Featured guests in this episode include Nick Buckingham (Co-Executive Director, Michigan Liberation), PG Watkins (organizer and facilitator extraordinaire), Angel McKissic (Founder, Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network), Monica Lewis-Patrick (President & CEO, We the People of Detroit), and Nate Mullen (artist, educator and founder of People in Education).
Disappearance as a tactic of neoliberalism and carcerality
HOUSING IS A HUMAN RIGHT! Every citizen deserves the right to sleep in the richest country in the history of the world.
In part one of Safety and Interdependence, we talked about the ways we're alienated from ourselves and each other amid capitalism. We talked about the neoliberal myths that uphold that alienation and how we isolate even the systems we need to care for ourselves from one another and the ways systems of policing and incarceration enforce that alienation. We talked about the concept of necropolitics or the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die, and how. Denying people access to water, for example, is one such necropolitical move we've witnessed in Detroit.
To pick up on that thread, necropolitics are enabled by the cultural imperative that punishes people for poverty and the attempts at survival that Monica Lewis Patrick mentioned before. It goes something like this: We commodify water, people can't afford it, and then we make it a felony to get water at your own home, for example. Or we commodify housing, people can't afford that, and then people who can't afford homes are criminalized for living on the street. Policing, surveillance and prisons all get employed as tools to enforce these fictions of deservingness as determined by ability to succeed amid capitalism. And then we dispose of and disappear those who are undeserving according to these logics.
We are in front of the Supreme Court. Homeless advocates from all over the country in a collective voice to say: Homelessness is not a crime.
Look no further than this summer's Grants Pass versus Johnson Supreme Court ruling.
A landmark decision from the U.S. Supreme Court on the issue of homelessness. In a 6 to 3vote, the high court cleared the way for cities to enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outdoors when there's no shelter space. The case centered around Grants Pass where Helen Cruz was once homeless.
Just because we don't have a home, we don't have a white picket fence doesn't mean that we don't deserve the same respect and dignity as everybody else.
The southern Oregon City tried to block people from sleeping and camping in public spaces, including sidewalks, streets and city parks. On Friday, the high court found those rules did not violate constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
Right now, this whole community, the homeless community, is in fear right now that they're going to start being arrested and going to jail.
Homeless advocates complain local ordinances similar to the laws enacted in Grants Pass, essentially criminalize homelessness.
Criminalizing homelessness essentially gives the state license to disappear people who don't have homes. Disappearance is a fundamental tool of carcerality. In the same way that homeless people are already likely to be arrested and jailed and now even more vulnerable to that same threat. Charity Hicks, who you heard from in part one, for example, was disappeared from her neighborhood when she became inconvenient for the state.
It's a way to‚ it criminalizes you for being alive.
She hadn't caused harm or committed a crime. And lest we confuse criminality with harm, even if she had turned her neighbors water back on, which was made a felony in Michigan, securing a life making resource like water just shouldn't be a crime in the first place. Who gets to decide anyways that so-called stealing water is a crime, and speculating on real estate isn't? And what about cases of actual harm? What if someone hurts me or someone I love? What if someone breaks into my home? The truth is, carcerality doesn't currently solve for that either.
Bumper
Welcome to Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities, a series of audio essays about making room for abolition and 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's healthier food, safer neighborhoods, new technologies for moving through conflict‚ it's usually described as an act of survival or desperation, rather than being classified as an act of resistance or feature making or speculative design. But each and every one of them is practicing a future that especially poor black Detroiters have been told is impossible.
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, you'll hear me 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
This episode builds on part one of our exploration into safety and interdependence. In part one, you heard us examine the ways capitalism drives alienation and the fictions that teach us that we thrive by separating ourselves from each other and from ourselves. We talked about the mythologies that privilege individualism over collective well-being, and we talked about how privatizing basic necessities like water and public safety actually undermines our safety. In part two today, we'll look at a few new themes disappearance and punishment and how both are used as tools to uphold expansive carceral fictions about safety.
We'll end with some musings about what others are already doing and what we can do to shake the kinds of capitalist alienation explored in part one, and return to ourselves and to each other.
But first, here's a dispatch from an abolitionist reality.
If cop-aganda defines our media today, what would we consume in a world without police and prisons? What kinds of abolitionist media would shape kids' imaginations? In this home, in 2047, a pristine graphic novel written and illustrated by Glenn Miles, peeks out from beneath a pile of a child's drawings scattered around on the living room floor. Chrysanthemum City, the cover reads. In the background, a city landscape overgrown with towering trees and thick moss sets the scene of a far off Detroit. Three Black and brown kids, one on a scooter, one on roller skates, and one hijabi girl in a wheelchair with their robot sidekick make up the main characters as they race toward a dark underground, where a stash of defunct police robots have come back to life, threatening once again to terrorize the city and its inhabitants. Yellow caution tape emblazoned with We Keep Us Safe divides this Detroit from its police infested underworld. This band of kids committed to keeping themselves and their city safe are prepared to do everything in their power to stop the zombie cop robots from decimating their world.
Disappearance as a tactic of neoliberalism and carcerality, con't
Carcerality as we know it rests on the belief that disposing of people and disappearing them from public view is an appropriate response to any and all situations of harm. In reality, it's a false proposition, a false solution that sweeps the root issues under the rug and obscures the observable symptoms of these issues by erasing the person from view. As Angela Davis has written, prisons don't disappear problems, they disappear people. Incarceration denies the messiness of reality when it comes to harm. Because neoliberal capitalism demands a quote unquote, clean fix, at least one that appears clean on the surface. But the thing is harm and accountability, that's messy. And so instead of dealing with the mess, the carceral state and the prison industrial complex will rather function by disappearing the mess‚ the people‚ into prisons and out of communities counting on their absence, equating to their erasure.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, as a transitive verb, one definition of the word police remains "to make clean and to put in order." This orientation toward cleanliness persists even in the language we use to talk about prison and the people we incarcerate.
So I stay away from using the term returning citizen. I hate that word.
Can you tell me a little bit about why?
Yeah. One, the term is often used to, to lighten our appearance. It's also a term that many funders like to hear. And it gives me this sense that, you know, we give the power of our narrative over to other folks. Rights create these languages and these terms for us to be used as right. Another is I don't like is because the folks in the South, you know, when they like Florida, for example, when they come out of prison, they don't have their rights restored. So they can't go vote.
So they're not really even returning as full citizens, yeah.
They're not a citizen, right, like if we say, that these are the‚ voting you know, your voting rights is like the thing that that proves your citizenship.
Sure, yeah.
Then the folks coming out of prison, so why are they "returning. So it pivots the...
So, it's not even a true term in that situation?
Right, and you know...
You're listening to Nick Buckingham, the co-executive director of Michigan Liberation, who was once incarcerated himself.
I never‚ I didn't leave Michigan. I just bounced around from prison to prison. I've seen some really great places. Like I've never been up north and experienced the beautiful air out there. And so I was like, I got to get incarcerated to experience this, right?
Mm, that's wild.
But then I came back to Michigan and so it's I'm not returning. I just walked out of prison. Like I was caged and oppressed away from society and I wanted to escape that's... Don't give me the "Oh, yeah, you're returning!" No, right?
Nick's point about referring to himself as formerly incarcerated instead of as a returning citizen may seem like a bit of a digression here, but bear with me. It's an observation that reveals our cultural discomfort with acknowledging what incarceration actually does. By sanitizing language we use to describe the people we send to prison, avoiding naming the fact of their incarceration by describing them as returning citizens, we sanitize our language in the same way we attempt to sanitize society by removing them in the first place. We use prison to dispose of people. But even in the wake of that disappearance, we strive to clean up the ways we articulate what we've done to them by calling it a different name. This softening of language to make incarceration seem more palatable, noble and rehabilitative than it actually is represents another kind of disappearance. It quite literally erases both the person and the fact of their caging, referring instead to an ambiguous, neoliberal, disembodied citizen, another avoidance of the mess of harm and prison and policing.
To bring things full circle, disappearance is also a foundational feature of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism operates as an "invisible doctrine." To borrow from the title of George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison's book by the same name. Shaping nearly every facet of our world and culture while invisibizing itself in the course of doing so.
But the fact of disappearance in the context of incarceration is in and of itself a carceral fiction. A person who caused harm and ends up incarcerated still exists just out of view. They've just been siphoned off from society, from their families, from their communities, and hidden from view and from freedom. And in the process, that extraction causes another kind of harm, that just like any other echoes through generations. Carceral logics convince us that if we remove a person from society, we've removed the problems they've caused or the problems that drove them to cause harm in the first place. But neither is truth. The belief goes something like this If we subsume all of our problems from mental health crises to homelessness to murder, to turning on your water within carceral solutions and then leave them to police in jails and prisons and juvenile detention centers and courts, then we can escape the shared responsibility of learning to navigate conflict, learning to care for each other, hold each other accountable, or cultivate safety amongst ourselves.
Removing the individual rather than addressing the context in which they commit harm also transforms harm and the preservation of safety into individual problems rather than collective ones.
This functions much in the same way that neoliberal capitalism shifts responsibility for large scale global pollution and climate degradation onto individual people, convincing us that our daily acts of consumption from plastic recycling to drinking out of those stupid paper straws, are the only things standing between climate collapse and the survival of the planet, all while big oil carries on with calamitous extraction and corporate lobbyists block any form of meaningful change. Hear me when I say, the task of producing safety through policing and imprisonment is an impossible one. It's a fool's errand. They're set up to fail at it, frankly. Or put another way, the fact that these systems are tasked with producing safety in the first place is itself a fiction. In truth, what their job is, is to control society, protect capital, and serve the interests of the state. So they disappear inconvenient people, and they're doing a pretty good job at that. In the words of an incarcerated writer named Stevie on Dreaming Freedom and Practicing Abolition, an online publication through the Network of Abolition Study Groups in Pennsylvania: Safety requires "being in right relation" and disappearing people from society, family and community, by definition, disrupts any possibility of that:
…safety from harm, including homicide and sexual violence, is achieved through right relations. Right relations lead to safe communities.
…it is broken relations that enable harm. I stress that creating and maintaining safety requires developing and sustaining right relations. Because policing and imprisonment are about caging and exiling people, making the creation, development and maintenance of right relations impossible, they can never effectuate safety. Disappearing people precludes safety.
And this phenomenon of institutions failing at the very tasks that they're at least fictionally charged with isn't limited to police and prisons.
Fool's errands: impossible tasks and impossible alternatives
Neoliberalism and punishment or punishing neoliberal social systems
Here's Nate Mullen, an educator, artist and founder of People in Education.
So in some ways, that institution is forced to do what is the most efficient and maybe what they would now call the most effective. Which inherently means you have to kind of dehumanize the people that are within its walls because you've been tasked with something that you actually can't do. And the same thing is actually true, I think of like the police state is that we created an institution that was like, Yo, you take care of safety. Even though safety is something that like all of us are responsible for.
As Nate reminds us, neoliberal systems like schools and policing require dehumanizing the people within them in order to function. The institutions we have today, from those that protect and serve to those delivering education function by hiding, obscuring and disappearing, instead of truly grappling with the complexity of their tasks and the people they're tasked with serving. They prioritize an efficiency that considers the needs of the market first and people last, if ever. They operate by stripping people of their humanity: Seeing students as widgets to be churned through a machine and turned into workers rather than young people who need care in order to learn turning people who cause harm or fail to succeed at capitalism into prisoners to be disposed of from society held in cages, put to work for free or killed instead of people who need transformation or care, or seeing humans as consumers of a commodity called water instead of people who quite literally would die without it.
In this whole equation, punishment is, unsurprisingly, a central feature of both the carceral state and neoliberalism. Typically, neoliberalism rejects government intervention in markets, arguing that it's inefficient and should be avoided altogether, except, however, where punishment is concerned. In a book called Neoliberal Finality: a Brief Genealogy by Bernard Harcourt, he writes that the primary function of punishment in a capitalist society is to prevent people from bypassing market or causing some kind of inefficiency that violates the market's so-called natural order.
The logic of neoliberal penality facilitates contemporary punishment practices by encouraging the belief that the legitimate space for government intervention is in the penal sphere. There, and there alone.
We see this kind of intervention to curtail market inefficiencies at work, in the logics of broken windows policing, for example, where police target so-called quality of life issues that are said to threaten Detroit's revitalization or the War on Drugs, where police target a form of underground commerce from which neoliberal darlings couldn't profit. We also see it at work when people are criminalized for homelessness, when Charity was arrested for protesting water shut offs or when kids are arrested for loitering.
This is precisely where a central part of the neoliberal fiction falls apart. The idea that neoliberalism as an economic system operates best without intervention in some autonomous, self-regulated natural order is just not true. It actually takes tons of government intervention to make the system work, just not in the ways proponents of neoliberalism would have you think. When it comes to any other social service, from welfare to health care to utilities, state intervention amid neoliberalism is lamented. But should we need to punish someone? Carceral interventions are gleefully encouraged to maintain the illiberal economic function. In a book called Neoliberalism and Punishment by Ignacio González-Sánchez about the origins of the penal system in Spain, he points out that neoliberalism doesn't mind state intervention in policing and incarceration, but recoils at it in the context of social policy.
It is thus possible to understand that the neoliberal paradigm does not have irremediable problems with state intervention in penal matters. Since this is aimed precisely at preserving or even producing the appropriate conditions for the functioning of the market, in other words, the neoliberal paradigm is concerned with fomenting respect for legality that is based on private property and allowing for a degree of investment security on the one hand, and persecuting those who try to make a living outside the market on the other. This marks a fundamental difference with respect to social policy traditionally oriented towards intervening in the disruption operated by the market and which, as will be seen in neoliberalism, tends to reconfigure itself with a marked orientation towards the commodification of social rights.
And if we take another step back, we can also see how we embed the same logics of punishment into institutions designed to meet social needs. We punish the people they fail to serve, when the systems fail at their impossible tasks: we punished the city of Detroit with bankruptcy and conservatorship. We punish educational systems when they fail to hit their goals after withholding the necessary resources for them to do so. But you know who doesn't get punished? Any part of the prison industrial complex?
Safety is something that like all of us are responsible for! It is not disconnected from food, from water, from history, from love. And so when you create institution it and say you're responsible for that, those people with an institution of automatically they have to dehumanize the people because that's a task that no one institution can be responsible for. And the same thing is what's happening inside of schools, right, is that we basically have passed these people with an impossible task and then we punish them when they fail at it. And they have and then they are given the tools to‚ we say that we're giving them the tools to do the job, but really they're just given the tools to just kind of, dehumanize the people that are within those systems, right? Like if you don't if you are educating what we call educated, let's call it educ‚ or caring for, right, within a school, hundreds of children every day. Right. And the ratio of of caregivers to people with something like maybe 15 to 1, maybe 20 to 1, I mean, some Detroit classrooms we know that there are more than 40 young people and 1 adult. Right. How is one person supposed to take care of the care of 40 people? Right, I'm a parent of one child...
I'm a solo adult and I can barely take care of myself!
Right, exactly! I can barely take care of ourselves and I'm, quote unquote, college educated right! But, like my kid, we've got two parents and we can barely contain her reality. So how is it supposed to be possible that one person can do it for 40? Or in a prison state, Right. Like one. One person can take care of like, all of the folks that have ended up in that space. It's those folks that we actually need care from our society. And yet our decision is that we kind of like disappear them and we kind of put them in one place and we we pay these people and say that that's your responsibility, right? And so I think one of the most powerful I think I just think that that connection is just really important to point out. And it and it replicates itself across all these systems, really replicates itself and food replicates itself inside water replicates itself inside of‚ I mean take your pick. Right. Is that we we have started to under... We have started we haven't started, we have committed right, to in this country at this moment to thinking about things incredibly separate from one another. Thinking of ourselves as really separate from one another. And we've, we've kind of‚ buying into this idea that everyone's out for themselves. Right. And that inherently is a system that is not human, because human beings can't survive in our world, period, by ourselves. So, the moment that we disregard our connection. We begin to lose our humanity.
We're disregarding our connection to one another. As Nate says, when we fail to build a fundamental capacity to care into school, this happens when we overcrowd classrooms and deprive students of the necessary attention to learn. It happens when we close schools or when we outsource public education to for profit operated charter schools without any oversight. It's worth noting, too, that these tendencies are characteristic of neoliberalism as drive to shift the function of education. It becomes about developing human capital in order to add value and compete better in the labor market rather than to provide a social good for the benefit of the collective.
In the state of Michigan, poorer school districts don't get enough funding to address the educational needs of students. Research has shown that schools need to provide at least 100% more funding for low income students than for high income students. But here, low income students only get an additional 11.5% of the average statewide allowance. That's way below what they need to meet their needs. Detroit's public schools have long remained racially segregated, and there's ample evidence that this fact denies an equal education to black students compared to white students. Then if we evaluate school quality based on test scores, Detroit's public schools have long been failing. The state's solution during bankruptcy or punishment, rather, was to take away public control of the schools, to privatize them, transforming many public schools into charters. But their performance isn't substantively any better than public schools. And 80%—let me run that back—80% of these charter schools are run by for profit management companies that take billions in state funding and don't have to report on it at all.
So in other words, Detroit's public schools are set up to fail. But, and this is a huge but, unlike schools, policing and prisons are consistently rewarded for failing at the task that they claim to perform: producing safety.
Prisons and police jails is experiment a horribly failed experiment that continues to get funding. If you are in any sort of academic space, you know, if you had outcomes like the police and jail, nobody would fund you ever again, just. You know, so we have standards in other sectors. And yet for this one, it produces such destructive, horrible outcomes and yet somehow it keeps getting support and money.
You're hearing from Angel McKissic, who directs the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network and was at the time working on her own doctoral dissertation and intimately familiar with the burden of proof expected to demonstrate academic rigor. What Angel's calling out pinpoints a double standard that exists between police and prisons and every other social service. In the wake of the 2020 uprisings, in response to George Floyd's murder and many others, despite calls for promises to defund police in accordance with demands, the opposite actually happened.
But our ABC owned television stations analyzed budgets for more than 100 police agencies and found defunding never happened in most cities.
This pattern, however, what may seem like a failure on the part of policing and prisons, a failure to produce safety, is actually just exposing the fundamental fiction underlying both systems: they were never meant to produce safety in the first place. There is, as Stafford Beer has written, "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is what it fails to do." If the purpose of a system is what it does, then we might instead come to the conclusion that the purpose of police is to arrest people for being poor, to protect capital, to file administrative reports after car accidents, and to escalate conflict, because that's what they do. They continue to get rewarded because they're not actually failing. They're doing exactly what they're supposed to do.
In 83% of the budgets we reviewed, funding actually increased by at least 2% between 2019 and 2022. And defunding often means different things for different departments. In some cities, funding was shifted to different areas of the police department or to social services not reduced. But some candidates are hyper focused on appearing tough on crime and supporting police officers. In Texas, governor...
And Detroit was no exception. The DPD or Detroit Police Department's budget increased from $321.6 million in fiscal year 2019 to $330 million in 2020 alone. And then just in the last year, between 2023 and 2024, it increased another $22 million, bringing the current budget to $388.8 million.
In part one, we heard from Charity Hicks, who was arrested and imprisoned for attempting to prevent her neighbors water from being shut off. Charity's story revealed that what we're observing with water shutoffs is intimately connected to the privatization of collective resources like water, education and safety across the world, all in service of driving capitalist profit. Why would we think that commodifying water, something everybody needs to live and then selling it back to people at ever increasing rates in a city where poverty stays around 40% would produce anything other than scarcity. Detroit sits at the banks of the largest group of freshwater lakes on the planet, and yet water rates rose over 119% from 2009 to 2019, making water unaffordable in a place so rich with water is a product of social and political processes, not actual resource scarcity. This is not about economics. It's about power.
They will use everything at their disposal because the very people that are privatizing public education and satirizing it, like the DeVosses, they're the very people that are part of buying up the aquifers all around the globe. The very banks that participated in the bankruptcy, the contrived bankruptcy in Detroit, they're the very banks‚ if you go look up an article called the Water Banker Barons, they're the very banks that benefited from the contrived bankruptcy, but they're also the very banks buying up all the water on a global scale. So we've got to connect these dots that this privatization and this commodification of water is connected to the commodification and the control of all assets and all resources. And these are the things that they will make into a criminal act to then justify dehumanizing things like water.
So the danger of overlooking the connections that Monica is pointing out here between the privatization of water, education, finance and everything else is that we might lose sight of the fact that the ways these systems harm the people they're ostensibly supposed to serve aren't blips or mishaps or irregularities. They are very much features of capitalist design. And just as we send the educational system, policing and prisons and providers of public resources like water on these fools errands, we declare that doing it any other way is also an impossible task. We lock ourselves in a cycle of inaction and possibility. We manufacture a crisis of imagination. In Mark Fisher's words, "this is capitalist realism. The widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it." In other words, as attributed to both Frederick Jameson and Slavoj Zizek, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Master’s tools / why individualism won’t save us
So, returning to disappearance as a tool of neoliberalism and carcerality, we see this at work in neighborhoods, too, as they're cleared or sanitized for gentrification and by gentrification to make way for wealthier residents. Neighbors are disappeared by the many carceral strategies that extract them in the name of broken windows policing, for example; we see neighbors disappeared by economic eviction and foreclosure; neighbors are disappeared by illegal property tax assessments, which led to over 100,000 families in Detroit losing their homes, for example. And this is all to say nothing of the ways in which the city's inadequate services push families seeking a decent quality of life out as well.
These kinds of forced disappearances are tied with neoliberalism, financialization of housing markets, real estate speculation produces blight and disinvestment, and then it criminalizes both blight and people's attempts to survive, in light of that disinvestment. It dispossess them of the very things, home and neighborhood, that stand between them and obliteration. And then it erases them and calls it the rebirth of a city, a renaissance. This kind of disappearance also occurs in an aesthetic sense as houses are flipped, sans serif house numbers are installed, slat fences go up, bike lanes appear on main thoroughfares and old commercial spaces are repurposed. In these moments, we can see traces of designers esthetic interventions and commitments to capital made visible. In large part, this is a cosmetic endeavor that does the political and cultural labor of rendering neighborhoods seductive and exclusive to wealthier, whiter homeowners who can afford these aesthetically appealing homes. In this way, gentrification also advances the task of sanitizing neighborhoods by disappearing remnants of what existed before. In some ways, the logics and technologies that enable these processes bear some resemblance to those that disappeared the first peoples of these lands, the Anishinaabe, Potawatomi and Ojibwe, enabling Detroit to supplant the memory of Waawiyaatanong.
I live in Detroit's North End. It's a gentrifying neighborhood in which I am, without question, the newcomer with more wealth than many of my longtime Detroit neighbors. Most of the people I call my neighbors don't actually live in the neighborhood, though At least not anymore. I live near a park and people can be in here every day. And by every day, I mean every day of the year. Rain, shine, snow, it don't matter. This is Detroit, after all. And they come from their homes in farther out neighborhoods and outlying suburbs. The park's unofficial mayor, the guy who builds all the furniture, cleans up, keeps folks acting right, and checks on me regularly, grew up down the street, and he worked at his grandma's party store as a kid for $3 a day. Another neighbor takes care of the park's landscaping and mine for a reasonable enough price and keeps an eye out for my packages. If he thinks I'm doing too much yard work alone, he'll yell at me and then pitch in to help. Another neighbor, an elder woman who maintains two small garden plots at the park and does still live about three blocks away, I think, came by to chastise me about planting my tomatoes too close together after she saw me setting up my garden, but she dropped off some butternut squash starts the next day. This park is a third space. It's popping all the time and it's loud as hell sometimes, but most folks will quiet down if I ask... most of the time.
I see the park and my neighbors persistent presence as a refusal to be disappeared in spite of clear attempts to do so. There's a way in which so much of Detroit's physical infrastructure similarly offers persistent reminders where ruins of factories and ruins of homes stand as monuments that refuse to allow us to forget the potential scale and breadth of damage to be done by capitalist industry to its laborers who once filled these homes, and how the financialization of real estate speculation specifically turns homes into shelves from which to extract future value.
I feel so sorry for people who are not living in Detroit. People always striving for size be a giant, and this is a symbol of how giants fall.
That's the voice of Grace Lee Boggs in the introduction to her documentary. To be clear, the point I'm trying to make isn't about glorifying capitalist ruins either. Nor is it about arguing that new people shouldn't be allowed to enter and thrive in long standing communities. If we're being honest about disappearance, we have to first acknowledge the much longer history of disappearing indigenous peoples like the Anishinaabe, Ojibwe and Potowatomi, who first populated this region called Waawiyaatanong in Anishinaabemowin. We also have to grapple with the disappearance of living Anishinabe, Ojibwe and Potawatomi peoples who remain to this day as the settler colonial project of constructing race would have us believe that they have in fact completely vanished.
What it is about, is questioning why we should accept the notion that in a place with an abundance of land and homes and space, people who have lived here their entire lives are effectively barred from affordably remaining in place.
So on my birthday this year, I slept in, washed my hair, and then went downstairs to start what I thought would be a pretty chill day filled with my new favorite activity: editing this audio. I looked out the window to find out what all the commotion was on the block. On one end, I could see that DTE was putting in a new gas line for one of the three apartments being renovated on the street. Meanwhile, immediately across the street from my house, two guys in dark hoodies with "Blight Removal Team" emblazoned in yellow on the back stood with their arms crossed, watching smugly as bulldozers and one of those giant claw machines crisscrossed the three city lots that make up the park facing my house. They were bulldozing every inch of the park into a pile of rubble in the center, making sure to demolish everything in their path before clawing it into their dump trucks.
I forgot to mention before, it's a park that residents made. It's not a city park. They had built or acquired every single piece of furniture: a merry go round, a zip line, a play set‚ multiple playsets, actually‚ basketball hoops, picnic tables, grills, trash cans, a porta potty. So I came downstairs with deep conditioner in my hair and my bonnet on my head to ask what was going on. And the blight removal overseer looked pretty annoyed at my question. "We're cleaning up this mess," he says. I told him people use this space every single day of the year. "Where are they supposed to go?" "It's an environmental hazard," he says. "We're cleaning up this junk."
And if you know me, you know I have complained about this park before. The noise or the cars blocking my driveway, whatever. But again, these are my neighbors. Neighbors are annoying! They're like siblings. They get on your nerves, but that doesn't mean they don't deserve to be there. And like I said, many of these folks have actually lived in this neighborhood for longer than I've been alive. But tenancy and stewardship of land and space and social life has no bearing in the context of capitalist constructs of land ownership, right? And let's be real. The city only cares now because this land isn't fulfilling its profit producing duties as a taxable property. The fact that the park was being so aggressively demolished at the exact same hour that the gas line was being installed for three newly renovated apartment buildings adjacent to these lots is no coincidence. If the City and Land Bank actually gave a shit about the park being a so-called mess or junk or an environmental hazard, there were some pretty easy ways to address that. You could give them the resources to steward it, better install some decent park equipment, put city resources behind, making it not a mess if that's all they can really see when they look at this space.
The only redeeming part of this saga, I'll say, is that the next morning the park neighbors were right back where they have been every day I've lived in my house. They brought their folding chairs and set up just like usual. And they have every day since day one. If nothing else, this park is a case study in refusing disappearance.
There are many ways to respond to this and other kinds of disappearance mentioned throughout this episode.
"Buying Back the Block," for example, is a strategy that some Black folks employ as a response to institutional harm: things like redlining, housing discrimination, dispossession and wealth extraction. But it's founded on extending the fiction that privatizing problems is the only way forward. It succumbs to the neoliberal premise that there's no alternative to the means the systems afford us. In other words, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
And in the Black narrative, too, is that it‚ it is about also us, for me, I will say it's for me it's about contending with all the pain of the denial that exists as a part of being a Black person.
To be fair, Nate's right. And I get it. It can seem futile to resist the ways we see other people thriving amid capitalism and instead push back through more collective reparative or reciprocal strategies. But...
Also recognizing that my freedom from that is not about replacing the white person on top of the capitalist hill. But it's about like, like if I'm going to really free myself, I got to, I actually have to— and that's really hard to do, right? I have to imagine beyond even what like white folks has told us is what success looks like or what freedom looks like.
Malcolm X once said that "you can't operate a capitalistic system unless you're vulturistic. You have to have someone else's blood to suck to be a capitalist." He went on to say that a capitalist has to "get it from somewhere other than himself, and that's where he gets it from somewhere or someone other than himself."
And when he says this, he's zeroing in on the extractive nature of capitalism, the imperative to take from the earth, from workers, from communities, from someone other than ourselves without their consent, without fair compensation, or without regard for the consequences of that extraction. And in another sense, we do need to get things from somewhere other than ourselves in order to move outside of or past capitalism and carcerality and cultivate abolitionist possibilities. And practices of mutuality and collectivism and shared responsibility can offer a way to look at what we might need to do to move toward meeting more of our own needs more of the time.
So, when I think about what we actually need, I think about becoming reacquainted with our alienated selves.
More than a call to simply withdraw funding and resources from policing and prisons, I understand the abolition of police and prisons as a practice of freedom. And as we'll explore elsewhere in the series, a practice of imagination. Neoliberalism teaches us that economic freedom is the basis for every other kind of freedom. Hayek and Friedman, who are two of the founders of neoliberalism, argue that without free markets, we couldn't have individual freedom. In an opinion piece for The Atlantic entitled "Freedom for the Wolves," the writer Joseph Stiglitz counters that "neoliberalism's grim record includes freeing financial markets to precipitate the largest financial crisis in three quarters of a century, freeing international trade to accelerate the industrialization and freeing corporations to exploit consumers, workers and the environment alike." Put another way, as Nate, Monica and many others you've heard so far have made abundantly clear: neoliberalism denies people's humanity, which inherently undermines our freedom.
So, in the same ways that we try to sever ties between problems in order to treat them through the siloed systems we currently have, bonds are severed when people are disappeared from neighborhoods by way of gentrification. They get severed when people are removed from their homes through incarceration driven by criminalization of property. They get severed when systems are separated from each other ideologically in ways that don't serve those who would benefit from their services. Or in a quote that's often also been attributed to Malcolm X, "When 'I' is replaced with 'we' even illness becomes wellness."
...the etymological root of the word friendship? And the word freedom is a Sanskrit word that means beloved and just that in and of itself. I was like, oh friendship and freedom, they used to, like, sit together, right? They, like, came from the same womb. And I was just like, I don't know how to think about that. But yes, like my spirit just said yes to that information. And then the other piece was that pre-1500s. Right, in a like very different Western context from the one we have right now, someone who was enslaved was understood as being unfree, partly because they were in bondage, but also because they had been separated from their people. So that to be free was to be in connected community. And again, this like totally resonated with me. And it just made sense to me because of what I know about human biology and who we are as people, right? Like, that's just like our state of being is with the collective...
You're listening to Mia Birdsong, interviewed by Dan Harris on his podcast, 10% Happier. Mia is a pathfinder, writer and facilitator, who steadily engages the leadership and wisdom of people experiencing injustice to chart new visions of American life. Her remarks on the common etymology of the words freedom and friendship offer a nuanced way to understand the kind of relationality often denied us amid neoliberal capitalism that might bring us all a little closer to freedom.
So the first piece, was it really cast for me, my understanding of Black people's experience in America. And if we think about your people as not just being, you know, the human beings that you like are in proximity to, but your ancestors, the land that you're on, your relationships with other living things. Right. So that when Black folks were kidnaped and trafficked from African continent across the ocean, we were obviously being separated like deeply from our people. And then if you look at the way that slavery was practiced in America, like there was this intrinsic piece of it that was about the constant threat of being sold away from your people. And then obviously, for many people, the experience of being sold away from your people. If you look at the, you know, kind of post-Reconstruction white supremacist terrorism in the south, that created a refugee crisis that we call the Great Migration, right. Again, Black folks being driven away from land and family through to the prison industrial complex to child protective services. There has been this American project of trying to make Black people unfree by separating us from each other. And we see this, too, with like Indigenous folks and, you know, boarding schools with practices at the U.S. border with Mexico, people being separated from each other as a way of making them unfree. And then, of course...
So if capitalism can't save us, if carcerality separates us, if surveillance isn't actually safety, if the systems that are supposed to meet our needs are too siloed to actually do so, what do we actually need? For starters, we need each other in a way that capitalism just doesn't allow for. We need more reciprocity in relationality than the carceral state lets us have. We have to take responsibility for each other in ways that we're socialized not to and in ways that neoliberalism tells us just aren't our responsibility.
What would this country be like if we believed that to be free was to be in connected community? What would our economy look like? What would our school system look like? What would our health care system look like? What would our neighborhoods be like? How would we think about designing right Like cities? How would it change the way that we what we expect from each other and what we expect from, you know, government or other institutions? And I was like, well, that's the world I want to live in. I want that one. The one where we believe, as Fannie Lou Hamer said, right, "nobody's free unless everybody's free." Where we recognize, right, that like, my wellbeing actually is dependent on the well-being of my neighbors. And that when I you know, and the example I gave of that cantilevered everybody sitting on each other's laps thing, right, when I hold you, everybody else is holding me. That's the world that I want to live in.
We have to imagine beyond what capitalists and carceral fictions teach us is and is impossible. We have to imagine otherwise. The good news is these are worlds in relations we're already imagining, practicing and inhabiting. In other episodes, we'll talk about the ways people are insisting on and cultivating these kinds of connections across Detroit.
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities on silos, alienation, safety and interdependence. Until next time, remember what's real: capital isn't productive, people are. Neoliberalism requires a ton of heavy handed intervention from government, including police and prisons, to carry on the way it does, and punishment is one of its favorite tools for maintaining economic order. Police don't serve to protect anything other than capital. Prisons disappear, people, not problems. Poverty isn't a crime and surveillance isn't safety. Mastering capitalism is not the way to liberation from capitalist oppression. Water, food and housing are human rights, and there's enough of it all to go around. And lastly, safety is all of our responsibility. We need each other to survive, and our needs are intertwined.
Thank you for listening. And thank you to the many people who've made this show and the wider body of work possible over the last three years. Thank you. Most of all, to all the futurists featured in this episode. People who participated in this project over three long years ago. In this episode that includes Nick Buckingham, PG Watkins, Angel McKissic, Monica Lewis-Patrick and Nate Mullen.
And I want to give a special shout out to PG, who helped facilitate the interviews that became a part of the series. And finally, thank you and rest in power to charity. Hicks, who was killed in a hit and run in New York City in 2014. This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by me, Lauren Williams. Essays were co-edited by my dear friend Andy Jean-Baptiste, and the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.
