“Everything I Believe In Is Rooted in Love”: Women and Non-binary Activists of Color Fighting for the Practice and Promise of Abolition

Abstract

The police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in the first half of 2020 sparked a powerful movement against police violence, white supremacy, and the carceral state with millions taking to the streets in the U.S. and globally. The movement coalesced around calls for police accountability, and to defund and abolish the prison industrial complex. While these calls for abolition were certainly not new, they reached national dialogues in a way not previously experienced. Although there are significant projects exploring abolition as a theory, there is not much scholarship on the specific area of the social movement that advocates for the abolition of police and prisons in practice. In this paper, I use an intersectional framework to explore participation in movement spaces, critiques of the criminal legal system, and visions for alternatives to the system among Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and multi-racial women and non-binary activists and organizers who engaged in the uprising of 2020. The findings reveal important insights into how white supremacy and patriarchy interplay with activism and the carceral state, as well as impact the possibilities for the transformation of the criminal legal system. Ultimately, experiences with intersectional oppression and state violence were central to this group’s commitment to the practice and promise of abolition rooted in the ethos of Black radical feminism.