 Thank you so much for conferring upon me the Dr. Honoris Causa. It is indeed a profound honor to accept this degree from Pumper Fabra University. Thank you to the rector, Jaume Casals, and to all of those who have participated in the process as well as in the actual program. I thank the phenomenal performers for such a moving rendition of our struggles for justice in accepting this honorary degree. I am aware that even though I am the individual recipient, the work that has led you to designate me as being worthy of this high honor has never been the work of a lone individual. Thus I feel compelled to acknowledge all those both within and outside the university, including those who were or continue to be incarcerated. Without whose ideas and practices, I would never have come to your attention as a potential recipient of an honorary degree from your university. I also thank you for organizing this beautiful ceremony under the very difficult conditions of a global pandemic, and at a time when you in Catalonia continue your own struggles for justice and equality. While I can only be present virtually at this time, I do look forward to the future possibility of an actual visit to Fabra University. In the remarks I offer you today, I acknowledge the current historical conjuncture as one of great pain and suffering throughout the world. But at the same time, this is a moment of hope and optimism for the future. I refer to the emerging collective consciousness of the fact that we in the contemporary world, we who constitute the human population cohabiting this planet, along with other animal species, are called upon to prevent the conflagration that is inevitable if we do not discover ways of transforming our manner of living on this planet. This planet whose flora whose soil, whose oceans are also suffering as a consequence of the human practices, primarily designed to produce wealth, wealth for a few that coexist with impoverishment of the many in different economic and political contexts. We could all be living fulfilling flourishing lives. But as it stands under current conditions of capitalism, increasing wealth for the few is the foundation for increasing impoverishment of the many. For the first time in human history vast numbers of people in many parts of the world are seriously reflecting on the structural consequences of colonialism and slavery. Those of us who are of African descent here in the Americas constitute the human evidence of the ways in which colonialism and slavery shape the mode of human habitation of the planet. We are the bearers of a legacy of struggle for freedom that is many centuries old. We look at our social economic and political institutions, recognizing the ways in which they literally embody processes that minimize indigenous or black life, seen as either impediments to the production of wealth or as the laboring bodies, capable of generating wealth for the slaveholders. This is a moment of intense suffering, not only because of the direct consequences of the COVID-19 virus, but because the planet is afflicted with this virus at a peak moment of capitalism, at a time when the planet's wealth has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of relatively few people. And at a time when human institutions that should be devoted to the well-being of humans, other animals, and indeed of the earth are subordinated to the needs of capital. Therefore, our health crisis here in the US is a crisis produced by the privatization of health care, and to the fact that empty hospital beds are deemed unprofitable by the global capitalist corporations that now dispense medical care to those who can afford it, that these institutions were gotten rid of, these beds were gotten rid of, and this crisis, such as the one we continue to experience today, not only involves the damage done by the trajectories of the virus, but its intersection with privatized health care, which as we know has proved fatal for many people. I say that this is a moment of hope and optimism. I'm finally acknowledging the entanglement of structural racism within this crisis. In fact, the crisis itself arriving at a time of intense educational efforts both within professionalized institutions like the university, and within the context of social movements and political organizing, helped to promote a collective consciousness of the structural character of racism. Here in the US, racism has been largely treated as an individual defect, as a product of individual attitudes and individually motivated acts of discrimination. The past assumption was that one defeats racism by convincing individuals to transform the way they think about Indigenous and Black people, Latinx and Asian people. However, the recognition that vastly disproportionate numbers of people were dying as a result of the coronavirus, combined with the fact that for many scholar activists, we're calling for an approach to racism that highlights the structures that incorporate and reproduce processes of oppression, that in turn keep people of color in a state of super exploitation and hyper marginalization. Today we look back at the 19th century and think of course slavery should have been abolished. The arguments to abolish slavery were of course compelling. Slavery was immoral, and the very idea of one human being owning another was entirely unethical. But there were also other arguments. Slave labor was not as efficient as wage labor. At the time, there were those who insisted that the institution of slavery in the South was far more humane than the wage slavery of the North. After all, the slave holder had a stake in keeping slaves alive because to brutalize an enslaved human being to death met a decrease in the wealth of the slave holder. In my study, the post slavery convictly system had pointed out that what followed was in many respects worse than slavery. As a matter of fact, some of the titles of the books exploring the convictly system include worse than slavery. And here we are, over a century and a half since the formal abolition of slavery, still dealing with slavery. And here we are, over a century and a half since the formal abolition of slavery. The question of slavery has arisen. And here we are, over a century and a half since the formal abolition of slavery, still dealing with the contemporary ramifications of that institution, and the ways in which racism over determines the institutional and structural make up of our society. While Europeans did not adopt slavery to the extent that it was adopted in the Americas, and what was then considered the new world. European countries relied on the wealth produced by the slave trade, and they benefited from the racial capitalism that was forged at the intersection of colonial invasions, indigenous genocides, and the enslavement of Africans. This current reckoning involves a recognition not only of the ways in which colonialism and slavery created the economic, social and political worlds of the Americas, where slavery provided the recognizable foundation of our histories, but also in Europe and other parts of the world, whose linkages and relations were forged by settler colonialism. Black freedom struggles have never unfolded in a historical vacuum. They've never been about only black people. To point out that there has never been a time in the history of the forced African presence in the Americas where there has not been resistance. And this is true not only in North America, but in the Caribbean, and South and Central America as well. We acknowledge that African descended people have always been in community with people of other ethnic backgrounds. In many instances resistance was enabled by indigenous people and the histories of black and indigenous people became intertwined as scholars like Taya Miles have documented. But we should point out that the feminist movement in fact the mainstream white feminist movement in the US has its historical origins in the movement to abolish slavery. Many white suffragists in the 19th century understood their own predicament by comparing the English common law adoption of Coverture that made married women entirely subject to the power of their husbands to the institution of slavery. Today, when we acknowledge that black lives matter, we are not simply saying that black people deserve justice, equality and freedom. We're pointing out that the positionality of black people in US society is one of the best measures of the meaning of democracy. And of course not only in the US. The current efforts to identify and to begin to dismantle structural racism in policing and prisons and the health care system and education and jobs and housing is a collective effort to ameliorate our society to break down impediments to democracy. Not only for black people but for everyone and not only in this part of the world but globally. I say this because there is a very patronizing way to look at black struggles, as if they only affect people of African descent or more broadly people of color. 21st century abolitionist discourses have emerged as the most radical calls for a better democracy. And that resides not primarily in the fact that we want to dismantle imprisonment and policing, which of course we do. But because we see these institutions as profound impediments to the emergence of radical democratic socialist futures. I argue that evolution is not primarily about the negative process of dissolution and elimination, but rather about clearing space so that we can imagine new institutions, new strategies of addressing issues that have been so over determined by structural racism, that it is not possible to remove the racism without the entire institution collapsing. We have believed in reform for so long that we have persuaded ourselves that reform is the only way. The history of both prisons and the police has always been the history of efforts to reform prisons and the history of efforts to reform the police. But at some point, we have to realize that reform itself is a myth. And that reform has been the very glue that has held these institutions together. If there have been protests directed at these institutions for the entire duration of their histories, doesn't it make sense to try something new. To not separate the development of abolitionist movements and this century from the emergence of a feminism that not only seeks gender equality but also defines itself as anti races and anti capitalist. We are of course familiar with the term intersectionality introduced by legal scholar Kimberly Crenshaw. We do not all know that this logic was introduced long ago by black feminists such as Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell who was mentioned in the law nation. And so this approach to feminism has helped us to issue myopic logics that assume that gender can be separated from racism. And so this approach to feminism has helped us to issue myopic logics that assume that gender can be separated from racism. And so this approach to feminism has helped us to issue myopic logics that assume that gender can be separated from race and class. Because of the way racism has crept into the very logic we rely on, it has been unfortunately assumed by some that we can examine gender by itself that is to say unraised and unclassed. But when this is attempted, the default context is whiteness. And therefore whiteness has informed the development of mainstream feminism without its proponents even realizing the impact of racism. This is the framework we critique as carceral feminism. Much of the work of early black feminisms and radical women of color feminisms consisted of attempts to correct the historical record, pointing out that white women were not the only women who challenged misogyny and patriarchy. And that oftentimes women of color, engage these challenges in a much more complex intersectional way. When second wave women's movements emerge during the latter 1960s in the US, the catalyst was precisely the recognition of the ubiquity of physical and sexual abuse of women. This form of violence has always crossed borders of race and class. But the speakouts and consciousness raising sessions that attempted to break the silence regarding rape and domestic violence were primarily associated with white middle class feminism. The strategy consisted of encouraging women to reveal violence within intimate relationships that had been previously kept secret. How does our view of gender violence change if we look at it from the vantage point of black women or indigenous women or working class and poor women of all racial backgrounds. In the way of beginning to formulate an answer, I would, I would say that we would have to be critical of the way in which middle class white women have come to stand in for all survivors of violence, because of the assumed privatization of the lives of middle class white women and because the private sphere is imagined as a haven of freedom, repressive apparatuses can be called upon to secure that freedom. And this is why we refer to those feminists who believe that more police and more prison terms will protect them we refer to them as carceral feminists. And this is also why we employ the phrase abolition feminism to refer to a robust approach to feminist research and activism that is not afraid to acknowledge its interdisciplinarity. Not only academic and to disciplinarity but a movement based into disciplinarity as well one that is not afraid to attend to race class gender sexuality and environment simultaneously and always recognizing recognizing their linkages and interrelationality. This approach to feminism has also allowed us to understand that abolitionist movements are at their best when they incorporate global recognition and solidarity. And so, as I conclude I say that on within this context we get to follow abolitionist feminist movements in Catalonia in Brazil in Palestine and in South Africa Uruguay in India. And we get to place our campaigns and struggles on the world historical stage by interacting with others who are also striving to create more habitable futures. Thank you.