 Felly, y ddechrau'n lluniau, аdi'r rili, yn rai i'n golygu i fynd i hynny Imani Robinson, unrhyw ffordd o'r ffordd o gael i gael i'r ffordd o'r Gweithgat, i'r gweithgat, y cyrraed, i'r ffordd o'r gweithgat, i'r ffordd o'r gael i'r ffordd o'r gweithgat i gael i'r ffordd o'r gweithgat. Yn 2018, ysgolodau Cymru a Camille Barton yn ei gwybod i gael i'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r of Drug Policy, Racial Justice and Liberation in collaboration with our great colleagues from Release. Imani works to build leadership for racial justice organisers and drug policy reformers to transform the ways we view race and drugs, stigma, criminalisation and punishment and to implement strategies for a more inclusive and radical struggle against the many harms of drug prohibition. Imani, you have the floor. OK, good, you are there. OK, great. OK, so last year I was feeling a bit depressed and I was looking through some photos of myself as a child and I came across this one which, you know, it made me feel better and I hope it's making you feel better because look at this child, wide-eyed child, ready, ready for the world. I think in some ways, you know, we're all born like this, ready for the world, ready for all the things and all the exciting experiences that it will bring us and we believe, we trust in the world, right? We trust that the world tells us things that are true, that what we are asked to believe is normal, is actually normal, but what happened to this child and what happens to all of us is that we start to feel something like fear and I say something like fear because it's a constructed fear. We are told to be afraid of ourselves. We are told to be afraid of our impulses, of what we know to be true, especially when that's not what the state thinks is true, right? So I want us all to kind of close our eyes for a second and put ourselves in a safe place. Think about a place that is safe, that is secure, where we feel protected. Is everybody in that space? So the prison industrial complex normalises the idea that we need police and prisons and the carceral state to keep us safe, but I'm going to guess that none of you thought about that when we closed our eyes, right? None of you thought, oh yeah, that safe space has a police officer in it. That safe space keeps me safe from all of the criminals out there. We're not really thinking about that, but the prison industrial complex makes us think that that is what safety is. How do you keep us safe from violence using violence? How does that make sense? So this talk is about drug policy reform as a racial justice issue, but it's also about our relationship to punishment and the collective commitments we make to punitive models of organising our world, to punitive models of keeping ourselves safe, right? So I'm going to start with what is racism. We kind of know what it is and then we don't know what it is. I'm just going to go through a little brief idea, a kind of suggestion of what racism could be. There are different layers, right? So let's say the first layer is internalised racism. A set of private beliefs, prejudices and ideas that individuals have about the superiority of white people and the inferiority of people of colour. Among people of colour it might manifest as internalised oppression. Among white people it might manifest as internalised racial superiority. Even if we don't kind of articulate it in our heads, that's in our consciousness, right? Interpersonal racism might be the expression of racism between individuals. It occurs when individuals interact and their private beliefs affect their actions, right? Affect their interactions. So this is what we kind of talk about more commonly as racism when somebody is being racist, it means that their private beliefs are affecting the way in which they behave in the world. Then we can think about maybe institutional racism. As a discriminatory treatment, as unfair policies and practices, inequitable opportunities and impacts within organisations and institutions that are based on race, that routinely produce racially inequitable outcomes for people of colour and advantages for white people. So it's not just that black people are oppressed, people of colour are oppressed, but that white people benefit from institutional racism. Individuals within institutions take on the power of the institution when they reinforce these racial inequalities. So then the next might be structural racism, which is different. It's a system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequality. It is a racial bias among institutions and across society. It involves the cumulative and compounding effects of an array of societal factors, including the history, culture, ideology and interactions of institutions and policies that systematically privilege white people and disadvantaged people of colour. As I was introduced, it became clear that I was an organiser, right? So what does it mean for me to organise for all black lives? Organising for all black lives means that we are actively committed to struggling against racist, sexist, heteronormative, homophobic, ablest class oppression and see as our particular task the development of an integrated analysis and practice based on the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. This is so important because the prison industrial complex produces multiple intersectional failures. Intersectionality is more than mapping our own identities, it's not primarily about identity. Intersectionality is about how particular structures make certain identities, the consequence of and the vehicle for vulnerability and state sanction violence. Without this framework, our struggles are not holistic. It's not just about recognising difference, it's up to us to consistently tell our stories, to articulate what difference that difference makes so it's incorporated within all of our struggles. How do we organise for racial justice? It is in part about being attendant to all the ways in which white supremacy and racism structure the world that we live in. The focus of my own racial justice organising has been expansive, but I always come back to abolition. I always come back to the carceral state. And ultimately to our collective relationship to harm and to punishment. Understanding the ways in which drug policy is used to criminalise, incarcerate and kill black people in the UK criminal justice system has made it very clear to me that the reform of drug policy is a central tenet of the fight for black lives. And so part of that intersectionality of fighting for all black lives is also fighting for black people who are drug users, black people who are drug producers, and all black people who are affected by the war on drugs, which is to say all black people whether or not they take drugs. Right? So what does this drug policy look like within an abolition framework? It is the transformation of our relationship to punishment, as we all know it's not about the drugs. In order to... Right, it's not about the drugs. In order to reform drug policy in ways that are beneficial to black people all over the world, it is our relationship to punishment and how this is punctuated by a relationship to racism and white supremacy and to drugs that is crucial to think about and strategise from. What is happening when we try to reform drug policy without a racial justice focus, without a political commitment to abolition and to transformative justice is that we are affecting change for an actually very small group of people. Drug policy reform has the capacity to be impactful in deeply radical and transformational ways, but it won't solve racism and that's not the point of our work here. The point of our work is to destabilise and make visible the ways in which drug policy has always been used as a tool for social and racial control. Our ideas and misconceptions about drugs, about addiction and about criminality mean that derivative moral judgements and racialised logic about criminals as opposed to facts about drugs is shaping drug policy. This is bad for all of us and bad in particular ways for black communities. Our relationship to punishment and our relationship to white supremacy and racism intersect. Criminals deserve to be punished and all black people are criminalised in our minds, in our perceptions already, before the state has a chance to intervene. Kojo Koram, a friend and the editor of the war on drugs in the global colour line, articulates it like this, racism goes further than a politics of different human identities. It actually configures who gets to be human. In this way, black skin signifies a less than human, a lacking in humanity. If we think of drugs as transgressive substances, rather than having the power to transform even the most rational, autonomous, enlightened and sovereign European man into the lazy, violent, depraved figure of the subhuman, and we read this against the fact of blackness, which already signifies a lack of humanity, we get to an awful and intriguing argument that the criminalisation and stigmatisation associated with drugs as an act of transgression is the always already lived reality of black people whether or not they consume drugs. So, white people are criminalised and violently attacked with no empathy for their lives when they transgress what it means to be human. But the category of human, that possibility of innocence is never available to black people in the first place. The most egregious harms of the war and drugs doubly compound the violence of racism through the prison industrial complex, the carceral state and vulnerability to punishment in all spheres of our lives. The war on drugs looks like a news heading that reads, young dad who died after police struggle boasted of drug dealing on Facebook and dubbed himself hard to kill after a 20-year-old, Russia and Charles, dies shortly after being restrained by the police. Footage of this incident which occurred in July last year in East London appeared to show Russia and Charles swallowing a package. This led to a speculation that the package contained illegal drugs which was later proven false despite being widely emphasised in all the media reports. Suspecting that somebody may have swallowed drugs to avoid being reprimanded by the police is not so much the issue. It is the denigration and if you look at the etymology of the word denigration it means to make black, to blacken fully. It is this denigration of Charles' character based on such a speculation that is the problem and one that is certainly not unique to this case. When black working class people die in or after police custody, the media narrative in the immediate aftermath is time after time a character assassination. Russia and Charles' death was justified in public consciousness not only because he was black but because we viewed him as a morally abhorrent character, somebody who not only consumed drugs but sold them to. The message was that this black man was a criminal because he was black and because he was associated with drugs and the logic extended that he therefore deserved his fate. It falls on all of us to consistently push back against this and to speak up for when our drug policies reflect and uphold such deadly narratives. From the moment Russia and Charles came into contact with the police a young black father was shrouded in unfounded criminality and deep-seated anti-black racism. Drug policy without a racial justice agenda means that we are not attendant to all the ways that power operates in our lives. We have to transform our relationship to race, to drugs, to harm, to punishment. Drug policy is not a single issue struggle and as Audrey Lord says, there is no such thing as a single issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives. As black organisers we need to make visible the ways in which drug policy is used as a mechanism to oppress us across so many different organising projects. Drug policy needs to be part of the narrative of racism and racial justice in the UK and all over the world and end to the carceral state and an abolitionist transformation of our relationship to punishment, our understanding of who gets to be human and the power of transgression in reducing us to having no empathy. Must underpin our efforts for reform. The principles of harm reduction taken to the next horizon is the principles of abolition. There is no such thing as crime. There is only harm and how we choose to define it and react to it. I cannot organise for racial justice without speaking about drug policy reform. You cannot organise for drug policy reform without speaking about racial justice.