonder what the underlying agenda might be. And I should say that I especially empathize with Assata because it was 43 years ago.
that I was placed on the FBI's 10 most wanted lists. And some of you may have seen the new documentary on my trial. And as that documentary reveals, President Richard Nixon congratulated openly and ceremoniously congratulated the FBI for catching me and in the process labeled me a terrorist as well. So I know the dangerous consequences that can follow from this ideological labeling process. That this is happening 40 years after Assata's original arrest should give us cause to reflect.
First of all, it reminds us that there is much work left over from the 20th century, especially for those of us who are in the middle of the 20th century. us who identify as advocates for peace, for racial, gender, sexual justice, for a world that is no longer mutilated by the ravages of capitalism. We are four decades removed from the era of the 60s, which is universally remembered as an era of radical and revolutionary activism. Being at a historical distance However, does not extricate us from the responsibility of defending and indeed liberating those who were and still are willing to give their lives so that we might build a world that is free of racism and imperialist war and sexism and homophobia and capitalist exploitation. I'm kind of rushing through because I only have...
45 minutes and because of what happened yesterday I really felt compelled to alter the introduction to my talk and say a few words about ASATA. And so I'd like to point out that individual memories are not nearly as long as the memories of institutions and especially repressive institutions. The FBI is still haunted by the ghost of J.
Edgar Hoover. And the CIA and ICE are institutions that have active and vivid memories of the mass organized struggles to end racism, to end war, to overthrow capitalism. And of course we should say something about... Homeland Security that got produced, you remember, during the Bush administration. And I guess you can say that Homeland Security took up the memories of both the FBI and the CIA.
But Lynette Peltier is still behind bars. And Mondo Wailanga and Ed Poindexter have been in prison for some 40 years. Sundiata Akoli, Assata's comrade. is in prison.
Herman Bell and Veranzo Bowers and Romaine Fitzgerald and my co-defendant Rochelle McGee has been in prison for about 50 years, a half century. Two of the Angola Three, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, are still in prison in solitary confinement and of course Mumia Abu-Jamal. Although he was released from death row and that was a people's victory, that was a people's victory, he is still behind bars. And even as the U.S. government, and this is ironic, singles out Assata as a terrorist and issues an open invitation to anyone to capture her and bring her back to the U.S., And there are so many mercenaries trained by Blackwater and other private security firms who probably will want to take up that bid for $2 million.
But even as that happens, the U.S. government holds in prison in this country five Cubans who attempted to prevent terrorist attacks on Cuba. They were investigating terrorism and in turn were charged with terrorism. I'm referring to the Cuban Five.
Free the Cuban Five. Now, the attack on Assata incorporates the logic. of the very terrorism with which they have falsely charged her. What might they expect to accomplish other than causing new generations of activists to recoil in fear? The FBI is attempting to persuade people, it seems to me, who are the grandchildren of Assata's generation.
My generation as well. to turn away from struggles to end police violence, to dismantle the prison industrial complex, struggles to end violence against women, struggles to end the occupation of Palestine, struggles to defend the rights of immigrants here and abroad. And I think you here in Chicago should be especially suspicious of the representations of Assata as a cop killer. Her hands were in the air when she was shot in the back, which temporarily paralyzed the arm she would have had to have used to pick up a gun.
I mean, you should be suspicious because, according to the Chicago Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression, 63 people have been killed by the Chicago Police Department in the last four years. And another 153... have been shot. Another 253 rather, 172 black people and 27 Latinos.
You should be very suspicious because as more youth are rendered disposable, as more youth become a part of surplus populations that can only be managed through imprisonment, The schools that could begin to solve the problems of disposability are being shut down, according to Karen Lewis, who is one of the most amazing leaders of our time, I think. Some 61 schools in this city face closure. And I think this is a good way to stage our discussion of feminism and abolition, which I consider to be essential theories and practices for the 21st century.
Assata Shakur represented within feminist struggles and theories an example of the way black women's representations and their involvement in revolutionary struggles militated against prevailing ideological assumptions about women. In fact, during the latter 20th century, there were numerous debates about how to define the category woman. There were numerous struggles over who got included. and who was excluded from that category.
And these struggles I think are key to understanding why there was some measure of resistance from women of color and also poor and working-class white women to identify with the emergent feminist movement. Many of us considered that movement at that time to be too white and especially too middle class, to bourgeois. And in some senses the struggle for women's rights was ideologically defined as a struggle for white middle-class women's rights, pushing out working-class and poor women, pushing out black women, Latinas, and other women of color from the discursive field covered by the category woman. The many contestations over this category helped to produce what we came to call radical women of color feminist theories and practices.
At the very time these questions were being raised, these questions about the universality of the category woman, similar concerns about the category human were being debated, especially... in relation to the underlying individualism of human rights discourses. How could this category be rethought?
Not only to embrace Africans, indigenous people, other non-Europeans, but how might it apply to groups and communities as well, not only to individuals? And then of course the slogan, human rights are women's rights, or I think it went women's rights are human rights, began to emerge in the aftermath of an amazing conference that took place in 1985 in Nairobi, Kenya. I guess there's some people in the house who attended that conference, am I right? Okay, I see some hands out there.
Great. And it was an amazing conference. I could spend the rest of my time here, you know, talking about what happened at that conference, but I have to move on rather quickly. And...
At that conference for the very first time, there was a very large delegation of U.S. women of color. And I think it was the first time that U.S. women of color... became active in an international arena.
Now, the problem was that many of us then thought that what we needed to do was to expand the category women. women so that it could embrace black women, Latina women, and so forth, Native American women, etc. We thought that by doing that we would have effectively addressed the problem of the exclusivity of the category.
And what I think we didn't realize then was that we would have to rewrite the whole category rather than simply assimilate more women into an unchanged category of what counts as women. Now, a few years earlier, 1979, a white woman by the name of Sandy Stone was working at the feminist recording company Olivia Records. Some of you may remember Olivia Records.
This woman was brought... attacked by some self-defined lesbian feminists for not really being a woman and for bringing masculine energy into women's spaces. As it turns out, Sandy Stone was a trans woman who later wrote some of the germinal texts in the development of transgender studies.
This woman was not considered a woman because she was assigned the gender designation of male at birth, but this did not prevent her from later asserting a very different gender. different gender identity. So let me fast forward to the present.
Okay, when scholars and activists are engaging with questions of prison abolition and gender nonconformity, and these scholars have produced some of the most interesting theories, some of the most interesting ideas and approaches to activism. But before I go into this, let me say parenthetically that I had the opportunity this morning to attend a part of a very exciting colloquium on the asylum. and the prison that was organized by Professor Bernard Harcourt in the political science department, and we can all applaud. And I heard two very brilliant presentations by Michael Rembus and Liat Bin Moshi, and I wish that all of you had been able to hear them, because it's often assumed that such issues as psychiatric incarceration and the imprisonment of children, of people who are intellectually and developmentally disabled are marginal questions.
However, precisely the opposite turns out to be the case. As both of the presenters emphasized, there is a great deal to be learned about the potential of decarceration and abolition in relation to prisons, about the potential possibilities of abolishing the prison industrial complex by looking very closely at the deinstitutionalization of asylums and psychiatric institutions. So having said that, what I want to do is address another issue and struggle that is unfortunately too often considered to be marginal.
the larger prison abolition struggle. So as I was saying, in relation to these contestations over the category woman, let's fast forward to the present. And let's visit the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live.
And an organization that is called Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project. Now... TGI Justice Project is an organization led by women of color, by trans women of color. The executive director is a woman whose name is Miss Majors.
And yeah, I'll tell Miss Majors that she got a lot of applause in Chicago, and that's especially important because she was raised on the south side of Chicago, not very far from here. She describes herself as a black, formerly incarcerated, male to female transgender elder. Born and raised on the south side of Chicago and a veteran activist, she participated in the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969. But she said she was not really politicized until the wake of the Attica prison rebellion.
And I was just talking to her the other day and I recently learned that the person she says she was politicized by is Big Black, one of the Attica defendants. Many of you will remember Frank Smith, Big Black. And she said that he was not only totally accepting of her gender presentation, but he corrected her on so many issues regarding the relationship between racism and imperialism and capitalism and so forth.
Now, TGI Justice Project is a grassroots organization that advocates for gender equality. or defends and includes primarily trans women and trans women of color. These are women who have to fight to be included within the category woman in a way that is not dissimilar from the earliest struggles of black women and women of color who were assigned the gender female at birth. have worked out what I see as a deeply feminist approach that we would do well to understand and emulate.
Ms. Majors, the executive director, she says she prefers to be called Ms. Majors, not Ms. Majors, because as a trans woman she is not yet liberated. Their work is deeply feminist because they work at the intersection of race, class, sexuality, and gender, and because they move from addressing the individual predicaments of the members of their community, the individuals who are most harassed by law enforcement, most arrested and incarcerated, and of course they end up primarily in male prisons, especially in the middle class. if they have not undergone gender reassignment surgery. And many of them don't want to undergo that surgery. And sometimes even if they have undergone the surgery, they end up being placed in men's prisons.
And after they are in prison, they often receive more violent treatment by the guards than anyone else. And on top of that, they are marked by the institution of male violence. And this is so much the case that cops so easily joke about their sexual fate in the male prisons where they're usually sent.
Male prisons are represented as violent places. But we see, especially by looking at the predicament of trans women, that this violence is often encouraged. by the institutions themselves. Many of you are familiar with the Minneapolis case of C.C.
McDonald, who was charged with murder after an encounter with a group that yelled out, okay, racist, homophobic, and transphobic slurs all at the same time. And she is now in a men's prison in Minnesota serving as a prison judge. a three and a half year sentence. But on top of this violence, trans women are often denied their hormonal treatments, even if they have valid prescriptions. The point that I'm trying to make is that we learn a great deal about the reach of the prison system, about the nature of the prison industrial complex, about the reach of abolition by examining the particular struggles of trans prisoners and especially trans women.
But perhaps most important of all, and this is so central to the development of feminist abolitionist theories and practices, we have to learn how to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically different. constituted as normal. As normal.
Prisons are constituted as normal. It takes a lot of work to persuade people to think beyond the bars and to be able to imagine a world without prisons and to struggle for the abolition of imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment. And we can ask ourselves in that context, why are trans women, and especially black trans women who cannot easily pass, why are they considered so far outside the norm?
They're considered outside the norm by almost everyone in the society. And of course, we've learned A great deal about gender over the past decades. I suppose just about everyone who's in the field of feminist studies have read Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. But you should also read Beth Ritchie's most recent book, amazing book, which is called Arrested Justice, Black Women, Violence, and the Prison Nation.
And specifically look at her account of the case of the New Jersey Four, where four young black lesbians just walking around having fun in Greenwich Village ended up in prison because they defended themselves from male violence and then they saw themselves represented in the media as a lesbian wolf pack. And so we see that here race... Gender, sexual nonconformity can lead to racist bestialization, which is an attack, as one of my students, Eric Stanley, points out in his dissertation, is an attack not only against the humans, but against the animals as well. And that's important to acknowledge.
TGI Justice Project is an abolitionist organization. It calls for a dialectic of service provision and abolitionist advocacy. And so what we see in TGIP is a kind of feminism that urges us to be flexible, not to become too attached to our objects, whether they are objects of study, and I say that for the academics in the House, or whether they are objects of our...
organizing, and I say that for the activists in the House, and sometimes you embody both scholars and activists, right? TGIP shows us that these objects can become something entirely different as a result of our work. It shows us that we need to It shows us that the process of trying to assimilate into an existing category is in many ways...
runs counter to the whole effort to produce something radical or revolutionary. And it shows us that we should not try to assimilate trans women into a category that remains the same, but that the category itself has to change so it does not simply reflect normative ideas of who counts as women and who doesn't. But by extension, there's another lesson. By extension, the lesson is don't even become too attached to the concept of gender.
Because as a matter of fact, the more closely we examine it, the more we discover that it is embedded in a range of social, political, cultural, and ideological formations. It is not one thing. There is not one definition.
And certainly gender cannot now be adequately described as a binary structure with male being one pole and female at the other. And so bringing trans women, trans men, intersex, many other forms of gender nonconformity into the concept of gender, it radically undermines the normative assumptions of the very concept of gender. And I want to share with you this really wonderful quote from Dean Spade, whom I understand spoke yesterday. From my understanding, he writes, a central endeavor of feminists, queer, and trans activists has been to dismantle the cultural ideologies, social practices, and legal norms that say Certain body parts determine gender identity and gendered social characteristics and roles.
We have fought against the idea that the presence of uteruses or ovaries or penises or testicles should be understood to determine such things as people's intelligence, proper parental roles, proper physical appearance, proper gender identity, proper labor roles. proper sexual partners and activities, and capacity to make decisions. We have opposed medical and scientific assertions that affirm the purported health of traditional gender roles and activities that pathologize bodies that defy these norms.
We continue to work to dispel myths that body parts somehow make us who we are and make us less than. or better than depending on which we may have. Now, trans scholar activists are doing, as I said, some of the most interesting work on prison abolition.
And I just want to mention three recent books by scholar activists who engage with trans abolitionist politics. And one of them is a wonderful anthology edited by... Eric Stanley and Nat Smith. Eric Stanley is the one I mentioned was my student. And it's called Captive Genders, Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex.
And Andrea Ritchie, Kay Whitlock and Joey Mogul just recently published an anthology called Queer Injustice, the Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. And then Dean Spade, whom I just recently quoted, and he's so amazingly prolific, I can't imagine how he writes all of these books and articles, and he's always on the front line in demonstrations all over the world. But anyway, it's called Normal Life. Normal Life.
Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Law. Now, I would argue that all three of these texts are feminist. And feminist not so much because they address a feminist object, although racism, the prison industrial complex, criminalization, captivity, violence, and the law are all objects that feminism should analyze, criticize, criticize, and also resist through struggle. But I see these texts as being feminist primarily because of their methodologies.
And feminist methodologies can assist us all in major ways as researchers, academics, and as activists and organizers. When we discover what appears to be one relatively small and marginal aspect of the category, of what is struggling to enter the category, so that it can basically bust up the category, this process can illuminate so much more than simply looking at the normative dimensions of the category. And, you know, academics are trained to fear the unexpected.
But also activists always want to have a very clear idea of our trajectories and our goals. And in both instances, we want control. We want control so that oftentimes our scholarly and activist projects are formulated just so that they reconfirm what we already know.
And that is not interesting. That is boring. That is boring. And so how to allow for surprises and how do we make these surprises Surprise is productive. And let me just make a tangential remark here, because in many ways this is about how to build on the surprise element.
When I was in high school, I really loved to square dance. I did. I loved it.
I did. I loved it. And then later on toward the Black Liberation Movement, somebody told me that black people don't square dance.
Why are you square dancing? Black people don't square dance. And then most recently, of course, I came across the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who are absolutely incredible. But I also ran across the story that I want to share with you about a square dance caller here in Chicago.
And I think her name is Sandra Bryant. I read this somewhere online. The square dance caller said she received a telephone call from someone who wanted her to call for their square dance club.
And so she says, okay, let me look at my calendar. But then the person quickly interjected, before you look at your calendar, you should know that we are a gay square dance club. And so she quickly retorted, well, before I look at my calendar, you should know that I am a black square dance caller.
So at that moment, square dancing became both black and gay, which probably changed something about square dancing as well. But you may think I was digressing, but not really, because I want to emphasize the importance of approaching both our theoretical explorations and our movement activism in ways that enlarge and expand and... complicate and deepen our theories and practices of freedom. Feminism involves so much more than gender equality, and it involves so much more than gender.
Feminism is is, it must involve a consciousness of capitalism. I mean the feminism that I relate to. And there are multiple feminisms, right? So it has to involve a consciousness of capitalism and racism and colonialism and post-colonialities and ability and more genders that we can even imagine and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name.
feminism has helped us not only to recognize a range of connections among discourses and institutions and identities and ideologies that we often tend to consider separate but it has also helped us to develop epistemological and organizing strategies that take us beyond the categories women and gender. And feminist methodologies impel us to explore connections that are not always apparent. And they drive us to inhabit contradictions and discover what is productive in these contradictions. Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think things together that appear to be separate and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.
Now, the assumption has been that because transgender and gender non-conforming populations are relatively small within a prison system, that in the U.S. constitutes almost 2.5 million people and more than 8 million people in jails and prisons worldwide, and therefore, why should they deserve very much attention? But feminist approaches to the understanding of prisons, and indeed the prison industrial complex, have always insisted that, for example, if we look at imprisoned women, who are also a very small percentage throughout the world, we learn not only about women in prison, but we learn much more about the system as a whole than we would learn if we looked exclusively at men. Thank you. Thus, also a feminist approach would insist both on what we can learn from and what we can transform with respect to trans and gender non-conforming prisoners, but also it insists on what this knowledge and activism tell us about the nature of punishment writ large, about the very apparatus of the prison.
It is true that we cannot begin to think about the abolition of prisons outside of an anti-racist context. It is also true that abolition embraces that prison abolition, anti-prison abolition, must also embrace the abolition of gender policing. And that very process reveals the...
The epistemic violence, and the feminist studies students in here know what I'm talking about, the violence that is inherent in the gender binary in the larger society. Feminism within an abolitionist frame and vice versa, bringing abolition within a feminist frame, means that we take seriously the old feminist adage that the personal is political. The personal is political. Everybody remembers that, right?
The personal is political. And we can follow the lead of Beth Ritchie in thinking about the dangerous ways in which the institutional violence of the prison complements and extends the intimate violence of the family. relationship, the individual violence of battery and sexual assault.
We also question whether incarcerating individual perpetrators does anything more than reproduce the very violence that the perpetrators have allegedly committed. There is criminalization, but the problem persists. And it seems to me that people who are working on the front line of the struggle against violence against women, they should also be on the front line of abolitionist struggles.
And people opposed to police crime should be opposed to domestic, what is constructed as domestic violence. There's public violence and there's privatized violence. There's a feminist philosophical dimension of abolitionists, both abolitionist theories and practices. The personal is political.
There is a deep relationality that links struggles against institutions. and struggles to reinvent our personal lives and recraft ourselves. We know, for example, that we replicate the structures of retributive justice oftentimes in our own emotional responses. Someone attacks us, verbally or otherwise, our response is what? A counterattack.
The retributive impulses of the state are inscribed in our very emotional responses. The political reproduces itself through the personal. This is a feminist insight, a Marxist-inflected feminist insight that perhaps reveals the reality of the state.
some influence of Foucault. This is a feminist insight regarding the reproduction of the relations that enable something like the prison industrial complex. Now we recognize, or we should recognize, that the imprisoned population could not have grown to almost two and a half million people in this country without our implicit assent. And we don't even acknowledge the fact that psychiatric institutions are often an important part of the prison industrial complex, nor do we acknowledge the intersection of the pharmaceutical industrial complex and the prison industrial complex.
But the point that I make is that if we had mounted a more powerful resistance in the 1980s and in the 1990s during the Reagan-Bush era and during the Clinton era, we would not be confronting such a behemoth today. We have had to unlearn a great deal over the course of the last few decades. We have had to try to unlearn racism, and not only white people.
People of color have had to unlearn the assumption that racism is individual, that it is primarily a question of individual attitudes that can be dealt with through sensitivity training. You remember Don, I must call the Rutgers women's basketball team nappy-headed hoes about five years ago. Five years later, he's rehabilitated.
But of course this doesn't compensate for the fact that Troy Davis is dead, his life claimed by the most racist of all of our institutions capital punishment. No amount of psychological therapy or group training can effectively address racism in this country unless we also begin to dismantle the structures of racism. And prisons, prisons are racism incarnate. As Michelle Alexander points out, they constitute the new Jim Crow, but also much more as the lynchpin. of the prison industrial complex.
They represent the increasing profitability of punishment. They represent the increasingly global strategy of dealing with populations of people of color and immigrant populations. from the countries of the global south as surplus populations, as disposable populations, put them all in a vast garbage bin, add some sophisticated electronic technology to control them and let them languish there. And in the meantime, create the ideological illusion that the surrounding society is safer and more free because the dangerous black people and Latinos...
the Native Americans and the dangerous Asians and the dangerous white people and of course the dangerous Muslims are locked up. And in the meantime, corporations profit and poor communities suffer. Public education suffers.
Public education suffers because it is not profitable according to corporate measures. Public health care suffers. If punishment can be profitable, then... certainly health care should be profitable too.
This is absolutely outrageous. It is outrageous. It is also outrageous that Israel uses the state of Israel.
Israel uses the carceral technologies developed in relation to U.S. prisons not only to control the more than 8,000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israel, but also to control the Palestinian population. These carceral technologies, for example, the separation wall, which reminds us of the border wall, the U.S.-Mexico border wall, is a very important part of the U.S. political system. border wall. The separation wall and other parcel technologies are the material constructs of Israeli apartheid. G4S, you know the organization, the corporation G4S, which profits from the incarceration and the torturing of Palestinian prisoners.
It has a subsidiary called G4S. as Secure Solutions, which was formerly known as Wackenhut. And just recently, a subsidiary of that corporation, GEO Group, which is a private prison company, attempted to claim naming rights at Florida Atlantic University by donating something like six...
million dollars, right? And the students rose up. They said that our football stadium will not bear the name of a private prison corporation. And the students won! The students won!
The name came down from the marquee. And so we can say from California or Texas or Illinois to Israel and occupied Palestine and then back to Florida. But we should not have allowed this to happen.
We should not have allowed this to happen over the last three decades. And we cannot allow it to continue today. And let me say that I really love the new generations of young students and workers. Two generations removed from my own, they say sometimes revolution skips a generation. But that skip generation has also worked hard.
Those of you who are in your 40s. And if you hadn't done the work that you did, then it would not be possible for the younger generation to emerge. And what I like most about the younger generation is that they are truly informed by feminism, even if they don't know it or even if they don't admit it.
They are informed by anti-racist struggles. They are not... infected with the emotionally damaging homophobia which has been with us for so long and they're taking the lead in challenging transphobia along with racism and islamophobia. So I like, I like working with young people because they allow me to imagine what it is like not to be so totally overburdened with decades of oppressive ideology.
Now, I just have a couple more things to say. I know I'm over my time, and I apologize. But I just have one more page of notes. And so let me say that marriage equality is more and more acceptable precisely because of young people. But many of these young people also remind us that we have to challenge the assimilationist logic of the struggle for marriage equality.
We cannot assume that once outsiders are allowed... to move into the circle of bourgeois, the bourgeois hetero-patriarchal institution of marriage that the struggle has been won. Now, the story of the interrelationships between feminism and abolition has no appropriate end. And with this conversation, we have just begun to explore a few of its dimensions.
But if I have not come to the end of the story, I've certainly come to the end of my time. So I want to let Asata Shakur have the last word tonight. At this moment, at this moment, she wrote a few years ago, I am not so concerned about myself.
Everybody has to die sometime, and all I want is to go with dignity. I am more concerned about the growing poverty, the growing despair that is rife in America. I am more concerned about our younger generations who represent our future. I am more concerned about the rise of the prison industrial complex that is turning our people into slaves again. I am more concerned about the rise of the prison industrial complex that is turning our people into slaves again.
We're concerned about the repression, the police brutality, violence, the rising wave of racism that makes up the political landscape of the U.S. today. Our young people deserve a future, and I consider it the mandate of my ancestors to be a part of the struggle to ensure that they have one. Thank you very much.