There’s a trafficking jam on the underground railroad: black abolitionist icons and anti-trafficking media

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article demonstrates how anti-trafficking media use the public memory of the Underground Railroad to racially legitimize US global policing regimes. From far-right paramilitary vigilante groups to liberal multicultural public history institutions, the anti-trafficking industry’s reverence for 19th-century Black women abolitionist icons is mobilized, counter-intuitively, to build public support for carceral agendas. Through visual analysis of the media of two exemplar organizations—Operation Underground Railroad and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center—I unpack the racial dynamics of anti-trafficking’s carceral humanitarianism and the racial politics of anti-trafficking’s memory of transatlantic abolition. I argue that incorporating icons of radical Black freedom struggle, such as Harriet Tubman, into anti-trafficking’s neoliberal carceral agenda becomes a racial alibi for the perpetuation of ongoing racialized state violence in the name of abolition. US policing is thus racially legitimized as a set of freedom-granting institutions amid the ongoing Black women-led freedom struggles that name policing’s role in perpetuating antiblack state violence.