Affirmations of Freedom

Abstract

Affirmations of Freedom Angela Y. Davis (bio) Karl Marx's insistence that "the weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses,"1 clearly applies to the role of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's theoretical interventions in promoting the entrance of antiprison and antipolice abolitionist ideas into mainstream discourse. During a crucial moment of the COVID-19 pandemic, defined, in part, by the May 2020 uprising, radical critiques of structural racism—including in health care, carceral institutions, policing, and other putative state guarantors of public security—began to be taken seriously for the first time in our memories. While the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor served as the catalyst for a collective prise de conscience expressed in massive demonstrations, the important historical provocations leading to the largest public protests ever to occur in the US (and which quickly spread to other countries) were related to consistent abolitionist organizing as well as the circulation of scholarly and popular ideas in what has now come to be called the era of Black Lives Matter. Gilmore's contributions to abolitionist practices of organizing and theorizing have offered us conceptual and practicable alternatives to prevailing carceral approaches to public safety that require us to understand and transform the larger economic, political, and social contexts. Her work always urges people to contextualize immediate problems within larger frameworks that compel us to think about the work of the state. In these lectures and articles written over the last two decades and now brought together under the rubric Abolition Geography: Essays toward Liberation, we witness the development of Gilmore's ideas as we are introduced to some of the organizers, scholars, and artists who have influenced them, and we see some of the ways they have unfolded dialectically in relation to antiprison (and antipolice) praxis. From the women who are the driving force of the LA organization Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (Mothers ROC) to thinkers like Stuart Hall and David Harvey, to musicians like Ornette Coleman and his theory of harmolodics, we witness the unique ways in which theorists, activists, and artists help her to enter and transform theories and methods grounded in geography into a material force with revolutionary potential. [End Page 391] One aspect of Gilmore's work that I most appreciate is her refusal to capitulate to those anti-intellectual tendencies sometimes expressed within radical social movements, often calling for substantially dumbed-down versions of complicated ideas as the only way to ensure mass engagement. Relatedly, she also rejects the notion that effective analysis necessarily involves increasing levels of simplification, thus rendering problematic the assumption that "academic" approaches necessarily entail difficulties that are definitely beyond the grasp of those who are not in possession of the methods, techniques, and terms embraced by academic disciplines and fields. She relentlessly argues for holding on to complicated ideas as she translates them into terms that are recognizable and knowable by those who do not necessarily have the same formal preparation. If complexity is not intellectually embraced—by professional thinkers and organic intellectuals alike—the very possibility of revolutionary transformation is foreclosed. Given the public circulation of simplistic and thus easily dismissible notions of abolition, especially during and in the aftermath of the summer 2020 uprisings, it is important to emphasize, as Gilmore does, that the dismantling implied in the concept of abolition is inexorably, and indeed also dialectically, linked to the creation of something new and more effective than that which was disestablished. In attempting to counter the partial and thus entirely misleading assumptions that have been attached to ideas of defunding the police and abolishing prisons, we have been greatly assisted by her call for increased attention to the new "presence" abolition implies rather than focusing exclusively on the "absence" that is denoted by the term. The complexity on which she insists moves us away from commonsense notions as well as disciplinary approaches that embrace the idea that such institutions as police, courts, bail bond, jails, and prisons can be effectively analyzed in isolation from other institutional and ideological...