SOPHIE KUPETZ: OK
so first of all,
thank you all for coming on
this kind of gloomy Monday.
Is it Monday?
Monday.
We're really excited
to have you all here.
My name is Sophie.
I am a first-semester senior
studying history and also
an undergraduate employee at the
Center for the Study of Slavery
and Justice, and I've
also had the privilege
to co-facilitate the
Carceral State Reading Group,
which we'll tell you about
in a moment, with Kristen.
KRISTEN MAYE: Hello, everyone.
Welcome.
My name is Kristen Maye,
and I am a third year
doctoral student in the
Africana Studies department
here at Brown and also a
graduate student worker
with the Center for the Study
of Slavery and Justice, as well.
SOPHIE KUPETZ: And this
year, Kristen and I
have had the privilege to
co-facilitate the Center
for the Study of Slavery
and Justice's Carceral State
Reading Group.
Every two weeks,
a group of people
from different sectors of
the Providence community,
including Brown University,
undergraduate and graduate
students, community organizers,
educators, and activists
have come together to
learn about and discuss
the long history of carcerality
and policing in the United
States and the current
expansion of the prison
industrial complex,
both here and abroad.
Each week, we've come
together over a warm meal
to collaboratively
build a space that
allows us to share experiences,
think through challenging
topics, and discover ways
to build trust and learning
with and from each other.
We strive to collectively
investigate the ways
institutions in our society
act as systems of control,
affecting each of our
lives in the world we
inhabit in intimate ways.
In doing this work, we practice
critical self-reflection,
working to understand our
investment in these topics,
both as individuals
with different relations
to the prison industrial
complex and as members
of a reading group funded
by Brown University.
We would like to take a moment
to thank Shana Weinberg, Maiyah
Gamble-Rivers, Catherine Van
Amburgh, and Professor Anthony
Bogues for approaching
Kristen and I to co-facilitate
the reading group, for their
support with this project,
and for making the CSSJ the
dynamic, intellectual space
that it is.
We would also like to thank
Facilities Services, Media
Services, and the
rest of the staff that
helped set up this room and
make the event possible.
We ask that you all just
please throw out your trash.
There should be a trash
can outside the door.
I'll make sure there is so
we can make it easy for them.
And we also want to extend
our immense gratitude
to the reading group
participants, who
we have learned and laughed
with these past few months,
as they have really
shaped this experience.
And lastly, on behalf
of the reading group,
we would like to thank Professor
Joy James for joining us today
and for teaching
us by example how
to think about
issues of carcerality
with intention and
critical self-reflection.
We are grateful to be joined by
the amazing scholar-activisit
Joy James.
She is the F.C.
Oakley 3rd-C Professor
at Williams College, where she
teaches in Political Science,
Humanities, Africana
Studies, Women and Gender
Studies, and American Studies.
James's anthologies critiquing
incarceration and policing
include The New Abolitionists,
Imprisoned Intellectuals,
The Angela Y. Davis Reader,
States of Confinement,
and Warfare in the
American Homeland,
all works that engage
critical writings
from the perspectives of social
justice activists, human rights
advocates, and revolutionary
political prisoners.
Co-editor of the 2016
Abolition Collective Election
blog, James's most
recent book is
Seeking the Beloved Community.
Author of The Womb
of Western Theory,
she has completed
draft monographs
on the eclipse of
the revolutionary era
and the abolitionist architects
Angela Y. Davis and George
Jackson, and Fulcrum: The
Captive Maternal Leverages
Democracy.
We will now turn it
over to Professor James,
who we have all come to see.
So thank you again.
[APPLAUSE]
JOY JAMES: OK.
Good afternoon, good evening,
and thank you so much,
Kristen and Sophie--
and Tony Bogues,
way in the back--
for inviting me to come
and spend time with you.
Particularly, I enjoyed this
afternoon and these discussions
and debates and these
pressing inquiries
that people were
presenting based
on their work, their
intellectual work,
their political work,
their commitment
to their communities.
And I have no answers, but I'm
really grateful that you've
made me think more critically
about possibilities
and also liabilities.
So what I want to share
with you right now
is a work in progress.
It is on the Revolutionary
Era, on the eclipse of it.
It looks at it through
the lens of abolitionism,
and I'm going to
start by talking
about the revolutionary
era in comparison
to the reactionary era.
You know, I'm not trying to
create cliches of statement
here, like labels, but I'm going
to work with them until they
fail or, you know,
hopefully, prove productive.
So I'm going to start here with
The Architects of Abolitionism:
George Jackson, Angela Davis,
and the Deradicalization
of Prison Struggles and begin
with a quote from Frederick
Douglass.
"The thing worse than
rebellion is the thing that
causes rebellion."
This is "Part 1: The Eclipse
of the Revolutionary Era."
The Revolutionary Era, 1967
to 1972 as defined here,
began when 159 US cities
burned despite recently
passed legislation, the 1964
Civil Rights Act, the 1965
Voting Rights Act, and
the 1967 appointment
of black liberal Thurgood
Marshall on the Supreme Court.
In 1967, the pacifist human
rights leader Martin Luther
King Jr. denounced
the war in Vietnam,
and Huey P. Newton, the
co-founder of the Black Panther
Party, was wounded and
arrested in a shooting
with white policemen that left
Newton going to the hospital,
one other officer going
to the hospital wounded,
and one police fatality.
Newton's arrest would spark
a Free Huey campaign, largely
conceived by Kathleen
and Eldridge Cleaver,
that legitimized
armed self-defense.
The Revolutionary Era ended
with the acquittal of Angela Y.
Davis in June 1972.
The dramatic close to that
costly political trial,
which was watched
across the globe,
became a victory that allegedly
or symbolically proved
that the US democracy could
function justly through law.
The revolutionary era
encompassed multiple movements,
from the Poor People's
Campaign through Black, Brown,
and Red Liberation Armies
to women's and gay rights,
to opposition to
the war in Vietnam.
Cops, courts, consumer culture,
and integration as assimilation
work, though, to eclipse
those radical desires fought
for in streets, courthouses,
and on campuses.
With contempt for
civil and human rights,
Richard M. Nixon,
POTUS 37, sought
to destroy remnants
of freedom movements
that the FBI, CIA,
and local police
could not eviscerate completely.
And hence, Nixon promoted
the concept of black power
as black capitalism.
And for me, that's going
to be a key intervention.
And I'm going to argue
that, in some ways,
the academy became an
extension of Nixon's mandate,
that the capital was
a trade in ideas,
and one of the commodities
is black rebellion itself.
The Revolutionary Era ended as
Nixon pursued a genocidal war
in Southeast Asia, repression
as law and order at home,
and won a second term
in office with 60.7%
of the popular vote in 1972.
Hence, that brings
us to what I want
to call the rise of
the Reactionary Era,
and I want to pair
the two of them
before I go specifically into
the contributions of George
and Angela.
Concerning the rise of
the Reactionary Era,
I believe we have to
revisit the war on drugs.
Because a lot of
the work that we're
doing around incarceration
focuses on mass incarceration,
and the work I did
here at Brown focused
on political incarceration and
political prisoners, per se,
and I can say more in a
Q&A why I splintered off
from crit resists and kind of
chose another path to explore.
But when we're thinking
about mass incarceration,
we tend to go to templates
or these paradigms
on how to explain
mass incarceration.
And the academy has been key
in launching those templates.
So one of the key ones would
be Michelle Alexander's, right?
The New Jim Crow.
And I'm grateful for all the
work that we've produced,
all our scholars
have produced, all
our activists have produced.
But my particular argument
is that the work itself
has been part of the
deradicalization of prison
abolitionism.
So if you think about
The New Jim Crow, which
I'm sure you've read
or seen in some ways,
think about the absence, and
what is absent is black agency.
There's only black
victimization,
and so the heartbeat
of radicalization
came from a black struggle when
people had incredible agency.
Another way to think about the
rise of mass incarceration,
tied to drug policy enforcement
or draconian drug policy
enforcement, is that it was also
a war against political agency.
So in order to
pursue that argument,
I'm going to talk
about Dan Baum's work
on John Ehrlichman, who
was counsel and assistant
to President Nixon.
He was the advisor to the
president for domestic affairs.
So Baum interviewed
Ehrlichman briefly in 1994,
and I think this is
a key quote, where
I want to tie in the political
with the social in terms
of repression under
the guise of pursuing
stable civil society through
enforcement of drug abuse.
So John Ehrlichman did time.
He was sentenced
to federal prison
for his role in Watergate, and
he informed the journalist Dan
Baum in 1994-- and this is
a key quote to my argument--
quote, "The Nixon
campaign in 1968
and the Nixon White
House after that
had two enemies, the anti-war
left and black people.
We knew we couldn't make
it illegal to be either
against the war or black,
but by getting the public
to associate the hippies
with marijuana and blacks
with heroin and then
criminalizing both heavily,
we could disrupt
those communities.
We could arrest their
leaders, raid their homes,
break up their meetings,
and vilify them night
after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were
lying about the drugs?
Of course we did."
This is the interview
that was done in 1994.
So the eclipse that
I'm arguing in terms
of the deradicalization
of abolitionist struggle
mirrors the social
concern about stability
of civil society in
the war on drugs,
which gestures towards
mass incarceration,
and then the lesser
attention that
is paid to political
incarceration itself
and the meaning of
political incarceration.
The 50-year eclipse of
revolutionary struggle
will hopefully one day wane.
And I would argue--
or I argue here--
that the 2013 not guilty
verdict at a trial that
mocked the racial uplift theme
of Davis's 1972 exoneration
saw the acquittal of
Trayvon Martin's killer
and later homicides
of unarmed blacks
at the hands of
police and vigilantes,
saw them spark mass
protests that shaped
the Black Lives Matter movement.
And the 2016
presidential primaries,
which mainstreamed the
mothers of the movement--
that would be the
mothers of Sandra Bland,
the mother of Eric Garner,
which would be Gwen Carr,
the mother of Michael
Brown, and so forth--
which mainstreamed the mothers
of the movement as Hillary
Clinton's surrogates
on the DNC stage
and saw the daughter of one
of the slain, Eric Garner's
daughter Erica Garner, storm
against the city mayor,
governor, and president and
build a platform against police
violence with a
brilliant campaign ad she
engineered for Bernie Sanders.
Following that 2016 emergence--
right?-- of abolitionism
through presidential politics,
we saw the election
of Donald Trump, who
lost the popular vote
by more than 2 million
and still won the presidency.
As POTUS 45 leads conservatives,
Congress, and courts
to block egalitarian democracy,
revolutionary battles
appear alongside
centrist planners who
try to manage the dysfunction.
If domination cannot be
petitioned but only contested,
as Frederick Douglass suggests,
then the risk and sacrifices
of the revolutionary era reflect
not only aspirations but also
practical mechanical blueprints
for an egalitarian democratic
future.
So I've compressed a
lot in there, right?
The historical
trajectory, right?
That there is this
historical eclipse
that we track with Nixon, right?
That Nixon's aggression
against radical rebellion
is not just through the FBI
or the CIA or COINTELPRO,
through J Edgar Hoover.
It's also through the
criminalization of drugs.
But the language of the
criminalization of drugs
is still an attempt to
quell black rebellion
and student rebellion against
imperialism in the war.
And what I'm gesturing here
before I go into Angela
and George is to do a setup--
that the revolutionary era--
right?-- was not romantic,
even though it becomes
romanticized in some ways
in academic and practical
discourse.
That even if you talk
to the Panthers today--
and I do talk to some of them,
and I visit some of the BLA who
are still incarcerated--
they're asked to express remorse
before they can be let out.
But it's not just a remorse
that they fought the state.
They also have to disavow
their ideology of rebellion.
And in some ways,
I think they've
internalized those disavowals,
and so I hear constantly,
what were we thinking?
How did we think we
could fight the state?
Why did we think we could win?
Which is exactly that
pragmatic, paternal language
of the academy
and civil society.
What were they thinking, right?
How immature, how
infantile those politics.
And I'm going to
argue counter to that.
And I'm not ascribing to any
of the methods or methodologies
that were used in
that era, but I
want to suggest that
they were engineers,
and they crafted blueprints.
And whether or not they
function or function
well, they were
thoughtfully planned out,
and they were a response to
the conditions of the time.
So the blueprint makers,
the pragmatic analyses
of the Black Panther Party and
Black Panther Field Marshal
George Jackson.
You know, before
I go into that--
and because it's a
work in progress,
I'm going to throw a lot at
you, so just roll with me--
I am going to say
that I found out
in the last couple of months
that the key architect to all
this, who has the
conceptual framework,
is probably Kathleen Cleaver,
who people rarely talk about.
But logically, she
would be the one
to understand both the
pragmatic aspect of the struggle
and also the theoretical
aspect of the struggle.
And when I get on
through the paper,
you will see that
I will position
that the celebrity or the
icon of the Black Panther
is someone who never joined
the Black Panther Party, which
would be Angela Davis.
And because she was
never in the party,
she doesn't know the logistics
of day-to-day struggle
or how the Panthers crafted
themselves and defended
themselves.
But Kathleen Cleaver
was the first woman
to sit on the Central
Committee of the Panthers,
as someone who traveled
internationally,
as someone who later
got a JD summa cum
laude from Yale, right?
That she sort of did a
360 scope but doesn't
have that visibility,
partly perhaps
because she doesn't desire.
But she's a key engineer
or writer of the blueprint
that I want to speak about now.
"Only one party in
the revolutionary era
became the primary target for
unsanctioned lethal police
violence, the Black
Panther Party.
Given the amount of state
violence arrayed to destroy it,
paying some attention to
the ideological framework
for the organization
seems reasonable."
"It constituted a threat
to racial capital.
Why?
This very small, very
young, and very bold
organization inspired national
and international committees
and communities.
Originally organized in 1966
as the Black Panther Party
for Self-Defense, the BPP
monitored and deterred police
aggression in cities and sought
to meet communal material
needs--
food, clothing, shelter,
medicine, and education."
"Criminalizing radical politics
and militant blackness, local,
state, and federal police
decimated an organization whose
membership-- several
hundred max--
was generally 25 years
or younger in age.
And yes, members
of the organization
believed in armed self-defense,
armed struggle, which is not
the topic at hand,
but can be discussed,
particularly since it mirrors
the stance of the state."
"Kathleen Cleaver"--
as I said earlier--
"was the first woman to sit
on the BPP Central Committee.
A co-founder of an Algerian
internationalist wing which
separated from
Oakland's [INAUDIBLE],,
which pursued black power,
later as black capitalism,
in electoral politics"--
and at times-- you know,
we could talk more about
where Huey started to
drift with criminal intent.
"Cleaver was also an analyst
of underground militarism
of the Black Liberation Army.
Her critiques of
anti-revolutionary animus
among black Americans
is useful today."
And for me, this is
key because I actually
am arguing that, in the
process of our assimilation,
we acquired traits of
a particular class,
and that we are not
the bourgeoisie.
We are really the
petite bourgeoisie
because we don't collectively
own that kind of wealth.
But the way in which we
perform and structure
acts as if we were
invested in capital.
And so that creates a split
between us and the working
class and the poor, the
so-called lumpenproletariat.
But it's a split
that's massed when
we claim this
universal blackness,
as if experientially we all
live with the same vulnerability
to the police and poverty.
"Her critiques of
anti-revolutionary animus
among black Americans
is useful today.
In a 1997 PBS interview with
Harvard scholar Henry Louis
Gates, Cleaver
describes nuanced ways
in which a revolutionary
movement rose, faltered,
and fell.
Class and ideological divisions
among black Americans,
Cleaver maintains,
shaped black middle class
or black bourgeoisie
disparagements
of radical or
revolutionary struggle."
"As a caste, affluent blacks
held complicated relationships
with black poor and
working-class communities.
Their response to black
radicals and revolutionaries
who also attained advanced
degrees and material status
were ideologically contentious.
For Cleaver, the romantic
search for, quote, 'black unity'
required ignoring
class divisions
and led to
superficial agreements
that publicly presented
a black united front."
"Radical progressives engaged
in creative confrontations
that disproportionately
benefit those best positioned
for personal gains.
Cleaver reforms
that, quote, 'Many
of the goals of the
civil rights movement
were essentially goals
for easier assimilation
for middle-class people.
Working-class people and poor
people weren't going to get too
much out of the civil
rights movement.'
End quote."
"The Panthers differed
from other civil rights
organizations that, quote,
'succumbed to red-baiting.'
They studied revolutionaries
Malcolm X, Guinean Kwameh
Nkrumah, Martinique
psychiatrist Frantz Fanon,
to forge a neo-Marxist
party, according to Cleaver.
What do past black revolutionary
battles for democracy tell us?
'Half a century ago,' says
the former Panther leader--
meaning Cleaver--
'revolutionaries believed that
if third-world international
movements challenge
global capital and empire,
they could prevail as, quote,
'an international revolutionary
vanguard' that would have
restructured the economy,
restructured the
educational system,
taken the United States out of
the role of world policeman,
and made it the American
people's revolutionary United
States.'"
And I always smile
when I read that.
"'For the majority of the
world's liberation movements
to be successful will require
not more than that they, quote,
'seize power,'
according to Cleaver,
given that conventional
independence left the IMF,
World Bank, and global
colonizing corporate capital
with control of national
resources in Africa
and in South
America,' end quote.
50 years ago, pragmatic
revolutionaries presciently
organized against
extreme concentrations
of wealth and poverty."
"30 years later, Cleaver
reminded the nation
and the world on public
television that, quote,
'government by corporation
would be dominated by those who
controlled resources and 15-
and 20-year plans,' end quote.
Black Panther Party intellectual
architects waged rebellion
against the emergence of a
governing corporate state
partnership with, quote,
'billions and billions
of dollars to get rid
of us,' end quote."
"Cleaver's Panthers were
imperfect visionaries
in struggle who
did not anticipate
material wins in their lifetime
but wished to leave a model.
Quote, 'We had ideals,
and we had commitment,
and we had this glorious belief
that the spirit of the people
was greater than
man's technology.'
End quote.
Decades after
Cleaver's observations,
electoral and popular
politics display
class and ideological fissures
shaped by capitalism."
"From Nixon to Lyndon
Baines Johnson,
through the Bushes and
Clintons and Obama and Trump,
US presidents have worked
for white nationalist
and anti-racist struggle to
be denuded of class analysis.
The reactionary eclipse
was global and evidential
of an old order's
refusal to fade.
And this is the last
quote from Cleaver,
and then I'll move on."
"'In colonial development, the
colonial power creates a middle
class, usually to control
the colony for itself.
The creation in black
American communities
of a class of physicians and
managers and lawyers and judges
means that their
education takes them away
from the communities that
created these people.
These are not like my
parents' generation,
people who were trained in the
black schools and whose talents
were confined to the black
community through a regime
of segregation.'"
"'These are people who
were trained in the major
institutions and are able to use
their talents in the corporate
and business structures
of the larger society.
Therefore, they are not
available to the poor black
communities.'
End quote.
Those with billions and
billions exercise their capacity
to restrict democratic
self-governing sites, including
black, indigenous, brown,
Asian, Muslim, white working
in impoverished spaces."
"Working for those with,
quote, 'billions and billions'
or attending or teaching
at their universities
and colleges, set by affirmative
action for white elites,
comes with cultural
training to minimize
the class and
ideological fractures
that the revolutionary era
magnified with analyses.
The eclipse of the
revolutionary struggle
now is shaped by
spectacles and media
performances that distract from
cogent progressive politics."
This is the last
segment on the present,
and then I'll go to the past.
"On February the 4th,
2019, POTUS 45"--
I don't like to call
him by his name.
Trump.
OK?
[LAUGHTER]
--"acknowledged two former
incarcerated black Americans
during the State of the
Union address, or SOTU.
Matthew Charles
and Alice Johnson
had both received draconian
sentences for drug trafficking
and were granted early release.
Miss Johnson served 20
years of a life sentence
for a first-time
nonviolent offense.
She publicly accepted
responsibility for a crime
and shared that her
loss of a child, lack
of funds to care for
surviving children,
and pending home foreclosure
led to poor judgment."
"Kim Kardashian West heard
of Johnson's case on Twitter,
called presidential
advisor/daughter Ivanka Trump
and set up a meeting
at the White House.
One week after Kardashian
West lobbied President Trump
in the Oval Office--
Kardashian West, not the
warden, not a state official--
contacted or called Alice
Johnson at her Tennessee prison
and told her that
she should pack
because she was going home."
"Both women referred to
45 as 'compassionate.'
A monarchical or
dictatorial president,
in my opinion infamous
for anti-black animus,
achieves as an abolitionist what
he opposes black or progressive
organizations for doing
for their own communities--
becoming the architects of
mass abolitionist movements
to free the imprisoned,
both the activists and those
who are not traditionally
considered to be activists."
"Opposing progressive
movements to free captives,
political and economic elites,
with documented affinities
to white supremacy now are
benevolent abolitionists
who understand that
they get to choose
which subjugated individuals
they deem worthy for release.
Jared Kushner, Donald Trump, the
Koch brothers do not publicly
atone for their alleged crimes
or anti-social behavior, which
would include racist housing
practices, tax avoidance, labor
exploitation,
environmental destruction,
because no one yet, including
the people or the community,
can force them to do so."
"While Kardashian West
and Johnson describe 45
as compassionate,
journalists remind them that,
'Donald Trump called for
the death penalty for drug
traffickers, as well as for the
exonerated Central Park Five.'
The First Step
bipartisan legislation
signed by Donald Trump helps,
and I'm not disavowing that.
It makes the reduction of
disparities in drug sentencing
retroactive, revises
mandatory sentencing,
enables time credit
and work programs."
"The 180,000 federal
prisoners out of the 2 million
incarcerated will
have to wait to see
how the executive branch or
the Department of Justice
interpret and
enforce the new law,
but the new law has value."
I want to argue, though, from
there as I move on to Angela.
And then I want you to
push back in the Q&A,
so I'm not going to
take up all the time.
There is a strong
possibility that, since we
never agree to evaluate
an ideological spectrum
for our struggles against
abolitionism, that everything
and anybody at any time can
claim to be an abolitionist.
So now the President
of the United States
is an abolitionist, just as
Van Jones is an abolitionist,
just as the Koch brothers
is an abolitionist.
And that's the
logical conclusion
of deradicalizing
the prison struggle.
By severing it from a
grassroots, working-class,
black base or
people of color base
that sought autonomy
from the state,
and by shifting the leadership
to elites to government,
to nonprofits, to academics,
so that the very definition
of the term of
abolitionism is not
decided by the people
who are incarcerated
or more vulnerable to
the incarceration matrix.
It is decided by the people
who are part of the machinery,
both its critics and
those who celebrate it.
And this, then, brings us to
Davis and to George Jackson,
which makes it complicated.
So I'm going to stop reading
because it's complicated.
[LAUGHTER]
So I don't know how familiar
you are between the relationship
between the two of them, right?
Fairly familiar?
OK, so Angela Davis,
as I said before,
was never a member of
the Black Panther Party.
But if you read her
memoir, she says
that she was a member of the
Black Panther political party,
which is B with three
Ps after it, right?
But at some point in the
memoir, one P drops off,
and you just get the BPP.
So your reading is not that
she was a member of the Black
Panther political
party, which was a study
group like you have on campus--
right?-- for intellectual
and grad students.
But you remember the
Black Panther Party,
which is Huey Newton, Bobby
Seale, Second Amendment rights,
the police are killing
us, we have the right
to fight back and
defend ourselves.
Those are two different
worlds, right?
They will both claim to
be radical phenomena,
but this is where
I'm in a quandary.
If they are equally
radical, then
what is the definitional
norm of radical struggle?
A study group?
Right?
Or having a 15-year-old be
shot in the back in 1966
so that Bobby Seale and Huey
Newton say, enough is enough.
We get to arm to
defend our communities.
And we encourage the people that
come out and bring their guns,
as a performance piece in part
but also as a messaging, right?
For the right to autonomy,
the right to sovereignty,
and just the basic
right to life.
So when Davis enters--
right?-- as a
graduate student who's
left Europe to come
study with Marcuse,
she wants to participate
in political struggle,
as we all do.
And so there is a lot
about Davis's life
that's attractive
because Davis resonates,
I believe, with academics.
Because Davis is an academic.
She was coming to
finish her doctorate.
And I don't know how--
I guess, like, raise your hand--
or not, but how many of you
are actually in that
same cycle, right?
Of reinventing yourself as a
professional intellectual who
will then be on payroll and
who is on a career track.
And it doesn't mean that
you're not political.
It just means that
you don't live
in impoverished neighborhoods,
even if you came from them.
And the way you see
politics and experience it--
increasingly, there
becomes this divide.
So when Davis announces-- after
she's outed as a communist,
right?
She refused to deny that she is
a member of the Communist Party
USA.
And that's how-- while
she's teaching at UCLA--
that her job is
placed in precarity.
And there's something
very heroic about that.
That she will not renounce
her political beliefs,
that she's aligned to a party.
She joins a section
of the CPUSA that's
formed by Charlene Mitchell.
So it's the Che-Lumumba
Club, so it's
an all-black club of
the Communist Party
because Davis won't join an
all-white club or integrate it.
Because she wants to
join the black struggle.
But once she loses her job,
she wants to stay engaged,
and she's asked to join the
Soledad Brothers Defense
Committee by Fay Stender, who's
a white Jewish attorney, who's
the attorney for George Jackson,
and before that she'd been
an attorney for Huey P. Newton.
And this is where George
Jackson looms large,
but he also disappears
at the same time.
And when George
begins to recede,
the revolutionary era begins
to recede with him, right?
So George tells Angela--
he writes to her.
He's, like, captivated
by this story
of this first black instructor
in Philosophy at UCLA.
You lost your job.
How does this happen?
He starts writing to
her, you stay strong.
She's an anti-racist organizer.
She's moving through
the community.
He writes to her.
They start a relationship.
She's on the Soledad
Brothers Defense Committee.
We need to save his life.
The Soledad brothers
were accused
of killing a prison
guard, but that's
only after Opie Miller,
who served time in Vietnam
and who was a sniper, killed six
black unarmed men in the prison
yard.
And then, a white
prison guard was
thrown over a railing, died,
but nobody saw who did it.
But they identified
the activists, right?
Which would be George
Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo--
I'm mangling his name--
and John Clutchette.
So Davis is swept into these
defense committees the way
we're swept into Free Mumia.
You know, you've all been
there at some point, right?
But she begins a personal
relationship with George,
and so George convinces her,
because she has death threats,
that there's only one person he
would trust is her bodyguard.
And that's going to be his
17-year-old brother Jonathan.
And Jonathan will have
access to Davis's guns,
and Davis has guns because
she grew up in the South,
where everybody had guns because
you needed to deter the Klan.
And so there was
a pragmatic aspect
to armed self-defense in
the Deep South in the '30s,
'40s, and '50s that somehow,
in the '60s and '70s,
becomes romanticized by some
and demonized when this was just
a way of life.
You had guns because you hunted.
You had guns because you plan
to keep your family alive.
And you didn't have to quote
the Second Amendment rights.
It was an insurance policy
that you pursue, right?
So Davis has weapons.
Jonathan has access to them.
Jonathan does the raid on
Marin County Courthouse
in August 1970.
Black Panthers are supposed
to come and support him.
They do not show up.
So you have a
17-year-old organizing
what is supposed to
be a PR moment, right?
To bring attention to
the plight of prisoners.
What brings the cameras?
Violence, or the
threat of violence.
That's when the
TV crews show up.
California at that
time had a mandate.
There would be no escapes
of any prisoners whatsoever,
and all casualties would
be approved, including
casualties of civilians.
So if you look at Bettina
Aptheker's scholarship,
she makes it clear.
Everybody who died
that day was killed
by prison guards
shooting into the van
or by the district attorney
who was taken hostage
and who probably shot
Jonathan first, took a gun,
and began shooting
everybody else in the van.
Right?
So you lost two of
the black prisoners.
You lost Jonathan.
You lost the judge.
You had the DA
crippled for life,
and you had some injured jurors.
But Angela is going
to be marked with us,
and Davis's is that, even
though she has class,
even though she has
educational pedigree,
she has vulnerability and
risk, so she goes underground.
Right?
And that becomes a
fugitive flight of Davis.
But before we get to
that fugitive flight,
we have to talk about the
significance of George.
Right?
Because I am going to
argue that after '72,
Davis walks away from George.
Because it is no longer
tenable to be associated
with this type of
revolutionary struggle
or this type of
revolutionary imagination.
So when George does
Soledad brother,
Fay Stender is the one
who conceives of the book
because she's trying
to save his life.
By the way, all the Soledad
brothers were acquitted.
But George, as we know, was
killed in '71, in August,
right?
Jonathan is killed in
August 1970, George in 1971.
If you read George,
there are two Georges.
There is the George in print
that white liberals need
to embrace so that
they don't fear
black revolutionary
struggle and they
don't think that it's
in a homicidal intent.
So Stender annoys George--
and that's probably
downplaying it--
by writing him or editing
his letters in a way
so that he does not
seem so violent.
But this is one of my arguments.
And Stender-- we could
talk about how she died.
It was very tragic.
But this is one of my arguments.
When we attempt to
refine the incarcerated
and launder their
language and their desires
and their passion
and their rage,
we're presenting an artificial
product for the consumer.
And what we're doing,
which is even worse,
is we're minimizing the
violence of the state.
Because if you saw how
deep that rage was,
you would have to ask
yourself what sparked it,
and then it would point to
the violence and brutality
of the guards.
It would point to what
W. L. Nolan said--
which is a close friend of
George who was assassinated,
one of those three
shot in the yard, who
was going the right route.
He had a lawsuit against
the prison authorities.
They were putting broken
glass and fecal matter
in the food of black prisoners.
They were letting the Aryan
Nation go into their cells
and brutalize them.
They were letting the Aryan
Nation kill them in the yard.
That they understood it
to be a state of war,
and in a state of
war they understood
that they had the right
to protect themselves.
And so when Davis is accused
of abetting Jonathan--
which he did not because she's
a member of the Communist Party,
which is legalistic and wants
to in some way influence
the Democratic Party--
she's forced underground.
She still has allegiance
and ties with George
until she is captured
and put on trial.
The last thing
that Davis writes--
right?-- to George
in terms of her
letters is her
fantasies of fighting
with him against the police.
And that is the literature--
that correspondence has
to be suppressed at her trial.
Because what the state
has to demonstrate
is that this woman with this
educational pedigree, who
can be an academic
in a university,
one, or who turned down
Yale to go to UCLA,
could never be like a, quote,
"street thug" like George.
And that literally becomes,
on some level, the defense.
Right?
So the radical ideology has
to disappear during the trial.
Ruchell Magee, who is
originally her codefendant, who
is one of the men in
the van, his trial
is severed from
hers because he's
making a defense from the
street and from the space
of revolutionary argument.
I am captive as a slave.
I have the right to rebellion.
Davis's argument has
to be, I am innocent.
Those are two
distinct arguments.
And I don't fault either one.
I mean, obviously,
if you don't want
to spend the rest of your
life in prison, the argument
that I am innocent when
you are technically
innocent is a solid argument.
But my argument--
myself, about the end
of the revolutionary era--
is that, with her acquittal,
you find this celebratory
moment that justice works.
And from that acquittal in
'72 to the National Alliance
against political
repression, to the birth
of critical resistance with
funding from non-profits,
to embedding abolitionism
in the academy,
you are drifting away from
the ground, the terrain,
of suffering and sorrow
and rebellion that
actually created this template.
And so what we get
is some derivative
of a desire of being free that
we no longer can articulate
because our language itself
belongs in the academy.
Our imagination itself
belongs to the academy,
and our funding itself tells
us to applaud President Trump--
right?-- for being
an emancipator when
we know, in fact, that
he's the opposite.
And that's sort of
the larger picture
that I want to present to
you as the project, right?
That the architects of
revolutionary abolitionism
have been turned
into commodities,
or they've been buried with
a kind of scholarship that
disparages them as paranoid.
But that I hold with Cleaver
that these were pragmatists.
And this is not an argument
for armed struggle.
This is an argument for
a clear analysis of how
violent the state is, its
refusal of black freedom,
and its ability to manipulate
our own desires to turn them
into commodities
to sell back to us
in terms of our own consumption.
So I'll stop there.
[APPLAUSE]
KRISTEN MAYE: Thank you
so much, Professor James,
for that very clear and
compelling set of reflections.
I myself-- Kristen--
and another reading
group member, Arya,
will join you on the
panel for about 15 minutes
of directed question asking,
and then we'll open it up
to the rest of the audience.
I guess I will just
introduce ourselves quickly.
OK.
Again, like I said, my
name is Kristen Maye.
I'm a third-year
doctoral student here
in Africana Studies.
ARYA SERENITY: Hello, I'm Arya.
Just part of the
reading study group,
a formerly
incarcerated individual
trying to learn,
just like all of us,
and maybe apply
some of this back
to my peoples inside
the penitentiary
and bring some light
to their darkness.
You know?
I ain't never done this
before, so bear with me.
Rookie at this, so--
how you doin'?
JOY JAMES: Hi.
I'm fine, how are you?
ARYA SERENITY: I'm blessed to
be here with you right now.
This is real--
JOY JAMES: I'm blessed
to be with you.
Thanks.
ARYA SERENITY: And
that was-- when
I see me walking
out-- that was one
of my peoples inside calling.
So this is for them, you know?
In my heart, this is for them.
So the first question, which
I'm going to read off to you,
is, "Many of us work
teaching or volunteering
inside local prisons.
There is this constant
balance between the work
one does with students and
that with the faculties."
"There are lots of feelings that
go along with the work, too,
which revolve around
the guilt of privilege,
which can be
dangerous, especially
coming from elite institutions.
What are some of the
pitfalls and possibilities
for work inside with
incarcerated folks?"
Sorry.
"What are some of the pitfalls
and possibilities for work
inside with incarcerated folks?
Has that changed
as the work seems
to be gaining in popularity?"
JOY JAMES: Yeah.
I think-- OK.
I have no answers,
just thoughts, right?
ARYA SERENITY: All right.
JOY JAMES: I think it's
really difficult to go inside.
I haven't gone inside a
lot, so I want to be honest.
I think the hardest time is when
I went on death row, which--
that kind of threw me, right?
Just because, I mean--
I felt you could feel it.
You know?
You can feel it on your body.
And so part of it--
I believe that there is
secondary and tertiary trauma.
Right?
And any time you engage with
people who are on the front
lines of any type-- of being
targeted or suffering--
the extent that
you align yourself
and that you're open
to learn from them,
it means that you
expose yourself,
even if you're not legally
vulnerable to endure
the conditions that
they're enduring.
Like between
emotional connectors,
in terms of learning
from each other,
in terms of shared
intelligence, that there is,
like, a bonding that goes on.
And you carry that with you.
So I try not to beat
myself up about not
being tough enough or smart
enough about when I go inside,
like not bringing enough.
Because I always feel
like I have a deficit.
I also feel that way
with political prisoners
because if you're pulling
48 years already, right?
Like people we
anthologize here at Brown,
like back in 2003 or
something, are still in.
You almost feel like, what
was the point of the book?
I mean, the point of the book
was to help people get out.
And it seems that the book or
the ideas or the personalities
became commodities, and
that went one place.
But it also inspired
people doing correspondence
and visiting and making
those connections.
To the best of my ability
to address that question,
I think you just have to show
up and learn in the moment.
I don't think there's any script
that I know that I can follow.
Because I started by
talking about George,
and we were talking earlier.
So George was a revolutionary
where it would just
be, you break them out.
That is not what we do now.
It's like we petition
for a pardon and release,
and we bring in
books and education,
and we help people get degrees.
We don't condemn the state's
capacity to act like a god
and destroy people's lives.
We try to mitigate the damage.
That's a different game plan.
So on one level, you have
George in your brain, right?
And then on another level, you
just have the pragmatic of,
we need to get through
this and be useful.
And so the pragmatics differ.
Does that make sense at
all, what I'm saying?
ARYA SERENITY: Absolutely.
Yeah.
JOY JAMES: Like, my heart wants
to follow the pragmatics of,
like, just get the
beast off your back.
But structure will not
be easily shed, right?
And so what can I
do in this moment,
in terms of emotional
availability,
emotional intelligence,
intellectual content, support?
You know, do you need attorneys?
Do you need books?
Do you need something
in the commissary?
Do you need a degree?
Do you need an educational
program when you get out?
How can we be supportive?
And it will always
be insufficient
because the beast has
license to pop up any day,
anytime, anywhere.
And that's the fragility
of this struggle now.
It was always the
fragility of the struggle,
but back in the revolutionary
era, you could call it out.
Like today, it feels like we
just have to be mute about it
and then just,
like, smile as we go
through the scanner and
people, like, let us sit in.
And be grateful that we
got admission to a cage
so that we can do some
good deeds, as opposed
to dismantling the cage.
ARYA SERENITY: I've got
something to say, but go ahead.
KRISTEN MAYE: I'm going
to let that marinate.
ARYA SERENITY: Yeah, OK.
KRISTEN MAYE: Yeah,
these are questions
that we kind of
collected from our group,
so I'm trying to
stay the script.
But also, I have
my own questions,
and maybe I'll follow up later.
So the question in front
of me is, "What does it
mean to be thinking or talking
or learning about issues
of the prison-industrial
complex and carcerality
in an academic setting?
What practices, if
any, can/must must we
undertake to
reconcile developing
an intellectual understanding
of the Prison-Industrial Complex
when people are affected
by the PIC as we speak?"
I'd also like to maybe add to
that question a little bit.
The question is
interested in what
it means to be thinking about
the prison in the context
of the university, and I am
curious, as a black studies
scholar, if there is a
particular vantage or insight
or any conceivable possibility
of thinking about black studies
as an intellectual
project emergent
around the revolutionary
era that we might not say
is doing the same thing
that it was at that moment.
But you know, are
there dispositions
or postures or
openings, possibilities,
in that mode of study
within the university,
or shall we kind of
theorize the prison
and the university as
similar kind of formations
of the state?
JOY JAMES: OK.
So, I'm in the
university, right?
And I'm a product
of the university.
So in the university
today kind of thing.
I did share earlier
how I got introduced
to prison studies or the
prison-industrial complex.
Maybe briefly share it here.
I was an activist.
I was in grad
school, and I barely
showed up for my classes.
I don't recommend
that to anybody.
But I was on the streets
a lot in New York City,
and a lot was going
on between the police.
You know, there's a ton of
stuff-- violence against women,
rape culture, AIDS.
You know, everything was
going on, so why go to school?
And I met Davis through
political organizing,
not through the academy.
So that completely
changes my perspective.
Like I don't do
celebrity culture.
I don't ask for autographs.
I've been with Davis where
I have to, like, tell people
to line up, where they get their
autographs and stuff like that.
But it never dawned on me,
having seen people beaten up
in the streets or,
like, fight the police
on the Brooklyn Bridge.
And then have teenagers with,
like, number nine irons,
and I know they're
not golfers, so I just
assume they got
them from the cops
on Staten Island behind us.
Like, so the police
are a threat in front
of you, and these
black teens, who
are being paid by the police
to threaten you from behind.
It just-- it's incongruous.
When you go to the academy,
it's another world.
It's another universe.
Like, it doesn't translate
because there is never
that level of physical threat.
I mean, violence does
happen on the academy,
but it's considered to
be privatized-- you know,
sexual assault, different
types of aggression.
And you go to the
cops for it, or you
go through your
counselors or something.
So having met Davis
outside of the academy
made me look at the emergence of
abolitionism inside the academy
with a lot of skepticism.
Because I'm like,
what is it doing here?
You know?
And Davis asked me to
do the prototype of crit
resist at CU Boulder,
and I spoke a little bit
about how much that cost.
It was more money than
they'd ever spent.
They called me in to
justify that expenditure.
I was working for free with
white radical students who
the FBI wanted to talk to
because of the Earth Liberation
Front, and they thought
their friends were in it,
with black working
class students who
were first generation and
just hated being in Boulder
because the anti-black animus
just radiated from everywhere.
But they formed a coalition
to do this conference,
the largest ever.
Davis was the keynote.
All these people flew in,
and that was the prototype.
But in the process of seeing
what the academy did with that,
it was very off-putting.
You know, the money.
They asked me to come in
and justify the money.
I told them, keep the money.
I'm going to bed.
I'm not coming in.
And they gave them money
anyway because they
wanted that we do prison stuff.
We do abolition.
We have Davis.
We have a former
political prisoner.
We have a celeb.
You know, it doesn't mean they
didn't care about the people.
It just meant the
way in which they
were going to make connectors
to anonymous poor people who
were incarcerated
was going to be
through this kind of
intellectual production
and consumption
that needed a star.
Right?
And once that unfolded, the
radical politics, for me,
began to disappear.
So I did the first anthology.
It was not here.
It was States of
Confinement from Boulder,
organized with Palgrave to
send 50 into the prisons.
The Panther wrote back and
said, thank you very much.
This book has nothing
to do with our lives.
And that started
about five years
to a decade of anthologizing
political prisoners at Brown,
with Brown students, with
undergrads who are brilliant,
who probably didn't do their
classwork the way they should
have been doing it
because for them,
this is a political endeavor.
So I trust whatever
surprises the academy.
I don't trust anything that's
on the menu of the academy.
That doesn't mean I
won't work with it,
but it's the disruptor
that I find that brings
in new energy, new thoughts.
It's once it's on
the menu, you know?
You just select what is
already preset for you,
and there is nothing
about the academy that
has revolutionary desire.
And if abolitionism is
about revolutionary desire,
then you're caught
in a contradiction.
Like you do the
best work you can,
but you understand,
because it's capital,
that capital likes markets,
and capital trades in markets.
And this becomes
another item to trade.
Then you're very protective.
I think the way that you guys
are envisioning it and doing it
here-- and there's
other places--
people are innovating
to protect so
that the authenticity and
the purpose remains intact
and it's not a photo op.
But again, my origins
are not the academy,
so I always kind of
stand back and want more,
even if I'm not going to get it.
KRISTEN MAYE: Yeah.
I appreciate that.
ARYA SERENITY: I'm just
digesting what you said.
So I'm just eating it up
real quick, all right?
I'm going to blend
two questions.
You use the phrase
"hyper-intellectual"
to describe George Jackson.
What do you mean by that phrase?
And in George
Jackson's own writings,
he uses the word "third-world."
And a lot of my peoples inside--
we used to, well, we
third world, you know?
They made it a thing, like
a badge of honor, you know?
Because it represents
the struggle.
But I wanted to know,
we wanted to know
on a larger scale, what
is a third-world nation
in a first-world country?
JOY JAMES: Besides a colony?
ARYA SERENITY: How
do you describe,
how do you define that?
JOY JAMES: Yeah,
that's why I wanted
to start with Kathleen even
though she wasn't in the title.
And increasingly, I just
keep coming back to Kathleen.
I mean, the way I read
Kathleen, it's a colony.
Right?
And so is it going to look
like a colony in which
the elites drift
towards structure
and just reinforce structure?
You know, the elites of a
colonized caste or race, right?
Or can it look like something
where we organically
organize to redefine structure?
And I think it's more--
I think in a
competitive culture,
the point is to be exceptional,
like the first black this
or the first brown that
or the first trans this
or the first woman this,
et cetera, et cetera.
And that exceptionality
is supposed
to be protection, right?
But the people I meet
who are the first
don't seem to be particularly
happy in the spaces they
occupy.
They feel to be
pressed on all sides.
And as much compassion
as I have for them,
I try not to forget about
class because then I
can't think about poor people.
Like, my mind has
so much bandwidth.
Like, if my students--
and they really have
real needs and desires,
and they're really struggling.
And they feel
persecuted, and they
are persecuted
because this is just
the nature of institutions--
right?-- That are
built historically.
Well, you know.
You do the whole slavery
and social justice,
so you know what it's built on.
That is real
suffering, but so are
people living in NYCHA
or public housing
with, like, lead paint
and mold and rats
and dealing with the NYPD.
Or homeless people
or trans people.
There's a caravan of
60 trans folks that
came across the
border, and you know,
Trump just said he
doesn't do asylum.
And one of Tony's former
students from Brown
is now an attorney and
works with big oil and gas,
but he pro bono
does all this work.
Well, they've been
tortured or mutilated--
you can clearly see that
they need assistance,
but they banned medical help.
They keep changing
the rules, when
the attorneys can come meet.
And that, for me, is
a level of reality
that has to co-exist
with people who
have more material privilege
and who are suffering, too.
But because our spaces
tend to be isolated,
the suffering among
the privileged
tends to dominate these other
stories, or these other stories
become like trauma
discourse or trauma porn.
You just get overwhelmed by
it, and you turn off the news
or you stop reading,
you know, the news feed.
So I went with Kathleen
because I think Kathleen
does what Angela does not do.
I think, when I listen to
the discourse of Angela
and abolitionism, there's
like a promissory note, right?
That if we do
restorative justice,
if we keep staying
with the program,
we're going to have some
kind of evolutionary moment
and move to a better place.
And if you look online, she has
a forum with Michelle Alexander
at Union Theological Seminary.
Because Michelle Alexander is an
attorney, taught in law school.
And she finally said,
you can't reform this
after she did The New Jim Crow.
So she left law school, and
now she's in a seminary.
And so she asked Angela, is
this an article of faith?
Is this religious
faith that stuff
is going to get better, that
abolitionism is going to work?
And there's this pause because
there's no answer to it.
So the struggle
now is aspiration.
It's now desire.
It's now important things
like community care,
but that does not directly
confront predatory structure.
And that's the missing piece.
And that's why I have
to go back to Kathleen,
who even talks about class
divisions among black people.
OK?
So much of the
narrative I found today
is like, we have
to stick together.
And then we have to have
coalitions with everybody.
And I'm like,
what's the ideology?
And then it's like,
intersectionality.
And I'm like, no,
that's additive.
Intersectionality-- like
gender, race, class, sexuality.
I've never heard
anybody add ideology
into intersectionality.
Because I want to know,
like, if you're a feminist.
Are you a liberal?
Are you a radical?
Because if I don't know
your ideological marker,
we're not going to work together
just because we have precarity.
Because the material
conditions are not
going to be changed
just by precarity.
They're going to be
changed by people
who actually have blueprints,
and that's what we're missing.
I feel like the blueprints,
they didn't work.
You know, well, they
don't work if the FBI
comes in, like Fred
Hampton, and kills you,
like, at 4:00 in the morning.
Or they don't work if Chris
Hani gets assassinated
in South Africa in the case that
it's a communist alternative
to Nelson Mandela.
Or they don't work if
Martin Luther King--
you know, yes, they don't work
because you have these pauses.
But the violence against
us is not going to stop.
I mean, this time, they
just burned the archives,
and then they burn the churches.
And then they do--
the violence will never stop
unless we have a blueprint.
And it feels to me
that the academy
wants to study the phenomenon
but will not offer a blueprint
and will not greenlight
anybody who takes the risk
to try to draw up a blueprint.
And that's where I see Davis
has promissory discourse
or Alexander's
retreat into seminary.
Being the primary black feminist
architects is not delivering.
Like I'm grateful.
I teach the work, et
cetera, et cetera.
I'm sorry.
It's not funny, but--
I have to stop.
[CHUCKLES]
[NERVOUS LAUGHTER]
I mean, like, who--
I mean, come on.
I mean, I talk this
way to my 10-year-old.
Mom's got it.
Don't worry about it.
Everything's going to be OK.
And then I stay up all night
because I can't figure out how
everything's going to be OK.
You lie to children
for a reason.
You don't lie to adults.
ARYA SERENITY:
Now, that's right.
JOY JAMES: Unless what?
SPEAKER 1: Unless you're the
kind of person that does.
JOY JAMES: Unless you give
narratives that are promissory.
KRISTEN MAYE: The last
kind of provocation--
then I'll open it up because
I don't want to predominate--
but in reading, you talk about
the framework of the expanding
carceral state and the
shrinking free world.
And when you
discussed how there's
got to be a situation of the
kind of explicit violences
that meet with
residents of NYCHA
and the folks who
are deprived basic,
you know, human necessities
at the border, that
needs to be situated
and contextualized
next to the suffering of folks
with more material privileges,
as well.
I guess I'm interested
in thinking about
this framework of the
expanding carceral state
and the shrinking free world
as enabling us to think outside
of the prison as the
paradigmatic and exceptional
site of suffering, period.
Does that invite us
to think analytically
about the suffering that
constitutes the larger world,
or is there something missing?
JOY JAMES: Yeah.
I appreciate that question.
I think I want to go
back to the anthologies
we were doing at Brown and
why political prisoners were
so important.
I think that political
captives have answers
to the questions
you're posing to me,
but nobody seems to read
them closely or sufficiently.
You read them, like,
in somebody else's book
that's talking about them.
You read them through
filters, right?
I think the answers that
are being posed to academics
should be the answers that
are posed to revolutionaries.
Or the questions.
Do you see what I'm saying?
See, my argument as an
academic for somebody
who's been in this
game and who's
going to play it a little
longer and then retire
is that the structure
itself blocks
a certain type of clarity.
So we were at Foucault Circle,
the conference at Stonehill
over the weekend, and I had
to do my talk, whatever,
and it's about how Foucault
took his conceptual ideas
from George Jackson
and Angela Davis.
And so Heiner writes
about that in City Lights,
and then I push it a
little further, right?
Because I say that the
first critique of Foucault--
'96, and it's not perfect--
but the one that appears in
Resisting State Violence--
I got that from black activist
women at Medgar Evers College,
right?
And then after I did that in
Angela's grad course, where
we studied Foucault,
Angela wrote a critique
where she talked about
elimination, that Foucault
couldn't deal with a
convict prison lease system
along with racial erasure.
Like, our absence is
not just our absence,
it's also the absence
of death in some way.
Like, if you write black people
and Muslims and brown people
out of history, you sanitize
how violent history is.
It's not just that we disappear.
It's like, you miss not just
the slave but the slave catcher.
Right?
And if the slave
catcher disappears,
then you don't understand
function, right?
And then the whole divide
between the free world
and not-so-free world--
I mean, for me, I'm
interested in function,
if that makes sense.
Right?
And so Davis and then
Heiner and others-- well,
one of the threads
I was thinking of
is, all of the writing
that we're doing,
even Foucault when he wrote The
Mass Assassination of George
Jackson-- and the first
English translation
was in Warfare in the American
Homeland-- all of that
was sparked by activism,
including activism on campus.
Like, students who should have
been studying for their exams
were trying to organize
a conference at Brown
on political prisoners, or they
were editing the content that
was going in the
anthology and their names
are by the bios and
things like that.
That you're performing
your role in the structure,
but you carve out
time for yourself
to create another role
that's tied to activism,
and that's where
insight comes from.
Because insight
comes from action.
It does not come from text.
Obviously, we read the
text because that's
part of our training.
That's our skill set.
But I'm making the argument that
the ideas that are grounded,
that are novel,
are experientially
made as art in survival mode.
Right?
And that connector
is what we've lost.
So you get the ideas of
George through Foucault,
and it's OK to teach
Foucault in the classroom.
But it's not OK to teach
George Jackson, which
makes no sense whatsoever,
since if you want a genealogy,
you go back to George
to get Foucault.
Discipline and Punish?
That comes from Jackson.
And you could say
from Davis, too,
but for me Jackson was
Davis's captive maternal.
He was a nurturer,
and he was also scary.
Because I'm uncomfortable
with that level of violence,
but I don't want to act like
an ostrich and pretend like it
doesn't exist in the world.
And I don't want
to tell people who
are marked for assassination
what they should and should not
do, but it's not even here.
Like, what is our
discourse in Yemen?
What is our discourse about the
Rohingya and the Buddhists in--
you know, militias in Myanmar.
What is our discourse about--
like, our discourse
from an empire
that is really good at
violence, its citizenry
is really not so skilled in
articulating an analysis of it.
So even if we have our projects,
if the depth of our analysis
is like skiing on top
and not deep sea diving,
then what we produce in
the world is superficial.
And that sounds harsh,
but so is dying in prison.
I don't know if that--
KRISTEN MAYE: So we'll open
it up now for questions,
and folks can speak
to each other,
as well as to Professor James.
And speaking openly.
And we have Sophie in the
back with a microphone.
SOPHIE KUPETZ: Sorry.
Cross the room.
AUDIENCE: This was a provocative
and exceptional talk.
I guess my question
is, so there seems
to be a kind of
unspecified tension
in your paper between
abolitionism and abolition
democracy.
Right?
So abolitionism--
I take you to mean
sort of straightforwardly
the abolition
of the prison-industrial
complex.
But abolition democracy
is a much more sort
of capacious term in that
it proceeds from the premise
that the condition
of possibility
for democratic self-government
in the United States
was lynching, dispossession
of native people.
Right?
Colonialism, imperialism,
that sort of thing.
So I'm wondering if you could
sort of specify analytically
the sort of relationship
between the two.
How exactly are they
sort of working together?
JOY JAMES: Yeah, that's
a great question.
I can try.
It's not going to work.
I see abolition democracy
not as a utopian endeavor--
I mean, I was talking
about blueprints, right?
There's a practicality to it.
But one of my problems remains.
I don't see a sufficient
critique of what we're facing.
Does that make sense?
Like, if abolition democracy
undoes the genocidal logic--
you know use Dylan Rodríguez
or other people's language--
of this present formation,
then obviously that's a good
that I support and I pursue.
I still maintain
that we would not
get anywhere near
abolition democracy
unless we go through the state.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
JOY JAMES: Well, I don't
know how you do it.
But I mean--
I don't want to
say "old-school."
I don't want to
dismiss my thought
and try to be cute up here or
anything like that, you know?
Too old to be cute
about anything.
But as I said before, having
grown up in a military family,
I think from an early
age, I understand
the utility of violence.
It's utilitarian.
Why else have it unless
it worked, right?
It's something that
will not wither away.
It's not going to
dissipate because we
have good ideas
or good intentions
or want to live in peace.
If I tracked the
trajectory we're on now--
and I'm finding that
liberals are like, oh,
is this the end of democracy,
and they're having, you know,
PBS specials and NPR--
whatever.
You know, it's just sort
of like they just woke up
about their precarity, right?
Their vulnerability, right?
But if it was--
you already know
what I'm saying.
Like, we we've already
been through genocide,
and then we've gone through
genocide with genocide
being popularized again.
And that was supposed
to be a cautionary tale,
like genocide is bad.
Don't do it anymore.
That cautionary
tale didn't hold.
The elites did not agree
with that narrative,
and now you have the largest--
the US probably has the
largest armed underground
white supremacist
movement in the world.
And in the old days,
like when I was younger
and we were organizing,
the whole thing
about the biblical aspect
of that and the rapture
was that Jesus wouldn't come
back until the time was ready.
The new interpretation
of it is, Jesus
asked for an ethnic cleansing
before Jesus will come back.
They've, like, upped the scale
in some really interesting
ways.
And I don't see
the progressives--
I see the expansion of
heart and compassion.
I don't see a counter
to organized terror,
which the state will look
the other way as it unfolds.
Like, we were in
the Foucault moment
and Terrence said the
archives burned in Highlander,
and I hadn't heard it.
And I was like--
you know, in the panel.
And then, so when I came
up afterwards, I was like,
there wasn't even a murmur.
Like in another era, if you
were told that terrorists burned
down your archives of
liberation, we would be like,
oh, lunch break.
We're going to
meet in this room,
and we're going
to plan this out,
and we're moving in some way.
A statement, a protest, a moment
of silent meditation, prayer.
There was nothing.
It was just like, oh, yeah.
That-- whatever.
And it's next panel.
So I love the idea of
what the future could be.
I will not see that future.
I will not live long enough
to watch it materialize.
I doubt my daughter
will, either.
And so for me, I'm like, I
just want to be utilitarian.
Like, what is efficient?
And if the most efficient is
to call out violence and demand
a critique of it rather
than this promissory note--
I keep coming back to
promissory note, which
I think is different from King.
When King did that last talk--
"I may not get there with
you, but I will see you
on the other side."
that was from the
point of, like,
I'm about to walk
into martyrdom,
and that was a
transcendent moment.
That is very different
from the pragmatic politics
of book publication
and building narratives
about reform and progress when
you're dealing with fascists.
Does that make sense
at all, or not?
I did the political
prisoner book
because not only did they say
this was a waste of our reading
time, and then I felt bad and
felt I had to anthologize--
I did the anthologies,
which is like--
10 years is a long time
to anthologize folks.
Right?
You never get real credit
because it's like, oh,
she can't really write a book.
She just, like, edits, right?
I did the anthologies
because they had been to war,
and I think people who go to war
really have clarity of sight.
I don't trust anybody
else, not for that level
of clarity of sight.
You can write whatever you want.
Unless you've been to
war, I don't trust you
because you don't know
the nature of defense.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: Yeah, Sorry.
Just a quick question.
Earlier-- I think the second
question in the panel--
they're trying to-- the question
was how to really connect
struggles in the prison to more
radical organizing on campus.
And I think I want
to take that question
and just kind of put it out
further and really ground--
or ask how struggles in the
prison can be used as a basis
to really rebuilding that
revolutionary vanguard party
that the BPP once stood for.
And kind of in
asking that question,
I allude to Boots Riley and
like Sorry to Bother You
and really just
trying to figure out
how to really drive a thorough
line from the prison space
to the open space.
And really bringing
out and drawing out
that protracted struggle.
So how can we as people
acting as neoliberal subjects
in this neoliberal
capitalist landscape really
be involved in
prison organizing,
not just eliminate that kind
of organizing to students
who have this kind of thing,
this idea of having free time
and being more fluid and
being able to move around
and being involved
in that type of work?
JOY JAMES: So I'm
so I'm going to go
talk a little bit
about the past and then
come back to the moment
that you're talking about.
For me, it was corresponding
with the incarcerated
and listening to what they said.
So when I was first
doing the anthology here,
it wasn't just
with the Panthers.
It was everybody.
I corresponded with
Leonard Peltier.
I mean, imprisoned
intellectuals.
It's multi-ethnic,
multiracial, even
though I'm talking primarily
about black revolutionaries.
But it was the
Berrigans, who are
former priests, the pacifists,
who said for the conference
at Brown, link it
with shock and awe.
Because Bush was
about to invade Iraq
under the pretense of
weapons of mass destruction.
And spark a genocide in Iraq,
basically near-genocide,
and destabilize the Middle East.
Right?
And so the very fact that people
inside think intellectually
and can come up with
their own ideas--
like, you know, ask
them what they think
is possible and
permissible or useful.
That sort of created
a whole other template
to the conference here at Brown.
And it also had another radical
or revolutionary edge to it
because I think when
it started to be
a critique of the war,
that's when we, you know,
saw pushback, like
from governance.
Right?
Like, what are you doing?
Like, as long as
it's a niche issue,
like, oh, this is
your little pool.
You just swim in that pool, and
you do your good deeds there.
But once you start
doing the connectors--
like, we're not just talking
about domestic policy,
we're talking about
foreign policy.
We're not just talking
about war inside a prison,
we're talking about--
"military-industrial complex"
is a phrase that led to the
prison-industrial complex,
right?
That we're making these links.
Then for me, then,
you're in the midst.
And you know, when I
was saying, like, I
trust people who
go to war, people
who link domestic policy
with foreign policy--
it doesn't mean
you're militarist--
and desire the analytical
skills to do so
are now in confrontation
with the state.
Because that was what
the Panthers did.
It was an international
imagination that they sparked.
And that's why
Kathleen was essential.
Like, I was starting
with Angela,
and I was like, oh, I'm going
to keep coming back to Kathleen.
Why?
Because Kathleen was
moving all over the world
Angela was in Europe to study.
Then she went back to Europe
once she was exonerated, right?
And met with Foucault
and gave talks
and wrote and lectured, right?
And organized in some ways.
Kathleen was moving as an
international emissary,
like in Vietnam,
in China, and all
places they were engaged
in revolutionary struggle,
learning about that.
And of course, the captives
can't formally do that,
but their minds do
that all the time.
George was influenced
by Ho Chi Minh.
The whole notion of George
as a dragon philosopher--
that comes from Ho Chi Minh.
"When the prison doors
are open, the dragon
will be released," right?
And the thing about
the dragon, right?
You want to you don't want
to live next door to them.
You don't want to have
them in your co-op.
You know, it's just like, nobody
wants to be around a dragon.
But if they have a
function, you have
to understand the function.
Or you simply have to
discredit their very being.
This is the thing.
Dragons are made because
they're tortured in dungeons.
Then, like, point to me
who the torturers are.
Then I'm in confrontation
with the state.
Tell me who funded the
death squads in El Salvador.
You know the answer.
I'm in competition with--
you know, like this
whole thing about,
they're coming over the border.
Part of the reason they're
coming over the border is--
I grew up on Fort
Benning, Georgia.
You know, School of
the Americas was there.
I don't know what
my dad was doing.
But he was an officer.
They trained death squads for
El Salvador and Guatemala,
and then decades
later, you have people
like, the violence
is off the hook.
We can't-- yeah, because you
had genocides that the US paid
for, right?
And I think we
work in our areas,
but the prison was never it.
The prison was never
the revolutionary site.
George was in the
prison, but George
thought as a free man engaged
in international revolutionary
struggle.
That's the thing
about the abolition.
It was never about the prison.
It was about empire
in the world.
But you can't say
"empire in the world."
You can't be anti-capitalism
now in a capitalist system.
You can't be anti-imperialism.
Nobody even uses that
language anymore.
I don't even know what
language people use anymore.
But the language of the
revolutionary was freedom,
and the impediment
to freedom was--
you can say "racial capital,
like [INAUDIBLE],, whatever.
But the impediment to
freedom was the military,
was the CIA, was the DEA, was
the FBI, was the Pentagon.
And taking on those structures
would shorten your time
in the free world.
But people still took
on those structures,
and I say, at
least as academics,
we have the intellectual space
to analyze those structures so
that our writing itself
becomes a confrontation.
We're not going to
engage in physical acts
against the state.
The only question is,
will we critique it,
or will we leap over
it to sort of this--
the goal is on the
other side the state.
The state's not going
to let you pass.
They've already made that clear.
Whatever we create, they own.
Whatever we create will
become a commodity.
It will not be freedom.
So you would have to eliminate
the state out of the equation,
and nobody knows how to do that,
in part because nobody's even
thinking about that
in public space
because it's not
permissible thought.
AUDIENCE: I think--
just a quick add-on--
you mentioned that it's
good that we listen
to people who are in the mix
of it, like actually in prison,
struggling actively
against the state.
And to re-buttress that,
you bring up Ho Chi Minh,
and I think--
obviously, we're living here,
like in America, as exists--
there's not a cadre marching
through the countryside
getting ready to go through
prisons and open up the gates
and let people out.
But I just kind of
wonder, is there more
that laypeople, people
out in the streets,
can do to more align themselves
with the people inside taking
out the measures
against the state,
like taking on a specific
political ideology alignment?
You bring up Ho Chi Minh and
that kind of alludes to Mao
and alludes to, like,
Marxist-Leninism,
so I just kind of wanted to see,
I suppose, your take on that.
JOY JAMES: I think there's
a couple things, right?
I think, one, that people
who want to get out--
we need to be more effective
in mounting parole.
So Jalil Muntaqim has been in
for 48 years in New York, was
in the Black Panther
Party and the BLA.
He's already, you know,
expressed his regrets
for whatever acts or actions
were taken in the past.
I mentioned earlier
the NYPD's position.
Even if the parole board
says you should get out,
if you ever fought
with the police,
if you ever shot at the police,
if you ever shot a policeman,
you die in prison.
So the police believe that
they override the courts,
that blue lives are more
important than anybody else's
lives.
Right?
So I think a direct
confrontation--
and it doesn't have to be
big C. It could be little C.
But a pushback against police
unions and the influence they
have on parole boards, to
mount more effective campaigns
on governments--
like governors--
for people to be
released, to have community
control over the police.
And actually, you know, there's
just a simple logic in this.
The moment you start
doing any of this,
they will start
pushing back, and you
will end up in a confrontation.
So it's like, do
anything effective,
and you will be meeting
state structure.
Do something that's
not effective,
and they'll give you
a very long leash.
So there are different
ways to plan and mobilize.
But for me, the
guardians of the state
or the police, the
federal police, the state
and the local-- and
as I said earlier,
it reminds me of when Freddie
Gray's spine was severed
in police custody,
and then Obama
had just put in Loretta
Lynch to replace Eric Holder.
And the first thing out of both
their mouths, Obama and Lynch,
were "thugs," and then
they walked it back.
And then, Obama showed
contrition, and said,
these families need more
help, like better techniques
or tactics in
raising their kids.
Nothing about the
police, like, needed
to be completely rethought.
But then, he said something
that for me was just telling,
and then I was like,
OK, now I can move on.
He said, I cannot
federalize the police,
which is not a standard
verb in American language.
And what he was saying-- he
can't control the police.
And if the President of the
United States cannot control
the police to keep them from
doing racist killings and rapes
and he just admits it, like,
to the public, then OK, then,
I mean--
I will vote, and I will
organize, you know,
in the next campaign.
But my primary in energy is
not directed towards anything
that's ineffectual.
Trump will not.
He will enable the
police to engage
in more violence with impunity,
but the good president just
said he was ineffectual.
So then, like, there
has to be a third way.
And so the architects
of abolitionism
would be the people who
found the third way,
not the people who
continued to petition
to the state for redress.
Because the state has
made it very clear,
whether it's a Democrat
or a Republican,
they have no intention
of undoing this.
They can live with a
predatory structure
because it's profitable.
So the new architects will
have to design another one.
I will not agree to the
terms of the contract.
And that-- you
know, we could talk
about an imaginary fugitive.
You can't really talk
to incarcerated people
about this stuff
because then they get
put in the hole and whatnot.
But there's the practical
stuff you do day to day,
and you don't even
have to ask me about it
because you already
know what you do.
Because it's local.
But what is going to be
national and international
is what will undo the
current structure.
And that means an architect
with a new blueprint.
And I've yet to see anyone
on the national stage,
particularly who
functions as a celebrity,
to wield that kind of
intellectual capacity.
I find it from the
political prisoners who
were pulling 48 to 50 years.
I found it in Erica
Garner before she
died, just from grief and
poor health and poverty.
I find it in these spaces where
it's not supposed to exist.
I don't find that intellectual
capacity among the elites.
So you know, I mean, this is
where we work, we operate.
But if we think this is where
the political imagination is
for freedom, I would think that
that would be an odd thought.
So I'm not blowing
your question off.
I'm just trying to be
as honest as I can.
KRISTEN MAYE: So Sophie's
going to take three more
questions before we close.
And Arya, do you have--
SOPHIE KUPETZ: I
see three hands up,
so we're just going to quickly
ask that you say your questions
and Professor James can respond
to all of them in closing.
So we'll take them all
and then let her respond.
KRISTEN MAYE: We're going to
just start up here, though,
because Arya has one question.
ARYA SERENITY: Not
so much a question,
but you said you trust the
people who have been to war.
And it's not so much
even a question, really,
but a statement to
everybody here in
regards to readings and stuff
that's unfiltered, uncensored
from peoples on the
inside besides being
able to correspond with them
and find their information
on computers and whatnot.
And just getting
a dialogue going.
There are old archives
within the computer
that I found myself that
I had while I was inside
that, like you said, you
would go to the hole for
or sent to high securities
because you can't have
that stuff, because it
liberates one's mind
and ends up radicalizing people.
But articles or periodicals
like Nation Time and Crossroads,
new African liberation
literature, even
the Malcolm X grassroots
movements that
have articles and stuff like
that, their own newspapers,
from political prisoners
that are inside, Mumia
or Mutulu Shakur before--
I believe he passed away--
JOY JAMES: Mutulu
is still alive.
He's in California.
ARYA SERENITY: Sundiata Acoli,
a lot a lot of literature
out there that speaks
to the very question
that Roro had in
regards to having
the streets and the prisoners,
you know, combine and build
those cadres, build that
secure communications where
you can't have that
type of conversation
in a setting like this.
And like Malcolm X said, you
know, we are amongst enemies.
There are enemies here.
You may not know it.
We may not know it.
It may not be here.
They may not be here, but
like I've always been trained,
we always have to pretend
or act like they are here.
So when it comes to speaking
about sensitive stuff like that
or reading sensitive
material like that,
there are places where you can
go and get that raw, real--
real right stuff, you
know what I'm saying?
And then intellectualize it
within your little cadres
or groups, study groups,
where you can then
determine whether you
want to take action
or not or however that
action may be defined.
But it's there, so there's
no excuse for nobody
not being or saying that
they can't get active.
You can get active.
Just pick up a pen
and write a brother,
you know what I'm saying?
It's just as simple as that.
That's all I got to say.
JOY JAMES: Yeah, I would
say, like, for Jalil,
he was teaching a black
studies course inside--
Muntaqim-- like on
the Black Panthers.
And he mentioned
gangs in the course,
about the stuff that
happened decades ago, right?
Because the party
ended in the '70s.
And he ended up with
broken ribs from the guards
and being put in
solitary for educating,
like just for teaching.
And so he asked for
a solidarity movement
where teachers outside would
support the right of prisoners
to teach, inside, their
own histories-- history
of Chicano struggle,
of Latino struggle,
Native American struggle,
of poor white working-class
struggle, of queer
trans struggle.
We couldn't mobilize that.
And it doesn't mean,
like, bad people,
but academics are really
busy, and maybe they
didn't understand that
the people inside who
were educators were
also their peers.
Like, they were mostly
the victims who we rescue.
They were not our
intellectual comrades.
Whatever the new
blueprints will be,
they will not look like some
blueprints from 50 years ago.
But whatever the
blueprints will be,
they will have to confront
with a world in which fascism
is on the rise globally,
not just in the US.
Like in the Philippines,
authoritarian movements
in Europe, Turkey.
I mean, I don't
know what Erdogan is
going to do about the election.
But authoritarian
movements are on the rise.
So that whole template of
the evolutionary democracy
that was supposed to stabilize?
It didn't stabilize.
And so it is not a
national struggle.
It is not a prison struggle.
It is an international struggle.
That said, the prison
abolition is just
a microcosm and an
international struggle
against the rise of
authoritarian rule,
billionaire capitalism,
climate control,
which is going to push
people either into deserts
or into cities.
And everything is, in
its own way, dissolving.
And a blueprint would
have to figure out
how to stabilize and be able
to plant something and grow
community and take
care of people
without, as people
said earlier today,
reproducing the harm that's
already been inflicted on us.
And that, for me, is brilliant.
I mean, your minds
are brilliant.
So I mean, like, get a
task worthy of your mind.
ARYA SERENITY: And your heart.
JOY JAMES: And your heart.
SOPHIE KUPETZ: Do
you want to go first?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
So thanks again for coming
and delivering this up.
I don't know.
I have various versions, but
I'll just keep it to one.
There's a book of
yours that doesn't
seem to get as cited as often
or as drawn upon or built upon.
So I'm wondering, what is the
relevance between the ideas
that you were speaking about
Transcending the Talented
Tenth and the stuff that you're
talking about now as it relates
to, you know, the repression
of revolutionary tendencies?
So I don't know.
I'm curious about that.
JOY JAMES: That's helpful.
So the woman Charlene Mitchell--
black communists
out of Chicago--
one of the few black
communist intellectuals,
just working-class,
came up the ranks.
She was the woman who recruited
Angela to the Che-Lumuma
Communist Party in 1968, '69.
She's the one who told me to go
to the Schomburg Library in New
York City and look up Du Bois
but only focus on the Talented
Tenth.
And if I hadn't had,
like, a working-class--
because my profs never
told me to do that, right?
Point me to the Schomburg
and say, read everything
you can about the
repudiation of elites.
Right?
And so when that work came
out, I think, at some point,
it was better
received because it
was considered to be a liberal
text and a recovery text.
Like, here are black women
that you haven't thought about.
And they made
these contributions
and this contribution.
So that kind of a rise of
a particular black feminism
that's compatible
with liberalism.
But the goal of it, really,
was to follow Charlene,
that if Du Bois first
embraced the notion that
came from white
philanthropists, right?
Who wanted to call the
top 10% of a subjugated
so that 10% could
manage their own people
and keep them in line with
capital, with racial capital,
right?
And if he bought
that idea in 1903
that came from the
American Home Missionary
Society, white philanthropists,
so that Spelman
is named after a Rockefeller,
and Morehouse is named
after white philanthropists.
Right?
So they're paying for these
colleges and institutions
because they're
creating a black elite.
If that is the premise,
that they can manage unrest
by having a lid on the base
that never has enough food,
never has enough dignity,
but you constantly
tell them, if you only
work hard like me,
stay out of trouble like I
did, you put in the hours,
then you can be like me one day.
You know, then that is something
that needed to be critiqued
and that Du Bois
later repudiated it.
Because when he
became radicalized,
and he says at one point--
I can't remember the text--
the only people
who came to his aid
were not property or
affluent black people.
It was the trade unionists.
It was the workers, right?
And the unionists
were militants,
so when he had, like, these
charges-- the House Un-American
Activities
Committee-- these were
the people that came to
his assistance and support.
So what Charlene wanted me
to do was undo or supplement
my academic training by looking
for leadership where it wasn't
supposed to be, and also by
not being invested in how I was
going to try to reinvent
myself as an intellectual,
and I found that helpful.
But then, I also feel that,
even if the work is not
taught as much,
it's the work that
really points to the
revolutionary that
gets disparaged.
Because I'm not-- it's
like, this is the path
to get out of thinking-- like Du
Bois has the PhD from Harvard,
right?
He does Fisk, but then
he needs Harvard, right?
This is the path
to walk away from--
I need to be like Du Bois in
order to make a name for myself
and be useful to my community.
Right?
But there is another
path beyond Du Bois.
This is how I could be
useful to my community
by risking more than I
ever thought I would risk.
And those are the
kinds of paths.
Not to be risk-taking
because I like precarity
or being on the edge.
I'm, like, old.
I don't like any of
that stuff, right?
But if my mind is
going to function,
I need to know
where the light is,
and the light is coming
from these people,
like Erica Garner.
It's just from these
people you don't expect
who have really profound--
not just thinking about
the world, but physical
engagement in it.
And it's not the
physical engagement
that's always
combative, it's also
physical engagement
of loving the world
and loving themselves in it.
And so this brings
me to the last,
is just the captive maternal.
Like, I'm totally
fascinated by the notion
of an ungendered phenomenon
whose generative powers have
been stolen by the state.
But this is the persona
that, if you call them
at 2:00 in the morning
because you're just
crying on the floor
in your bathroom,
they will come over and get you.
Like, this is a captive maternal
that allows your nervous system
to function and for you to show
up in these wretched schools--
and I'm not talking
about this one--
but you know, public
schools or any kind
of schools that denigrate
you and don't give you
a real education or these jobs
where you're laboring in these,
like, factories where you
get damaged or poisoned.
But here's our bind.
We keep our
communities functioning
because we love them.
We will not abandon them,
even when they turn on us,
because we love them, and
the state uses that labor
to stabilize itself.
Because we keep our
communities from going crazy,
just like they kept
us from going crazy.
And that labor is
expropriated by the state.
So now I'm like, so what's
next for the captive maternal?
Like, what's the exit plan?
Like, you're not going to
leave your community behind,
and you're not going to
stop helping and nurturing
and healing.
But every time we stabilize,
they build upon that stability
and enforce another
form of theft--
trauma, time theft, loss--
for productivity to a state that
you find, you know, horrific.
And so, you know, I
mean, Professor Bogues
writes and talks
about marronage.
I mean, other people do.
It's just the exit door.
I'm totally fascinated
about how you tunnel out.
And then, of course, we'd
have to figure, literally,
how to get people out of prison
so that they come with us.
But this may sound weird, but
do you see the beauty in that?
Like, it's an impossible
task, but it's
one completely worthy of you.
ARYA SERENITY: Kind
of spiritualizing it.
JOY JAMES: Yeah, which is
why you're doing it anyway.
KRISTEN MAYE: On that note,
we're going to have to close.
Please join me in thanking
Professor Joy James
for being with us tonight.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much.
