Introducing Carceral Chronopolitics

But today I want to talk to you more about the political nature of time. White people own time.

Now, the one thing I'd add to Cooper's analysis here, which might sound a little counterintuitive, is that to some degree, increasingly, irrespective of race, those who own and control capital are the ones who really own time. But here, Brittney Cooper, an activist, author, cultural critic and professor of Women and Gender studies at Rutgers, adds a layer of racial analysis to time that's necessary in the context of our racialized lives and economy in the United States.

The reason I'm saying that the way that we position ourselves in relationship to time comes out of histories of European and Western thought. And a lot of the way that we talk about time really finds its roots in the Industrial Revolution. So prior to that, we would talk about time as merely passing the time. After the Industrial Revolution, suddenly we begin to talk about time as spending time. It becomes something that is tethered to a monetary value. So when we think about hourly wage, we now talk about time in terms of "wasting time" or "spending time," and that's a really different understanding of time than, you know, like seasonal time or time that is sort of merely passing. And so I wanted to think about what does it mean if people are considered folks who largely are not impacting the flow of things, right, which is often a racialized idea. So when we think about Black and brown peoples around the world...

Throughout this series, we've explored time and its relationship to carcerality, colonialism and capitalism. We discussed the fact that time, as experienced by waterways like rivers and wetlands, moves differently than it does for humans. That their lifetimes, and consequently memories, are way longer than ours. We've explored how our manipulations of land and water can speed up or slow down landscapes, effectively shifting time scales of nature as we go. We've discussed notions of linear time and kinship time: a more relational way of narrating the transformations that emerge between more than human kin amid climate change or, in the words of Kyle Whyte:

Kinship time is that sense of, you know, temporality or that feeling of how long it will take to do something solely based on what we understand to be the degree of kinship that we have with the people, the beings, the non-humans, the ecosystems that we have to coordinate with, to mobilize, to do something.

We've also explored real estate speculation: a means of financial risk taking for the sake of profit that counts on the value of land and homes exceeding their present value at some future point in time. We've examined the pace with which neighborhood change transpires, the ways in which gentrification erases people and their histories, supplanting them with a shiny quality of novelty and temporality and the sense that multiple Detroit's are happening atop one another.

We've talked about time quite a bit in this series, but there's still more to say.

Bumper

Welcome to Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities, a series of audio essays about making room for abolition. Making Room for Abolition first appeared at Red Bull Arts in Detroit in October of 2021 as a month long installation of speculative artifacts set in a home in a future without police and prisons. This series reflects on conversations from that space with Detroit-based organizers and futurists committed to food justice, water access, educational equity, restorative justice and Black liberation more broadly. When Black folks in Detroit manufacture better lives for ourselves‚ whether that means healthier food, safer neighborhoods, new technologies for living through conflict‚ it's usually described as an act of survival or desperation, rather than being classified as an act of resistance or future-making or speculative design. But each and every one of these folks is practicing a future that especially poor black Detroiters have been told is impossible.

So in each episode, we'll look closely at the kinds of fictions that shape our current attachments to policing prisons and punishment to examine where they come from and how they affect us. At the same time, we'll hear us propose abolitionist realities that counter these fictions and open up other ways of being.

My name is Lauren Williams. I'm an artist and designer based in Detroit, Michigan, and I work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power.

About This Episode

In this episode, we'll talk about carceral chronopolitics or how time is used to punish and how race has been constructed to transform over time. I'll talk about how my own struggles with and against time both motivated and shaped the original Making for Abolition Installation in 2021. We'll explore how rushing toward abolition constrains our imaginations and how narrating the crisis of policing and incarceration through a lens of kinship time might offer a perspective that shifts how we think about the problem much in the way it shifts how we interpret and respond to climate change.

So we're going to talk about time and politics in three different configurations. First, the politics of time. Then the time of politics and last, politicized time. All right. So let's talk about the politics of time.

Politics of Time

The politics of time refers to the regulation, synchronization and allocation of individuals' everyday time and lifetime.

Time is political, and it's so deeply interwoven with all aspects of power that it's easy to miss the many carceral fictions it informs, as you heard Brittney Cooper mentioned a moment ago:

White people own time.

More specifically, time is operationalized to shape and control everyday of our racialized lives. Since the carceral state is one that both relies on and reproduces race in its function, understanding how time and race interact is a necessary starting point. We can see the politics of time at work in the uneven distribution of power that dictates the pace of the work day, how much our time is worth, how long we wait for basic services. When we dissect the politics of time, we can see capitalist fictions at work and the conventional wisdom, for example, that "time is money."

I remember there's one of the RJ people that I work with‚ which is her full time work‚ she was like this, there's an American Indigenous man that she knew, and he told her that time was the white man's invention. And, you know, I believe that's right. And the way that we monetize time, I think‚ think of the saying "time is money," I mean, even fucking time has been capitalized. We get paid by the hour. Our work is quantified, you know. And so even down to those things that we don't realize need to transform, our sense of time and how we move and what pace we move, that is also something that effectively needs to be like decolonize, if you will.

You're listening to Angel McKissic, who leads the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network, and at the time of this recording worked at the Detroit Justice Center. When Angel says RJ, she's referring to Restorative Justice, which focuses on non-punitive approaches to repairing harm through cooperative processes that include those both directly and indirectly impacted. The origin of the phrase "time is money" is debated, but it's often wrongly attributed to Ben Franklin. He did say it, but he probably just wasn't the first. When he published Advice to a Young Tradesmen in 1748, he admonished readers to remember that "time is money," and perhaps most importantly, he went on to warn that any time spent idly not working is losing you money. In other words, there's an opportunity cost to resting. What's implied here, too, is that if you don't adhere to this advice‚ work endlessly, rest never‚ you'll suffer from it. But let's be real: who does this line of thinking really benefit? And what if time were actually money and everyone's time was valued equally?

Time as Currency

Here's a dispatch from an abolitionist reality.

I could tell Seti he was annoyed by the way he ambled over to the side table, feet dragging, eyes tumbling to the backs of their sockets. A deep sigh? No, a growl escaping from his gritted teeth. The somewhat silent protest of a pre-teen. I remembered how quickly things could change, though. So I'd keep making him practice. "Come on, baby," I said. "We've got to get going or we'll miss the lady with the good clementines. How much do we need?" "I don't know why you keep making me practice this. It's embarrassing. Why can't we just use time like everybody else?" he whines. "Exactly," I told him. "We've got to make use of these bills before they're completely worthless." He's right, though. The dollar is on its way out of circulation. The death rattle has been echoing for years. Until then, though, we'll practice conversion so he can practice math and practice remembering a time before he was born. I'd gone into labor around the same time the new currency system went into circulation. Sometimes in my dreams, I still paid for things with the $1 million notes emblazoned with a man's puckered lips and orange-tinted face. No one has those bills anymore. And if they do, they're so rare that they're actually worth something now. It really hadn't been that long ago, but I couldn't quite remember what he did that earned him a place on those bills or monuments. His smug smile was frozen in three dimensions on many of the remaining shrines to capital. The ones that survived the flood were mostly the cheap ones. These hollow, sculpted out plastic monstrosities, the metal ones had stayed fixed to their cement pedestals, submerged like everything else. Everything that to me seemed so novel, seemed, to Seti as old as time, like it had always been that way. He turned his hair between his thumb and forefinger, perfecting a single coil as he appeared at the handbook and contemplated digits. "$14,300. 25 hours." "You sure?" I asked. He sucked his teeth again. "All right. All right. I trust you. Grab a ten in time while you're at it. Just in case. All right, let's go before we miss the jitney."

Time is only money in our current paradigm because your very existence has to be monetized in order to survive, and because it behooves employers for workers to believe that they are actively losing money the less they work and the more they rest. And at the same time, part of where this logic falls further apart for me in this capitalist paradigm is that everyone's time is not valued equally. In a piece about fast capitalism for the Telegraph India, Arun Kumar writes:

The gap between the poor and the rich is not just about haves and have nots. It is also about who will should wait or not wait. Time is money and status. How you spend your time shapes your class, caste and gendered self. The theft and management of time was and is at the heart of capitalist profit in the 19th and 20th centuries. Factory owners stole time from workers leisure hours by reducing lunch times, letting machines run partially during breaks, asking employees to work on weekends and mismanaging factory clocks. This stolen time amounted to significant profit for employers.

This still happens, by the way, in the form of wage theft, which might include employers paying below minimum wage, not paying overtime, coercing employees to work off the clock before or after shifts, prohibiting workers from taking legally-mandated breaks, confiscating tips and many more things. In a 2021 report, the Economic Policy Institute found that workers had been deprived of an estimated $15 billion per year through minimum wage violations alone. But that's only what's been reported. And in most cases, unlike crimes of poverty like homelessness or shoplifting, wage theft isn't even considered a crime. It incurs a civil penalty. If anything, this makes clear who the target of our carceral infrastructure is and isn't. And this doesn't even begin to touch on the fact that the vast majority of exorbitant wealth isn't even made through people's labor, but through speculative markets. To be clear, there is labor involved in producing this kind of wealth. It's just that the workers aren't the ones who get to reap the benefits. So much of what produces these wide gaps in how our time is valued is a product of neoliberal capitalism's orientation to time, as  Jens Beckert writes in Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations in Capitalist Dynamics:

Capitalism is a system in which actors, be they firms, entrepreneurs, investors, employees or consumers, orient their activities toward a future they perceive as open and uncertain, containing unforeseeable opportunities as well as incalculable risks. But it is also anchored in the unique human ability to imagine future states of the world that are different from the present. As they seek to make profit, augment their income, or increase their social status, actors create imaginaries of economic futures. The achievement or avoidance of which motivates their decisions. The temporal disposition of economic actors toward the future and the capability to fill this future with counterfactual economic imaginaries is crucial to understanding both how capitalism diverges from the economic orders that preceded it and its overall dynamics. As is the case with fiction in literature, the defining feature of fictional expectations in the economy is that they create a world of their own into which actors can project themselves.

Time as Punishment

As Rasheedah Phillips has warned us, quote, "Time is also used to punish people, oppress people, and to create severe inequities," end quote. Phillips is a cultural producer, artist, housing advocate, author and creator of the Afro Futurist Affair and co-creator of the duo Black Quantum Futurism. As she explained in a presentation about the Black Quantum Futurism Time Zone Protocols Project, we see time used as a tool of punishment in the housing and court system.

So the majority of people who end up in eviction court across the country, but in Philadelphia in particular, where I come from, right, is the people who are in eviction court, 74% of them are Black women and their children. And every time you go and every time you get threatened with an eviction, you get an eviction record. And so that record follows you forever because there are no mechanisms to hide or mask that record from view. And anybody can can go in and look it up and find it, right. And so those eviction records, because they are used by landlords routinely, they lock Black women in particular out of the future. They lock Black women out of the future of housing stability. And so some of the solutions that we came up with in Philadelphia to address this issue was a law that would not allow landlords to look at the eviction records beyond a certain time period, right. And so cutting off, again, thinking about the sort of temporal nature and the way time is embedded in the way in which these eviction records are open forever and sort of designing solutions that are going to cut, mask those records or put some time limitations on them. So that way that we're opening up possibilities for the future that were previously foreclosed because of those records. So again...

In prisons and in the carceral systems that permeate Black neighborhoods and Black lives, time is an instrument of punishment levy disproportionately against Black and Indigenous people. Colloquially, we say someone who's been incarcerated has "served time" or "done time," for example. Time in carceral systems becomes a punitive tool.

And many people righteously believe, and I used to long time ago, righteously presume that somehow continuation of unfreedom must mean a continuation of slavery, which must mean a continuation of labor exploitation. It's different. There is exploitation. It's not labor. What turns into money that circulates as wages and interest and rent and utility bills and so forth is tying the people who are locked up are deprived of time, which is to say time is extracted from their lives. They never get it back. Nobody ever gets their time back. And it's the fact of time that becomes transformed into money that circulates in these various ways that time becomes money. And if you think back on everything that anybody has ever written to analyze the peculiar conditions that capitalism throws entire polities and political economies into, we're reminded that Marx talked about the annihilation of space by time, and that's what happens to people who are imprisoned one by one by one. We are space and our space, our lives are annihilated by the extraction of time.

That's Ruth Wilson Gilmore on Daniel Denvir's Jacobin podcast, "The Dig." To back up even further, we can see the politics of time at work in cutting Black lifetimes short, whether during slavery in the Transatlantic passage, whose traumas persist across generations; when Black mothers today are significantly more likely to die in childbirth; or when Black people today are disproportionately killed or brutalized by police. Beyond that, the very contours of race and racism in the United States are carved by and through time. Some features of the way race was designed pay explicit attention to temporality, particularly the racial categories of whiteness, Blackness and Indigineity. The white racial imaginary relies on Indigeneity diminishing over time while Blackness expands, in part because Black offspring were bound up as capital into perpetuity. These fallacies shaped the delusions that no Natives remained to claim their stolen land or that descendants of enslaved Africans have no rights as thinking, feeling, human American citizens. Only by constraining these racial imaginaries in time, does whiteness work. Consequently, the underlying infrastructure of race is delineated by its relation to time.

The Time of Politics

All right. So let's talk the time of politics.

The time of politics refers to the political systems, own time to the arena of the decision making process and to the changing rhythms and durations within which politics take place.

Most insidiously time is used to delude us about our rights to freedom and the pace at which we might achieve it through the political systems at our disposal. Admonished to wait for freedom, justice and the right to live, protests are often met with reproach. We're told, "Be patient, wait for the right time, or accept performative gestures rather than substantive shifts in the sociopolitical infrastructures that govern what it means to be free. The theft, genocide and enslavement that brought us here happened so long ago that it should be a distant memory, irrelevant to our present realities, because enough time has passed." And in that way, time is used to delegitimize viable demands for repair of historical harms.

Politicized Time

And finally, we have politicized time:

Politicized time in turn, is time employed as a weapon of politics, as a means of legitimizing one's own political program and of challenging or discrediting political opponents or opposing political views.

We're reminded time and again that black people are behind the times.

We think about Black and brown peoples around the world. In Western frameworks, there is a way that Black and brown people are seen as a lag on social progress, so they are seen as holding back the power of the West to modernize the world. And that becomes the pretext often to do all manner of violence. Time has a history. And so do Black people. But we treat time as though it is timeless, as though it has always been this way, as though it doesn't have a political history bound up with the plunder of Indigenous lands, the genocide of Indigenous people and the stealing of Africans from their homeland. When white male European philosophers first thought to conceptualize time in history, one famously declared, Africa is no historical part of the world. He was essentially saying that Africans were people outside of history who had had no impact on time or the march of progress. This idea that Black people have had no impact on history is one of the foundational ideas of white supremacy. It's the reason...

In terms of contemporary metrics of social and economic well-being, educational outcomes, household income and wealth, Black people are often described as behind slow, backward or needing to catch up to a white benchmark. Too often, this is framed as a deficient quality of Blackness rather than a product of white control, systems of oppression, or the machinations of capitalism. This orientation denies the ways the construction of race itself and the infrastructures that rely on and uphold racialized categories have weaponised time to craft those outcomes. On the flip side, in today's political landscape, a multiracial future is the boogieman that drives white paranoia about the so-called threat of a minority majority. Here's white nationalist Jared Tyler, for example, saying the quiet part out loud for Eddie Huang, a Taiwanese-American author, chef and restaurant owner in 2017.

I voted for Donald Trump for one reason only. His policies, if implemented, would slow the dispossession of whites in the United States. If he were to deport all illegal immigrants, if he were to think very hard about letting in any Muslims, all of this would slow the rate at which whites are becoming a minority. I wish...

Why are you so worried about the white dispossession of America?

Because I want my people to survive. Is that so strange? We don't control China. We don't control any place where whites are not a majority. And if we become a minority, we will not control our own destiny anymore.

The temporal irony here is that Tyler's fears about the future are predicated on a fiction about the past, that his ancestors‚ white people alone‚ are the ones who, in his words, built this country. All that said, as Tao Leigh Goffe writes in her article, "The DJ is a Time Machine," although, quote, "Slavery attempted to make flesh into a machine, an object, Black and Indigenous people have continued to invent in spite of the conditions of the apocalypse," end quote. Speaking of apocalypse, in our second episode, you might recall that we talked about the quote often attributed to Jameson and Zizek, that "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." But to expand on Goffe's point here, Black and Indigenous folks have been through apocalypse countless times before. We don't have to imagine it because our ancestors and our genetic material remember it. So even if the end of capitalism were somehow beyond apocalyptic or at least beyond the scope of our apocalyptic imaginations, it doesn't necessarily have to mean the end of the world, the planet, or humanity. As written in "Rethinking the Apocalypse, an Indigenous Anti-futurist Manifesto:"

Many worlds have gone before this one. Our traditional histories are tightly woven with the fabric of the birthing and ending of worlds. Through these cataclysms, we have gained many lessons that have shaped who we are and how we are to be with one another. Our ways of being are informed through finding harmony, through and from the destruction of worlds.

Just as time acts on us, Black and Indigenous people on Turtle Island act on time living, breathing and forging futures in spite of and in light of the precarities imposed on us through and throughout time.

Struggling with and Against Time

In the context of imagining and striving for a more liberated abolitionist world, a world without police and prisons, I'm often inherently talking about futures moments in time that are yet to come. Moments we still have the capacity to shape, if we understand, time to move along a linear spectrum from where we stood to where we stand, to where we could be. The English language to some degree reinforces this construct. Maybe we also contemplate these positions in time as alternate present moments, potential variations on the timeframes we're currently experiencing, or we dream of a return to a past, a nostalgia for something we've left behind. Maybe we're trying to prevent a particularly oppressive future from coming to be. Either way, it's worth pointing out that all of these orientations of time still interpret it as existing on a linear scale. We can look backward and forward exclusively. But, as I worked on Making Room for Abolition, the installation, three years ago, I found myself struggling with and to some degree rejecting that linearity in ways that emerged as I thought about how to represent time as a feature of space.

The Install: Time as Space

When I first started talking about making room for abolition, I said I wanted to imagine abolitionist futures. But by the time I started actually making those artifacts and building the space, it became clear that it was important to represent multiple overlapping time frames in which abolition was actively being practiced.

And actually, this is a Det‚ old Detroit Summer quote, right? Like "Another Detroit is happening." It's almost like I think that‚ I am like, yo, the depth of that is beyond me, right?

That's Nate Mullen again, an educator, artist and founder of People in Education. He's speaking about this kind of multiplicity that occurs when we practice beloved community in Detroit, meaning that folks are simultaneously practicing another reality alongside the prevailing one we all inhabit. The more time I spent with people similarly working toward abolitionist possibility in Detroit, the clearer it became that it was unhelpful‚ dangerous, even‚ to present abolition as a singular point in time, a single destination we have to reach, because in doing so, we set up the same dynamic we have with the prison industrial complex, a singular thing that must alone solve for every kind of problem we experience: an impossibility. The artifacts you've heard about in our dispatches‚ the water steward uniform, study materials, Chrysanthemum City graphic novel, the Third Edition Ojibwe Dictionary‚ were made for the original installation of Making Room for Abolition. As I workshopped the concepts of these artifacts with Detroiters. It became clear that it wasn't going to be helpful to place them at some point in the future that we couldn't recognize. I didn't want to represent the living room in Making Room as only a moment we were striving for, yearning for, or working toward without reflecting the countless ways people are already living abolition today.

Mariame Kaba, an organizer, educator and writer who advocates for the abolition of the prison industrial complex, has referred to abolition as a "horizon." At first thought, I wondered if this was similarly too destination-focused to frame how I want to represent our positioning relative to abolition. But if I understand a horizon as a place that will repeatedly come into view day after day, it works. Interviewing Kaba for the Nation, Elias Rodriques shared an experience at a temple where a monk told him that, quote, "Life is kind of like doing the dishes. You do all the dishes and it's clean, and then in three hours we're going to make a mess again and you have to do the dishes again," end quote. The horizon exists already. It's not that it's a different moment in time, but it is spatially distinct. Maybe it's a different time zone, it's a destination we can get to and maybe we've already visited. It's in view. It's attainable and it's already being practiced, even if we don't see it in our everyday.

In other words, as a horizon, abolition is visible from where we are, even if it's not everywhere we are and everything around us all the time. And even then we can go there from time to time. So this is how I attempted to depict the farthest futures in the installation. I resolve to situate the room itself in multiple timescales and to incorporate artifacts from three different moments in time, equating space and time in the form of overlapping transparent walls, constructed as a Venn diagram that organizes the room into three distinct spaces. One reflects the present moment, one reflects a far future without a date, and the interstitial space produced by their overlap is set in the year 2047. Here's past me describing the space in one of our earlier interviews...

That, so like the way that the space is structured, what you enter when you walk into the room is a Venn diagram, so there are two, two spaces overlapping with each other that produce three, right? The way that like a Venn diagram would. And you see that sort of in the, in the division of the walls that are around you because they're sort of like composing those shapes. And so I think a little bit to your point earlier, Angel, about like what, you know, why does the state still exist here? Like, I don't want to be in a place where practices that shouldn't be coercive or co-opted and made obligations by the state... Or why do we still even have Detroit Free Press? Like, why are you know, just any number of questions? And I didn't. I almost like threw all the stuff from the workshops away and like started a new version. But then I realized, I think I think what I was trying to reflect was like when you walk into the room, you're in a space that in my imagination is now. So all the objects in that first space are from last summer for the most part, or like somewhere between then and now; when you walk into the second room, you're in a near-future that's like Sirrita was saying, 2047; and then when you walk into the third space, you're in a farther future that I don't even know when to set it, so there's no dates. It's just very different like we're referencing Waawiyatanong on the map, the map is‚ It's different. Like the shoreline is not what it is right now. There's a reference to a great flood on some other stuff. So like that, it's not really a conclusive decision about form, it was just I was like, I can't I don't know when we are. I was like, I don't know when this needs to be and I don't maybe it's just an alternate present, maybe it's an alternate future. But time is somehow confused and I at the time felt like it was somehow instructive to reflect how difficult it is for me and most people to see that. So it's like you can stand in the first space and look in the third and see the stuff, but it's obscured by the walls and same with the second. Like you can look back or forward and it all feels like murky because there's this sheer wall in front of you.

When Aggie Toppins, a friend and colleague, at Wash U in Saint Louis, wrote about time in the installation in her review of the show, she described it in this way:

Dimly lit and dreamlike, the setting appears to be mostly in a time forthcoming, but it makes many historical references situating the visitor in non time where past, present and future are conflated in a way that de-familiarizes the home, making it strange.

The strangeness was reinforced by the way visitors would encounter and come to understand time and the installation, too. The structure I just explained to you was experienced by visitors, but not explicitly described. I intentionally left the room and its contents open to interpretation because I was more interested in the questions it could provoke than dictating exactly how it would be understood. As an aside, this makes the digital archive of Making Room [dot] online really distinct from the embodied experience of moving through the living room space. Here's Nick Buckingham, co-founder of Michigan Liberation, describing his movement through the space and interpretations of what he encountered.

Cause, so I wanted‚ so I felt that, right? I started‚ I didn't start in the front. I went all the way to the back:.

Okay, okay.

And the first thing, like I sat in the chair and I wanted to I wanted to hear, you know, what was that, what was this conversation? Who voices was I hearing? And it sounded like a mom and her daughter. Right. And when I was in the last room, I looked at the money, then the language on some of the documents. And I immediately went to a hundred years and I said, Wow, this is. This is money. Right?This money looks good. And this is money, you know, and I seen the like, the American money rolled up.

Right, yeah.

And for me, I looked at it as, like, there's no value in this anymore.

Absolutely, yeah.

And so then when I went to the second piece or like the the overlay where the shells are in, and then I felt like when I was looking and reading the story about the shells and like this new‚ it's like, this is leading up to this, this hundred years, right? I also took the shells as, as a sign of like multi-generation, very inclusive, diverse. You know, I don't I don't know if this is like true or not, but like are there two shells alike? You know. And so like all of these shells, that's just right there, right? And creating something. Then as I came into the front room, this felt like today, right, reading a newspaper about, you know, the lay off of the Detroit‚ I mean, of the police, the statues: I immediately went to last year. The street‚  the uprisings around George Floyd, Breonna Taylor.

Yeah.

It was like, oh I could see this by five years down the line, right? We have this like crazy visioning process in organizing, we always like to start off at the end.

Nick was processing the room much in the same way he strategizes around campaigns in his work.

And we say, you know, if we start a campaign, "[If] we win, what does the next day look like?" And usually we say, you know, "What would the headline look like?" And it's like, oh crap, there go the headline right there, right? So like, yo, we end cash bail and we can defund the police right now, you know, continue to call out all the corruption, all it would make sense. And, you know, this would be the first line of language to come out. Yeah, through our newspapers. Right? Yeah, like I was just sitting there reading, like... "statues of police officers are going up," and so I thought about, you know, a statue of Chief Craig going up and we vandalizing it and kicking it over...

Hell yeah.

Others experienced time in the installation very differently. Here's Angel McKissic:

Your comments about time are I think really interesting because I mean reflecting on it now and I... I really had no sense of time in that space it was just like future, maybe... Maybe but still‚ but and even still, I, I was still looking at it here, now, today and I think it's interesting, to‚ I think it's important to let that struggle with the time be out there, because I, like you were saying about trying to "get it right," you know, and again, how that's another product of like the society we live in and that invisible demand on us that that we adopt and it made me think of...

This struggle with placing ourselves in time, placing abolition in time is perhaps an abolitionist reality we need to contend with rather than to shy away from.

Also, what you were saying is really powerful, which is about this time traveling that we're doing when we step into the piece that it is in the future. But it is now. Right? I mean.

It's both‚ yeah. And it's something I struggled to define. Like, is it the future or is it just a different? Is it a different present?

Because I mean, Mama Myrtle can tell us about the changing shoreline of Detroit!"

Exactly...

Right now. That is life. Right? Like it is life that the that the water is coming to reclaim.

I mean, look. Yeah, I was making this around over the summer during, you know, when there were at least two major floods.

And getting comfortable with this struggle rather than resisting it might help counter our carceral conditioning and the fiction that time is only ever linear.

It made me think of the scholar who was working with Fanon, and he's actually had access to Fanon's papers that only a few other people have had access to. And the book is about two different Fanons, but in terms of his voice: the sort of, you know, revolutionary Fanon that we know and also a bit more ambivalent. And what he was saying was that people have‚ and this is connecting to maybe what you're saying‚ people have really tried to make Fanon cohesive and like a singular voice. And he's saying through this examination of these papers that there are two different voices coming up in Fanon's work, and that by trying to suppress that and just make him, you know, cohesive, we we miss that he's struggling. And it's important for us to know why was this so hard for him? That's important for us as movements to know that this, you know, a great, very influential thinker, psychiatrist, you know, educator was struggling. And if we don't allow that to come forward, it really disadvantages us and our movements. It helps us fully appreciate that this is a big problem and this is a hard problem. And so I really appreciate the piece about the time and maybe not like coming forward because that's also a provocative part of the piece to say, why is this so hard for us to imagine exactly when this would be?

At the end of the day, this struggle with time and space was about rejecting the notion that abolition is only a future state, a destination to which we've never been and can't relate, and recognizing the ways it's being practiced all around us.

Overlapping Time Zones

Plus a world without police is already here, now, today for some of us, but in a pretty twisted way.

So I tell people abolitionist future is not that far. If‚ if they defunded the police, you wouldn't even feel it because they don't even come here no way. And provide any services no way.

To be clear, the fact that police don't respond to calls in certain places is problematic in a context where we're taught that the police are our only option, in a place where widespread viable abolitionist responses to harm don't yet exist. But this conundrum, which really is a feature of the carceral state, not an accident, helps to illustrate again how fungible and fragile the linearity of time is.

Ultimately, my creative decision to situate the room in multiple timescapes was informed by my own slow recognition of the nonlinearity of time, which was further informed by the reality that a world without police, for example, is already very much a reality, especially for poor Black folks in Detroit and the fact that at the very same time, like Mariame Kaba reminded us, some of these abolitionist futures are already happening, too. During the summer of 2020's uprisings, 313 Liberation zones began popping up across Detroit. Operating with a similar orientation to time‚ an overlapping simultaneity, a recognition that multiple presents are possible and necessary‚ temporarily practicing an alternate reality in the midst of the one that surrounds us. PG Watkins, a Detroiter, organizer, incredible facilitator and friend who co facilitated many of these conversations with me, was involved in organizing some of these spaces.

And‚ and the concept of it is this idea that in order to actualize the world that we want, we have to be in practice around it. And when we are practicing it, we need to create the kind of boundaries of like, okay, here is where we're going to be doing this. In this space, this is how we treat each other; in this space, this is what we're practicing and doing. And it is usually trying to figure out how to develop these types of resilience-based actions that are outside of the systems that already exist. And this idea that we have to change our dependance and reliance on those systems, create our own systems. So in terms of like the work with three and three, L.Z., was can we demonstrate to people through these occupations, through these direct actions a little bit, just a little bit of what it could be like to be in community without police, to handle conflict, without police, to provide food, without having to rely on the state to provide other care products. You know, we were doing those actions in the midst of the pandemic, so it was like, what does it mean to provide care for each other in this time, in this way? So it was a, I think a abolitionist practice or like a liberatory practice around can we create these territories? And then I mean, the larger history of liberated zones, right? I mean, something I was studying recently was about a Amilcar Cabral and Guinea-Bissau's revolution and the importance of liberated territories in the armed struggle that they were in and around like, okay, we know here that we are safeguarded. You know, like, we know in this space we have defenses set up against these external forces that are going to try to mess us up, harm us, kill us, make us give up our land and our freedom. And so let's, like, fortify ourselves in this contained space or many contained spaces over the country, really, but yeah, I think we're trying to learn from that type of practice.

As PG describes, liberated zones or temporary autonomous zones aren't new. Hakim Bey, a poet and anarchoimmediatist, and Sufi scholar coined the term in 1990 to refer to a, quote, "liberated area of land, time or imagination where one can be for something not just against and where new ways of being human together can be explored and experimented with," end quote.

Locating itself in the cracks and fault lines in the global grid of control and alienation. A temporary autonomous zone or T.A.Z. is an eruption of free culture where life is experienced at maximum intensity. It should feel like an exceptional party where for a brief moment our desires are made manifest and we all become the creators of the art of everyday life. The key is to remain mobile, relying on stealth and the ability to melt into the darkness at a moment's notice before the T.A.Z. Is spotted and recognized by the state, which will inevitably seek to crush it. It dissolves and moves on, reappearing in unexpected places to celebrate once again the wonders of conviviality and life outside the law. It might last hours, days, years, even, depending on how quickly it is noticed by authorities.

Thinking of spaces like this, the inherent linearity of time we're so attached to begins to break down and the abolitionist reality begins to take shape: that multiple worlds are possible, that our experiences situated in time overlap with one another. And perhaps most importantly, that we have to practice the future we're working toward today. The construction of that sentence itself demonstrates how insufficient our language is to describe time in this way. This reminds me of a point we've raise in this series before.

I feel so sorry for people who are not living in Detroit. People are always striving for size, to be a giant and this is a symbol of how giants fall.

That's Grace Lee Boggs from American Revolutionary, the documentary about her lifetime of thinking and action. Detroit is a city that's known for its industrial ruins. Grace's point here is that it's a blessing to be reminded of how hard corporate collapse can hit. How fragile it is, how temporary.

I visited Havana, Cuba recently and I was reminded of the same collapsing of time, of time folding in on itself in the spaces you inhabit. When people talk about Cuba, they often talk about it as a place that feels stuck in time because of the relics of buildings and cars and appliances made ubiquitous by the American blockade.

Havana and Detroit share this temporal conundrum. While the traders are reminded of corporate collapse and organized abandonment, Cubans are reminded of American callousness and the brutal effects of imperial oppression. Cuba is a site of punitive American foreign policy. The blockade is a collective punishment against all Cuban people, which is considered a human rights violation by the U.N., by the way. And the United States knows this, as Lester D. Mallory, who was then Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, said in 1960.

The majority of Cubans support Castro. The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba, a line of action which makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.

Much in the way that Black folks in the United States have been cast as behind the times, another effect of that collective punishment was to lock Cuba in a past that cast the country and all of its people, many of whom are also Black, by the way, out of time altogether. In a world where "time is money," one way to deliver on that maximum is to banish an entire nation's population from the neoliberal capitalist concept of contemporaneity and futurity, to prevent them from participating in the overconsumption of the newest stuff, because novelty is equated to progress; to relegate them to a life of maintaining and repairing old stuff. So when we see Cuba as a time capsule, we're really witnessing a representation of its banishment from the global timeline. To be a socialist country today is to be out of sync with the times and with neoliberal ideals.

Cuba is not a panacea, of course, and I'm not interested in lionizing Fidel Castro or romanticizing revolution. To be fair, that's a conversation for a whole other day. But Cuba is a place where both the revolution and many of the state social policies that followed, outwardly prioritized people's collective well-being, which is such a threat to the United States that they've held on to and escalated this blockade for the last 60 years. In a strange way, even though the American establishment's decades long punishment attempts to trap the island in time, it hasn't succeeded in restraining Cuban social policy, which is light years ahead of American social support for its most vulnerable families.

While I was in Cuba, one of the most confusing things I encountered as a guest was the currency system. There were drastically different exchange rates inside and outside the hotels. Inside our hotel, there was a special card we could buy and load dollars onto, but you couldn't purchase anything with actual dollar bills inside the hotel, and you couldn't use that card anywhere but the hotel. And some people told us not to worry about getting Cuban pesos at all because everyone would accept dollars. For the record, they were wrong. But by the time I was in Cuba in 2024, the currency system had already been somewhat simplified. It used to be that there were roughly three currencies in use: the Cuban peso, the American dollar and the CUC or Cuban Convertible Peso. The American dollar was formally brought into circulation during the Special Period, which began in '93. The Cuban economy was de-dollarized in 2004, but the dollar remained in circulation and the convertible peso was introduced at the same time. The value of the convertible peso, which was removed from circulation during the pandemic in 2021, was pegged to the U.S. dollar and essentially created a double economy because people's wages were paid in Cuban pesos, but most goods for sale were listed in convertible pesos. According to a book called Money: From the Power of Finance to the Power of the People by Rémy Herrera, this especially impacted, quote, "workers performing functions essential to society, among others industrial workers, peasants, doctors, teachers, researchers, etc. who were penalized compared to others who could access the dollar," end quote. Plus, for those who worked in tourism or received remittances from relatives in American dollars, for example, it was much easier to buy goods at the convertible peso rate. It cast those Cubans, the ones who were paid in Cuban pesos, exclusively, into a frame of reference where their time and money was worth less than those with ties to the American dollar and economy.

I'm sharing all this because, for one, it feels resonant with what we've explored so far about the adage that time is money. Secondly, because in our current paradigm, the value of currencies rely, to a large degree, on a country's GDP and a presumption of persistent GDP growth over time, the idea that progress is both inevitable and necessary. And third, because currency is also subject to a speculative foreign trade market. Another financial transaction, much like real estate speculation that relies on guesses about the value of something at a point in the future. Because many of these monetary policy maneuvers by the Cuban government were responses to the ever evolving terms of the American blockade. It's as if this collective punishment further traps the island in time by controlling the flow of currencies, resources and access to global economy in such a way that undermines the very value of Cubans' time.

Kinship Time and Resisting Urgency

Urgently Organizing

When I first proposed Making Room for Abolition, I was responding to my own struggle against the urgency of movement work coming off the 2020 uprisings, which demanded urgent, immediate, repeated calls for organizers to show up in the streets. As I helped deliver pallets of water in plastic bottles to Detroiters whose water had been shut off by the city, I contemplated what felt like a contradiction: knowing the deliveries weren't a sustainable response to their need, as urgent and necessary as it was and continues to be. The contradiction was amplified by what felt like the pitting of one urgent crisis against another: the crisis of families being denied access to water against another pressing crisis of plastics consumption and climate change, the effects of which are sure to be felt most acutely by poor Black and brown communities.

To be clear, this moment helped me formulate a criticism of the crisis manufactured by the city shutting off people's water, not the work of delivering water itself. We the People of Detroit, where I was volunteering, is also committed to long-term visionary work grounded in policy and research to address the water crisis and other quality of life concerns affecting Detroiters today.

But to me, this urgency, this rushing around in 2020 was distracting and suffocating almost to our ability to expansively imagine the worlds we were working toward with greater fidelity. It felt like we were always flailing around, as we hurried, to address multiple, very real, very pressing compounding crises.

Rushing Abolition: A Double Standard

And this kind of urgency is one that many of us in movement spaces have internalized. It's one that's weaponized against radical organizers who don't have a whole cloth replacement ready to go for the systems they critique.

Right, exactly. So, yeah, I really I think I latched onto your comments about time because I've been thinking about that in the organizing space and what I ask of people and how I ask it of them. And it's been a real lesson for me. It's a battle against myself. It's a battle against a sense of urgency because the system puts especially people work in abolition. It puts a sense of urgency on us, like y'all got to know how to fix it now. Those are the questions we always get. So what now? What else we going to build? And I'm like, where's that energy for the current system? You know, y'all are coming at us like it has to work the first time. And I'm like, why don't you save that energy for your current systems of policing and, you know, whatever. And it reminds...

To Angel's point, that energy for the current system simply doesn't exist. There's a double standard at work here. One of many we hold for abolitionists and not for the carceral state. Wherein the urgency to prove our ability to implement abolition is not matched with the same energy for proving that the carceral system actually does anything it promises to do: reduce so-called crime, keep people safe, so on. Spoiler alert it doesn't. And in fact, there is plenty of evidence, much of which we shared throughout the series, to prove otherwise already.

But if we understand these carceral tactics like policing and incarceration to be catchall solutions to countless problems, we should also understand that they're inherently inadequate for the breadth of problems they're expected to address. We talked about this when we talked about silos and alienation in episode one, right? The notion that the same institutions of policing and prison could possibly address everything from writing up the documentation you need to file an insurance claim to addressing sexual violence is just absurd. They don't have the range.

Urgency Leads to Bad Solutions, Anyway

In our episodes on nature, we explored the ways that our perception of time as only linear does us a disservice when it shapes our responses to climate change. For example. We introduced a concept called kinship time, to which I was introduced by Kyle White, an environmental justice scholar and faculty at the University of Michigan. He's also an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. We spoke about kinship time in the context of our relationships to nature as an alternative to what is typically presented to us as an urgent, imminent crisis of climate collapse. The idea that if we look at the relational shifts that happen and our responsibilities to our more than human kin, we might come up with better responses to climate change than when we're acting out of urgency. This resistance urgency is a lesson we can take to inform our responses to other kinds of shared crises as well. What if, for example, we looked at abolition through a similar lens? What if we tried narrating the multiple compounding crises of carcerality in terms of kinship time?

Instead of simply talking about the increasing rates of incarceration and out-of-control police budgets, I could tell you that for longer than I've been alive, we've been taught explicitly and implicitly that the police are the guardians of safety, the keepers of balance between people, and that prisons are the containers that keep bad people away from good people and prevent bad things from happening on the outside. But what is the role of police today, really? And what function do prisons really serve? As protest against policing mounts and the façade shifts. We're witnessing police sow fear with lies about crime rates to garner more funding. We're seeing police receive more and more transfers of equipment, technology and training from the military. And prison infrastructure and profitability expand on the promise of a new president and even more incarceration to come. As policing and incarceration adapt to contemporary social norms and contort to serve capital more dutifully, there will be more reasons to incarcerate people, more laws that criminalize the things people do to stay alive. More ways to punish people's survival. This is already happening, as we've documented throughout this series of essays, turning your own or your neighbor's water back on in Detroit has been categorized a felony and homelessness in some states a crime. Various kinds of harm, violence, abuse, rape continue to occur because as it turns out, policing and incarceration do very little, if anything, to address harm or produce accountability after it occurs. And they do even less to prevent it. In fact, both policing and prisons produce new kinds of harm that echo through generations and through the lineages of families touched by them. The more public money we pour into policing, the more resources we deny the kinds of social services that address the needs that are being increasingly criminalized. The more we rely on these systems to address harm through violence and extraction, the more we enable the degradation of the kinds of right relations required to cultivate actual safety and deprive ourselves of the skills required to navigate conflict without state violence. Policing and prisons have always been enemies of the people. Today they're being aggravated and multiplied by what we call the prison industrial complex.

If we keep thinking about carcerality and climate change only in terms of linear time, only with a laser focus on the impending doomscape of the future, we'll probably keep coming up with terrible, shortsighted interventions that don't prioritize the relational nature of crisis and the relational nature of the skills abolition demands that we develop, like responsibility and consent and care. As Kyle White reminded us when describing kinship time. As you'll recall from our first episode, Ruth Wilson Gilmore said:

Abolition really does require that we change one thing, which is everything.

Including the carceral conditioning we've internalized, such as the ways we've learned to turn to carceral interventions because they seem quick and easy, especially when motivated by urgency and the attendant fear it brings up.

Yeah, somebody is having a different experience at a different time at this exact moment. Right. But it's it's it's, you know, it's one of those things where I can actually see a world beyond all this. I can see it. The complicated thing is that this infrastructure that's in place will continue to create circumstances where the minute we feel like we're making gains, they'll create a new circumstance that taps into our biggest fears, our deepest fears.

You're listening to two on a petty a social justice organizer, poet, author and facilitator whose work focuses on racial justice, equity, privacy and consent.

I'll use, I'll use‚ face recognition as an example. Momentum. Tremendous momentum all across the world to get rid of it. Tremendous momentum. Then January 6th happened, the Capitol riots. And even people I know who are hell bent on getting rid of face recognition were like becoming private sleuths to help solve for... So it's almost like I hate this thing for the people on my side. But if you talk about the people on their side that I don't care about, then I want all these carceral systems for those people. And so, yes, so they figured out a formula to tap into the things that we're still struggling with. And so, you know, I see the vision and there are places that are further along than than the United States in moving towards a abolitionist framework. And, you know, in and in in‚ ending some of the carcerality that we're we're experiencing especially in a medical industry. COVID came and it was like our immediate response was like, let's track everybody, let's get surveillance, face recognition, temperature checks, and thermometers. You know what I mean? Like, let's scan everybody's faces. But not every place is thinking that way. And so it really is the "what time is it on the clock of the world?" And like, how much do we know about places all around the world that might be a little further along than we are and thinking about a community that's not so connected to policing.

Grace Lee and Jimmy Boggs first posed this question in their 1974 book entitled Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century. This question points to the exercise of placing all human history‚ 3000 years or so‚ on a clock and envisioning every minute as a 50 year chunk of time.

What time do you think it is? The clock of the universe? I think that we are at the time in the clock of the world, of the universe, when we have the power within us to destroy all living things on this planet. But we also have the power within us to create the world anew. And that, I think, is what each of us needs to live with, 24/7. How do we deal? What choice do we make at this unprecedented time in the history of the universe?

Frankly, it's hard to have a solid answer to this question, but at the very least, it stops you in your tracks long enough to contemplate where you see yourself in our collective struggle situated in time. It reorients you to the scale and pace of a time frame that far outlasts any of our human lives and forces you to consider ancestors, descendants and the circumstances they had to and will have to contend with that may relate to your own. While it feels true that we urgently need a different world and hope to see glimpses of it in our lifetimes. The pressure to arrive at a whole cloth different world immediately is crushing. And more importantly, it seems to distort the potential of abolitionist work. Here's PG Watkins again.

Time, ah time. I think that time in this capitalist world is. So it goes so fas, right? It's like. Where did this year ago? You know what I mean, like, it's November now. Like what? It's about to be February. You know what I mean? Like, it's just last week was July. I'm just like, I don't quite understand where time goes. And I think it's because you work all the time and sometimes you sleep and then you work some more and then sometimes you sleep and then six months happen. So time is weird, but I think that I'm someone who, in order for me to actually show up in this work and be excited about it and be present to the possibility of it, I do believe that I want to find some bit of this liberation in my lifetime. I understand that this is going to be a multi- multi-generational struggle, right? Like, there's going to have to be ways that the work continues after my lifetime in this way, in this body is done. And and I'm like, yeah, let's make some shit shake before before it gets too late. Like, what are we got to do to make it happen right now? So I do think there's this thing around time where it's like it goes so quickly. I don't know that we always know what to do with it. So often organizers in movement struggle against time and in the face of a pandemic as well, multiple pandemics, like constantly feeling this urgency of like, we have to solve for this, this all these crises right now, and there's not enough time to do all that. And but we have to do it right now. But there's not enough time. We have to do right now... So I think that we're in this constant fight against using the time we have, finding value in the time.

I think like as a person that describes themselves as a turtle.

Oh, I didn't know that, okay.

I didn't know you did too! I thought I was just baba.

No, I'm definitely his child. That is real.

You're also hearing the voice of Curtis Renee, who identifies as a turtle and is a co-founder of the Detroit Safety Team, an organization dedicated to assisting communities in building a new safety infrastructure that shifts away from police reliance. Curtis is also an incredible chef.

But like describing myself as a turtle and I think doing support work, there is always like a line of urgency that is like layered with like crisis and mediation and things like that. And I think it's often a very hard negotiation for me because I really feel like, you know, at the basis of urgency, most of the time shit is not urgent.

It's not!

Most of the time shit is not urgent. And when I say that to people they be like, "It is! It is urgent right now! Why is you not moving like it's so? And so, like, the negotiation of like hearing people in crisis and also being able to say, okay, I understand your crisis and also this is‚ that does not mean it's urgent. It just means that you need some care. And also, like being able to just move through the world, like I need to. So it makes sense. Like things when we allow things to, like, take the shape that it needs to, and the time that it needs to just take that shape like, it happens in a really magical way. And when we apply, like, this sense of urgency, like it needs to happen tomorrow, then I don't know, like the magic is lost and really like the true shape of what it could be is like completely distorted. So, you know, time is weird. I'm moving through the world like a turtle. And I try to acknowledge where people are.

Part of what Curtis is saying here, too, is that re-categorizing something is not urgent, doesn't mean that it's not important or doesn't demand our attention. Rather, that first, urgency is relative. And second, our responses to urgent matters can't consistently completely upend everything else going on around us all the time if we expect to make any progress on these massive issues we're facing in movement work.

It's if if "we move through it with urgency and expect it tomorrow, then the magic is lost," to me, I'm just like, I feel like one of the most common refrains I have when I'm talking to people, when I'm canvasing about abolition is just like, we're not expecting this to happen tomorrow, right? Because I think if we were to say that this was happening tomorrow, like even the fight for the budget this past year and hopefully the fight will continue to have against the budget in the coming years, it's not like, okay, we're going to change this budget that's going to fix everything. We have defunded the police. Go Detroit. Right? It's like actually, if we move in that way, that okay, this first year of trying to divest, we actually do defund it by hundreds of millions of dollars without building up what else is needed to, like, fortify our communities in the wake of a different type of safety network safety system? Like then, yeah, we don't have the magic of true community in the ways that we envision like true liberation and justice in the way that we envision because we've moved so quickly to try to self‚ or like to predetermine or pre-fix something that needed more time to be built.

In other words, building abolitionist ecosystems to replace the totalizing scheme of the carceral state takes time. The carceral fiction emerging here is not so much that these things aren't urgent because they are, but that our response to their urgency sets us up to produce an equally urgent and poorly-formulated, short-sighted response.

Future Archives: Who gets to future, anyway?

If you've made it this far in the series, you've probably, hopefully already seen the digital archive of artifacts from the Making Room for Abolition installation on Making Room [dot] online. As I thought about how to carry this work forward from the physical installation three years ago, I thought a lot about the role of archives historically.

We tend to understand archives as evidence of the past. If an archive is typically a tool for preserving history or recording a past, what does that become when it's used to construct a future? What if it were possible to remember a future? When we re-orient an archive around futures and set of pasts, it becomes a tool of prefiguration. Archives are always political, in the sense that they preserve narratives and culture and shape the historical record. With Making Room [dot] online, this project starts to ask: What if instead, archives could also shape the realm of possibility? What if they could define the scope of our imaginations or prefigure our worlds? Historically, archives have been the sites of colonial theft, where folks with more power collected bits of other people's culture and history, kept them behind lock and key and withheld them from the people to whom they belonged. But what does it mean to produce an archive instead of collect it? Or to project meaning into archival material rather than to interpret artifacts? And what might it mean to generate evidence for an uncertain but possible future rather than to gather evidence of a certain past? In the second part of our episode on Nature, we talked about these maps of the Mississippi River alluvial basin, illustrated by Harold Fisk. They tell a story about the many paths the river has taken over time rather than the fallacy of the singular blue line we usually see depicted on maps. Commenting on the Mississippi River's shifting banks and flooding, Toni Morrison once remarked:

The act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use. But in fact, it is not flooding. It is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that. Remembering where we were. That valley we ran through. What the banks were like. The light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory with the nerves and the skin, remember, as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our flooding.

Like the Mississippi, the many traditions of Black and Indigenous futuring are our flooding, our remembering. I see this archive I'm building as a space where time collapses on itself and the resulting collisions produce openings in the limits of our imaginations. In our next episode will examine where those limits reside, what enables our imaginations, and what we need to make room for in movements to support more abolitionist imaginaries.

Closing

Alright, so to sum things up, what if we began to release our attachment to urgency, to take the time it takes to imagine and develop abolitionist interventions and gave ourselves time to witness that flooding of our imaginations that Toni Morrison mentioned. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities.

Until next time, remember what's real: time may be money in today's paradigm, but we have to continually question who that maxim serves. Time is a punitive tool in the carceral system and the social systems that operate with carceral logics. Time isn't only linear, it's relational and layered. The sooner we get comfortable with narrating complex relational shifts in terms of kinship time, the better we'll be able to respond to them. Thank you for listening and thanks to the many people who've made this show and the wider body of work possible over the last three years.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to all the futurists featured in this episode who participated in this project three long years ago. That includes Tawana Petty, Nate Mullen, Angel McKissic, Nick Buckingham and Curtis Renee. And thank you especially to PG Watkins for helping me facilitate these conversations. Thank you also to Kyle Whyte, for participating in an interview in the fall of 2024.  This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by me, Lauren Williams. Essays were co-produced by my dear friend Ayinde Jean-Baptiste, and the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Excerpts from several references were read by the voice actor Joy Vandervoordt-Cobb. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.

This project is presented in partnership with Respair Production and Media.