 Good afternoon. I am delighted to welcome you to the Center for Race and Genders Fall Distinguished Lecture with Angela Davis and Gina Dent. Let me begin with a land acknowledgement. We take a moment to recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of Hu Chen, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo-speaking Aloni people, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Muwekma Aloni tribe and other familial descendants of the Verona Band. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land since the institution's founding in 1868. Consistent with our values of community and diversity, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university's relationship to Native peoples. By offering this land acknowledgement, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the University of California Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples. My name is Letty Vulp and I'm the Director of the Center for Race and Gender. We're truly glad that you can join us and I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome our distinguished speakers for today. Before I introduce them, I want to thank our many wonderful co-sponsors for today's event. African American and African Diaspora Studies, the Center on Race, Sexuality and Culture, Gender and Women's Studies, the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, the Othering and Belonging Institute, the Othering and Belonging Institute's Diversity and Health Disparities Cluster, the Thelma E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, and UC Berkeley's Division of Equity and Inclusion. Let me also thank Elizabeth Trieger, who is providing sign language interpretation for our event. Let me now introduce our speakers. Angela Davis is a world renowned activist and scholar. She has spent decades at the forefront of the quest for economic, racial, gender and social justice. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz after a long career as an educator that brought her to San Francisco State, Mills College, UCLA, Vassar, Syracuse, the Claremont Colleges, Stanford University and Berkeley. She is the author of nine books, including The Meaning of Freedom, Freedom as a Constant Struggle, Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, Our Prison's Obsolete, Lose Legacy and Black Feminism, Abolition Democracy, Women, Race and Class, Women, Culture and Politics, If They Come in the Morning, and of course, her autobiography. Her long standing critique of the prison dates back to her involvement in the campaign to free the Soledad brothers, which led to her own arrest and imprisonment for 18 months and one of the most famous trials in US history before her acquittal. A founding member of Critical Resistance, dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex, she has devoted her life and work to abolition and to freedom struggles around the globe. Gina Dent is a brilliant scholar known for her work on race, feminism, popular culture and visual art. Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness and Legal Studies at UC Santa Cruz and former director of the UC Santa Cruz Institute for Advanced Feminist Research. Gina is a committed activist, scholar and educator who came to Santa Cruz after time teaching at Princeton, Columbia and Berkeley. For over two decades, she has been immersed in the project of researching the prison and in abolition. Gina is the editor of Black Popular Culture with its well-known introduction on Black Pleasure and Black Joy, and the author of several forthcoming works, including the book Anchored to the Real, Black Literature in the Wake of Anthropology and Prison as a Border and Other Essays. She has lectured around the world on critical race studies, critical theory and post-colonialism, and Black feminisms. I was thinking about when I first met Gina and I realized it's almost 30 years ago. Ever since we met as graduate students at Columbia, Gina has inspired me, taught me so much, and been a dear friend. I have been lucky to know Angela almost as long and cherish the time I have been able to spend with a visionary who's thinking has guided so many and who is also so deeply kind a person. I am truly grateful that these two amazing scholars, educators and activists are going to be speaking with us today about their current work on abolition feminism. I will be moderating a conversation with Angela and Gina. We will leave time for questions from the audience, so please do post them on the Facebook page and we will try to address them. Please be aware that we are recording today's event and we'll be posting it on the CRG website. So I'm going to begin with a question about abolition. Your critical work on abolition has completely changed our world in helping us both comprehend the nature of the prison industrial complex in underwriting the social problem it purports to resolve and in helping us imagine the possibility of a world without prisons. Now mobilizing for abolition is focused upon the police, calling for defunding of or an end to the police as an inherently violent and racist institution. Abolition of the police has been implicit in the project of prison abolition, but the movement for police abolition only gained momentum with Ferguson, and then exploded this summer after the horrific murder of George Floyd. I'm wondering if you could think about police abolition and prison abolition separately and together. Some of the questions we might think about are, do the reasons why prisons should be abolished exactly map on to why police should be abolished. And why has abolition of the police only caught so much attention in recent years. So for this question I want to turn first to Angela. And thanks so much for inviting us to participate in this conversation. You know, before I begin to respond to the question that your question is very layered and rich and I don't know whether I'll be able to address all of the aspects of the question but but let me say that there's often a tendency to point to individuals who are responsible for certain ideas and and notions as academics we experiences all the time we out we need an individual for our for purposes of citation, and that often conceals the fact that these ideas reflect collective work collaborative work and vast numbers of people have been involved in the campaigns that have made it possible for the discourse of abolition to enter the mainstream as it has over the last period. Now, as in relation to the question about police abolition in light of prison abolition or vice versa. I would say I don't know whether it's possible to really think one without the other, whether one begins with policing or prisons it's it's virtually impossible to imagine the abolition of the one without the abolition of the other. And as I think back, it seems to me that police abolition was always an implicit aspect of prison abolition. There are very long histories of protests, both against the police and against prisons and and remember that jails are are run by sheriffs. As a matter of fact I was thinking about the fact that before patrice colors help to found the Black Lives Matter network. She was involved in what was called a coalition against sheriff's violence in Los Angeles. I think single out other aspects of the criminal legal system because I think that is what is at stake here the criminal legal system which is everyone knows, most often referred to as the criminal justice system. The role of prosecutors and we're seeing a trend of progressive process prosecutors despite the oxymoronic ring of the term, there's Chesa Boudin for example across the bay in San Francisco. Let me say that the 1990s witness a rapidly growing population within jails and prisons, and at the same time, the disestablishment of agencies that were charged with administrating human services welfare healthcare, etc. And the privatization of these services as well as the increasing ties of the carceral system to the capitalist economy. So, during the 1990s we saw this frantic involvement of the construction industry in the construction of new prisons, the field of architecture in to the design of prisons prison work became a major source of profits and this happened of course along with the de industrialization process produced by global capitalism that got rid of so many of the jobs that people had depended on. So I say this because when I think back to the events that led to the organization of the conference critical resistance beyond the prison industrial complex. I remember that the impulse for prison abolition for this instantiation of prison abolition. Didn't emanate from a kind of myopic engagement with institutions of incarceration but rather from a much broader engagement that took seriously the extent to which racial capitalism has seeped into the structures of these institutions. We were interested. I remember in the fact that prisons constitute one of the most dramatic examples of structural racism. So this was a way to encourage a much larger explanatory framework that would would not allow for the kind of myopic critique of jails and prisons. That has produced so many reform measures that in turn have often served as the glue that rendered the institution of the prison more permanent. But at the same time, I am remembering that we were aware of of important developments in relationship to the police the fact that the Department of Defense. In the early 1990s began to transfer military weaponry to local police departments. And so I think we came to understand that the part played by global capitalism and retooling prison retooling police departments as a matter of fact especially in relation to the war on terror were very much connected to the rise of what we call the prison industrial complex. And to give you an example of the ways in which these movements were clearly intertwined. I think that abolitionists were really the first to call attention to the fact that we could not in good conscience simply call for the prosecution of particular police officers who had engaged in racist violence and assume that the whole question of racist state violence could be addressed could be addressed in in that way. So I think, I think that the two issues have really always been intertwined. The police abolition has been periodically expressed by calls to disarm the police in relation to the campaign to rid our society of the millions of guns, not only in the hands of civilians, but in the hands of the police. And that's actually the beginning of an answer we could go on but it's so interesting, of course, that in the, that during this period as we began to focus on the structural and systemic character of racism, the state lynching of George Floyd, which brought unprecedented people in the streets, more people than ever before, in relation to campaigns against police violence and systemic racism. So yeah, that's the beginning of an answer Gina probably has more insightful points to make so Gina why don't you, you add what you'd like to say. Oh my goodness. Well, first of all, let me just say thank you. It's always, it's always hard to be on these webinars when we can't see the audience but it's so lovely to see you letty and thank you for inviting us. This is such an important conversation and your question had so many layers. And Angela has dealt with all of them at some level. I just like to maybe add I think the last part of what you said is why now we're focusing on the police. And, and one of the comments that, you know, many people talk about now is, what's the difference now between now and when Rodney King was beaten and we had the video of and I remember in the wake of the Rodney King beating. There were so many analyses which talked about the way that the breaking down into small into still pictures of the moments of the beating helped to rationalize and naturalize the police violence. And that now we're talking about similar technologies, although more advanced of capturing video. And yet, it is not so much about the technologies that have changed. Yes, we have them more closely on our bodies but it's really about the way that the work that has been done by abolitionists over these years has transformed conversations. And I think it's important to say that the work of abolitionists hasn't been work only about prisons as a, as a side issue, but the work of talking about the prison industrial complex and the PIC has been the work of showing the interconnectedness as Angela has already pointed out between racial capitalism, a gender system are, you know, and every other aspect of our society. And that interconnection is really what helps us to now see differently. So it isn't just that we're looking at something which is dramatically different it's that we're prepared to see, because in order to think differently about those images, we have to be able to attend differently. And we have to be prepared for that. And what we're really showing seeing now is that so much has changed in terms of our conversations because of so many layers of activism in so many parts of the world I think we're going to need to talk today also of course about other places beside the United States, even though these conversations are often very focused on just the US. Yeah, I think I'll leave it there except I do want to just maybe specify further what I think we can see now that we couldn't see them. Those attempts to manipulate the temporal frame as I as I refer to, to criminalize the subject to produce fear in the population, those are all less effective. Those are the kinds of things that have changed because of the conversations we've had and the activism that's occurred. And Angela said something, wrote about something many years ago which I always use when talking about these issues. And that's the concept of disarticulating crime and punishment is one of the first things we talked about as activists and this was so key to the early critical part of this organizing, thinking about prisons was a way to better think about the criminal justice system and policing, so that starting from prisons that which has disappeared the sphere of punishment that we really didn't see, unless you had been incarcerated or had been had a family member who was incarcerated or maybe was an attorney or even worked in corrections, but otherwise so many people never experienced the prison. And so that work of revealing the prison industrial complex and popularizing that concept and explaining that concept had a lot to do with the capacity to disarticulate crime and punishment and no longer to attribute to every person that we saw in one of these videos, the forms of criminality that had previously stuck so well to their bodies. That's super helpful. So we might think about disarticulating crime and policing just as prison abolition has disarticulated crime and punishment. But I want to pick up on the interconnections that you just mentioned Gina and actually delve into the relationship between abolition and feminism. So, to start that let me share this anecdote so there was recently a discussion among colleagues who were deciding whether to support the movement of cops off campus and the sticking point raised by one male professor was what about sexual assaults against female students on campus. Don't we want police for that. So to me it was this telling moment where the protection of women who are vulnerable to sexual violence becomes the linchpin for policing. We know that when people think about violence against women or gendered violence, gender based violence, they typically think about interpersonal violence, domestic violence, sexual assault, rape, sexual harassment. And a legacy of feminist struggle to have violence against women taking seriously was the demand for the intervention of the criminal justice system into cases of interpersonal violence with faith in the state as protector. But the police killings of Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Kayla Moore and other women and trans people of color have completely disrupted this presumption and redirected attention to violence perpetrated by the state. As has buying attention to abuse and sexual violence committed by law enforcement and all kinds of settings, the criminalization of survivors of abuse with survived and punished and increasing concern about what has been named carceral feminism, the reliance upon arrest prosecution and prison as the chosen path to combat gendered violence. So this raises the question of how abolition should be understood as a feminist project, and also how feminism should embrace an abolitionist project. So the two of you are actually writing a book called abolition feminism now, together with Beth Ritchie and Erica minors and I was hoping you could draw on that word. So sketch of feminist genealogy of abolition, and also share how non carceral strategies of addressing gendered violence, often described as transformative justice might work to address gendered violence, what these strategies are and whether they might be effective often seems like a real issue in this discussion. So for this, I'm going to turn to Angela first. Well, first of all, I think it's important. Not to think of abolition and feminism as as to discrete approaches we're bringing, we're attempting to bring together because feminism and and and so many different ways has always been at one might even say it's a very foundation of abolitionists of thinking. Your question is is again very complex and really rich and and and so many ways I could answer it but first, I think I probably need to point out that if we were in Europe. We would have to point out that the ways in which feminism and abolition come together in terms of our approach is not what is usually assumed when people hear the phrase abolition feminism they are referring to abolitionists approaches to prostitution. And I think it's really important for us to point out the extent to which we distance ourselves from that and support the rights of sex workers. But I think for the moment, what I'm going to do is mention a very important small book that was published in 1990 in the United Kingdom by a radical criminologist whose name is Pat Carlin. And the title of that book is alternatives alternatives to women's imprisonment I used to teach that text in my graduate courses on on abolition and her argument. Was that women's prisons should be abolished. And she has a number of very compelling reasons why it's possible right now or at that time to get rid of women's prisons and then that would serve as a prelude to a larger abolitionist movement to abolish prisons more broadly. But around the same time, feminist activists were challenging prison abolition, arguing that precisely at the moment when we had finally reached the point where gender violence was being taken seriously. Where gender violence could actually be criminalized that that those of us who were abolitionists were saying that we needed to let go of that strategy to address gender violence, but anti violence, anti violence advocates and I'm you know I'm thinking about Beth Richie and others who understood the connection between race and gender, argued that if this process of criminalization was used the criminalization of gender violence it would simply strengthen the structural racism that was already responsible for incarcerating so many people of color. And I mentioned that because feminist insights have arisen oftentimes from very contradictory terrain and and and out of these contradictions arose I think some of the most compelling arguments for abolition. Again I mentioned Beth Richie and her her book Arrested Justice Black Women. What is it black women the prison nation and Sorry, we should know this better. Black women violence at America's prison nation that's the subject of the book I got it. And one might say that given the pandemic character of gender violence it is illogical to assume that carceral solutions will be effective. And more over criminalization strategies by themselves assume that violence can only be addressed in the aftermath of its commission. So, in a sense, from the criminalization strategy assumes that gender violence will always be with us and we simply have to try to punish it when it happens. Now those who want to abolish gender violence abolition feminism creates a very spacious conceptual framework that allows us to pursue a much deeper understanding of the reasons why gender violence is so widespread and why it persists. And, and reflecting on these questions led us to recognize that state violence and intimate violence are not unrelated. And of course much work has been done in this field from the activist work of insight women of color against violence. The scholarly work of Sarah Paley, for example. But, but I can remember very vividly the remarks of a of a young woman who had been imprisoned here in the state of California, who pointed out that she had been subject to sexual abuse when she lived in the so called free world. And once she went to prison. The abuse felt exactly the same. And that was a kind of catalyst and catalytic insight that led many scholars and activists, organic intellectuals to reflect on those connections and the relationality that links state violence and intimate violence together. This is one of the reasons why the dimension of feminism or the role of feminism in producing the abolitionist ideas and discourses that we're familiar with today. This is one of the reasons why they're so exciting. Because on the one hand we start with the assumption that, well, there aren't that many women in prison. So why should we even think about women, given the fact that the overwhelming majority of people behind bars are men. This is one very compelling example that demonstrates to us how looking closely at the predicament of women behind bars helps us to develop insights about the system as a whole. That's the beginning of a feminist genealogy, but let me say that and maybe Gina will have more to say about this after I make this observation. Critical resistance, the critical resistance organizing committee, I'm talking about the committee that organized the conference that took place in September of 1998 at UC Berkeley. The organizing committee was very attentive to the feminist approaches that we needed to incorporate throughout our organizing. So from the beginning, at least this instantiation abolition, we might say 21st century abolitionism, we were organizing at the end of the 20th century, so we focused on how to generate a 21st century abolition. And that was always inflected with feminism. It was inflected with feminism at every turn. Sometimes that gets lost, because people often don't want a messy frame, they want to be able to define abolition and that is it. But the abolition that we are witnessing today has its roots in feminism. Gina, do you want to add something? Well, yes, getting back to the questions is now difficult just because it was so much in your questions, but I think there were a few things that I heard that I should pick up on. I spent the earlier part of the critical resistance organizing. I was still in New York at the time. So most of it I only heard about with Angela informing me what was going on until I joined. But I know because of working once I arrived in California, how important feminist and trans and indigenous and other issues were to the organizing and I think it's really important to talk about this now. There was a moment when the narrative of mass incarceration has solidified the, at least in the US imaginary and I think beyond as well, the notion of the problem of black people being overly incarcerated, and I'm going to say a little bit about that in a second. And so we, we know that story. And there are a number of problems with the way we know that story which have to do with the things that are left out. And one of the things about abolition feminism and what we're talking about as a genealogical approach to it is looking for what has been removed from our account of what that movement is and has been and should be, and also looking at these other things that have been suppressed in the history. And we touch on what Kanbahi has to do the river Kanbahi River Collective has to do with it, what triple jeopardy has to do with it as a project that was focused on racism, sexism, but also imperialism, the term that often drops out when we're talking about these days about incarceration. We talk about the Santa Cruz, women's, the letter from the women against rape from 19, I believe, 77, which was a letter to the anti rape movement, very early on about the racism within the anti rape movement. So we're writing partly to lift up those touchstones and to to remark on that but also we're writing with a genealogical approach, which is an approach that suggests a critical relationship, a denaturalizing relationship, you know, to be for this respect to the way in which we even understand abolition. And so I think what Angela was really talking about is the way that we don't really understand the term abolition without feminism. And once feminism is emptied out of abolition, we have find ourselves with all kinds of trouble in dealing with some of the problems of today. So I, I did want to say just a little bit because Angela mentioned the part about the abolition feminism and the European context and the anti sex work and criminalizing sex work movement and that's where we come to this term, the term, the term, carceral feminism, Elizabeth Bernstein wrote the article, I spend years now, which allowed us to start to think about this as carceral feminism. And so abolition feminism is a term that has been used in violence, precisely to reclaim what that abolition would mean in a different context. And there's so much more to say about this but I think I've, I've, I've lost track but I do want to add, as we're balancing interpersonal violence and state violence simultaneously, we're also mindful that we're not measuring the value of the body or the person who's violated by the length of the sentence that someone receives, or the status of the, the kind of crime that they're charged with the seriousness of the crime. And I think moving away from that notion that we have to measure our value, if we've been violated by the retributive form of justice, and the amount of the number of years that are given as a sentence is really important and has been so important for us to think through this. So, I'm always in conversations like the one you have. We have these conversations now around Title IX on campuses, we have these conversations in so many spaces and it's really important to simultaneously recognize and treat and deal with the, the forms of violence that we have in our community. It's, it's also important not to rely on and rest on the criminalization that extends not just from that criminal justice system outside the universities but even the internalization of those ways of thinking and relating that are part of the way we treat other kinds of violations. Thank you so much. You know, what Angela was saying about abolition feminism in the European context makes me think, actually, when you think about what is the epitome of carceral feminism in the US context, it's the project of sex trafficking criminalization right that the look historically at the department of Homeland Security homepage right they trumpet their work on combating sex trafficking through sex trafficking through criminalization. Anyway, so that that I think is a is a interesting thread to not forget and the other thing I just want to say is maybe just to point listeners to again the work of insight women and trans people of color. There's violence violence. The anthologies inside has produced many Kim's work on transformative justice in terms of looking to what might be non carceral strategies of addressing gendered violence. But I'd like to move us to another topic which is prison as a border. So, in 2001, the journal signs published a conversation between the two of you, titled prison as a border a conversation on gender globalization and in the conversation the two of you address multiple complex ways of thinking about the relationship between the prison and borders, which include the need to internationalize resistance to capital formations that disregard national borders, the appeal of the prison across time and space with particular models of imprisonment traveling around the world. The fact that in prisons in Europe a disproportionately large number of people found inside our immigrants, and the fact that the prison itself is a border between the so called free world and the space behind the walls of the prison. So I wonder if I could ask you to talk to us more about the relationship between prisons and borders. So how do borders rely on prisons and vice versa. The United States as we know is actively using imprisonment to deter migration, with one result being that as the media reported yesterday, parents of 545 children separated at the border still have not been found. That might be said about the place of immigration detention, or maybe we should say immigration prisons, which imprisoned half a million people per year within the prison abolition movement. And what abolition feminism demand a world without nation state orders. So I'm going to actually turn first to see if Gina can. Another big question. So many layers there. I wish we could remember exactly what we wrote in 2001 but I. But I, I want to start with the 545 children who cannot be reunited with their parents now, even after so much time has passed. I should just pause there but I will go on to say that one of the things that abolition feminism helps us to do, hopefully, is not to miss that as a part of the prison industrial complex. One of the things that we're arguing is that the particular narrative and I referred to it earlier in talking about mass incarceration, which is very important in talking about racial capitalism and what has happened to those who were descendants of slaves is also connected to the forms of incarceration that have not had that name. I think also to the way that we've re characterized what used to be referred to as Japanese internment. And we're now talking using the term incarceration. This is for us very important in reorganizing how we understand the, the whole span of this problem. And we absolutely need to be paying attention to border violence. And by border violence, I don't mean it in the characteristic way in which it sometimes is thought to be about those who are crossing. Even the individuals who are stopping and molesting and beating those who are attempting to cross. But the violence of the border itself, the relationship to indigenous land, the relationship to the problem of those who are forced to cross the border for family and work and the degree to which those borders are secured for the purposes of furthering capitalist objectives. So, yes, I think abolition feminists would absolutely believe in a world without those borders, which I think is to make people feel that we're talking about a world which has no distinction between places and no spaces of autonomy. But I think it's quite to the contrary, it just means that we can't return to thinking about those places within the logic of capitalism. And so I also wanted to move, however, to thinking about what we were really meaning by the phrase prison as a border. One of the things we were pointing out is that the free world, as we refer to the world outside of the prison is a world that is inhabited mostly as I referred to before by people who don't know what it's like inside. I remember that one of the first things that we did after critical resistance the conference was how the the action go to prison week. And that was in 1999 the spring or something after we had the conference and that was really about breaking down that wall, and encouraging everyone to get inside of a prison in whatever way they could if they hadn't visited a family member to go visit that family member. If they were an attorney, they could get in that way if they're a teacher they could go that way they could try to request a visit, do whatever possible to break down that border. So that's one part of it. Another part of it is the border that I was referring to a bit earlier when I was talking about the change from the term internment to incarceration. And those the segregations in terms of our forms of knowledge that allow us to think that one thing is very separate from another thing. And one thing happens to one kind of people and something else happens to another kind of people, and it splits our concerns in very violent ways. So the borders that I was referring to and that we were referring to are not just borders that are nation state borders, but they're also borders of perception and their borders that are created in academic discourse in particular. And I am very interested in breaking down those borders, also the ones that allow us to think that the way we get information about the prison system is only from that material that is based in factual or socially scientific kinds of material. I'm really concerned with the way that we have been inundated with imagery about prisons in our everyday lives, to the extent that that helps to naturalize the prison as an environment. And so all of those were layers of what we were really thinking about at that time. And I still think it's a very tall order to think about those all simultaneously, but I think it's absolutely necessary and it's an opportunity today to try to break those down and think about them. Interesting, I'm just thinking about these, I mean, they're not just rhetorical strategies, they're shifts in conceptualization, but thinking about, for example, Guantanamo detainees versus Guantanamo prisoners, Japanese American internees versus Japanese American prisoners. You know, the immigration detainee versus the immigration prisoner, you know, and of course, the situation is one where people who are in immigration detention centers are there because of a civil offense, not a criminal offense. There are complexities in here where there are people advocating for immigrants who engage in a splitting strategy of, well, they're not like regular prisoners, right, or they're not for those who don't have criminal histories, you know, they're not criminals and the sort of politics of slavery. So anyway, they're really interesting, I think, a lot of complexities in terms of trying to think across categories and questions of solidarity and advocacy and of course, you know, there are, you know, macro level abolish ICE, abolish immigration prison, abolish all prison activities that many people are engaged in as well. But Angela, did you want to add anything? Just one or two observations. You know, I'm remembering that the rising numbers of people behind bars that we witnessed from the early 90s, well, during the entire decade of the 90s, going back to the mid 80s, that served as a major catalyst for doing the work that led us to conceptualize the prison industrial complex, which I think it's important to point out, we theorize the prison industrial complex not as a place, not as a location, but as a set of relations, the explanation of which allowed us to raise the strategy of abolition and do this abolitionist work. And so I'm thinking right now, why have we not been similarly moved to make more powerful connections with the issue of immigration, given the vast numbers of people all around the planet that have been forced to leave their homes precisely as a consequence of the impact of global capitalism. And I know that, you know, wonderful scholars like Kelly Lytle-Henande have done work on this issue, but it seems to me that it should be more central to the abolition work that we are doing. But in answer to that last question that you raised about the abolition of the nation state, I want to answer in the affirmative, but I also know that even as we're deeply critical of the nation state and its contemporary instantiations, which have emphasized closed borders and have demonstrated a failure to assume any responsibility for the migration of people under the pressure of the capitalist retooling of their home economies. We haven't explicitly called for the dismantling of the state. And I'm thinking about this because it's so important to educate the imagination. I did a conversation with Gina the other day in relation to the program that she is involved in at UC Santa Cruz, visualizing abolition. Why are we so ideologically imprisoned inside of the assumption that the capitalist nation state is the eternal form of human community on this planet? And so I'm thinking that just as we have called for an end to what came to be known as felon disenfranchisement, we support the right of all formerly incarcerated people to vote. We should also be supporting the right of people in prison to vote. It used to be the case that any residents of communities voted. And at the same time, we might imagine a campaign calling for immigrants, regardless of their legal status to be capable of voting. And, you know, sometimes we have these ideas that appear to be utterly utopian and idealist and people can't imagine them. But these are precisely the ideas that need to begin to start germinating. So I'm I really thank you for that question because it tells me that that perhaps this is the time to begin to play some emphasis on the impermanency of the nation state. I think that's fantastic and so welcomed, especially at, you know, this moment where we see the inverse where the Trump administration, for example, is trying not to have the census count. It's a document that people's body purpose of apportionment, right, for members of Congress. So, yeah, so that that that would be amazing. But returning actually to something that Gina mentioned, and also Angela so thinking about Kelly Lail Hernandez is more recent work right City of Angels, and thinking about the question of abolition on stolen land right. How might we think about abolition on stolen land and in particular abolition feminism on stolen land. In other words, what is the relationship between the settler state and the carceral state, and what might abolition feminism say about this relationship. So, I would really welcome in responding to this question, you're sharing your experiences with sister inside Australia, your work in Palestine, as well as with indigenous activists working in the space of the United States in answering this question. And I think Gina, I might ask you to respond to this first. Yeah, well, another, another huge and important question. Well, first of all, we have to acknowledge where we are. In the United States, California, Bay Area, University of California, UC Berkeley, my own body. I mean at every scale that I just mentioned we could do an analysis that would require us to think about coloniality and, and I'm thinking about this, about the body because I was privileged to enjoy a talk yesterday by a colleague of mine at UC Santa Cruz, Gerald Cassell who's a dancer, and was really talking about the way that the dancers were, and his own choreography is about acknowledging the ways in which the bodies also colonized so at every scale we'd have to, we'd have to think about this. We are as you started out in the landed on acknowledgement occupying a lonely land. We could, we could start there. We could start talking about the moral act. We could talk about the land us. You see as a land grant institution on stolen land. All of this, and we could spend time at each scale talking about those violations. But I think I'll, for the sake of time, try to get to the part you asked about the what abolition feminism would say about this and why we need to do that. As you've already deduced, we expect that abolition feminism is intersectional in this way. And I'm going back to our very early days, let it together in the early critical race theory and intersectionality when we were working together on on those on those things and thinking about intersectionality not so much the way we mobilize it today is more popular term, but the way it allowed interpretation. So what it was requiring us to see simultaneously, that we would normally segregate. And in this respect, we, we are proponents of an abolition feminism that requires us to see all of these aspects simultaneously. Obviously, we can't always attend to them, all simultaneously what we can't, we can't let them out of our minds. So settler colonialism, it has to be a part of the story we tell. Again, I'm on my third time referencing the mass incarceration and slavery narrative but it that is so central it's made it possible for people broadly to understand the right of what's wrong with the prison system in the United States, but it is also restricted the way we understand the prison system in the United States. And so abolition feminism requires us always to see from below, always to see intersectionally and that means we have to be thinking about settler colonialism our own relationship to it. It's a fact that we can be in multiple spaces at the same time. I'm always speaking as a black feminist as a black queer feminist. But that doesn't exempt me from responsibility for thinking about my role in a settler state. So that is absolutely something that we take on as a part of abolition feminism. And I think it's also part of why discourses of protection and security and safety that were part of what was raised in your earlier question need to be rethought. I mean I think about learning from Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak very early on about the phrase that she's known for that maybe is not the best phrase but the white men saving brown men, I'm sorry, brown women from brown men, right. So this notion of the colonialism operating with the idea that it's saving certain people. And of course we also see the protecting women right as a reason we already talked about for extending criminality in the in our current injustice system. So those kinds of factors are things that we really need to think about. And I would say even further to break down this notion that we can fix these systems by adding different colored people into them. We can look to what's happening in Nigeria today. I have to say I'm speaking about this as someone who's mostly receiving this news on, you know, social media and in the press but it's really important for us to pay attention to this abolitionist movement that comes in a colonial context. That is in an environment where we're not talking about a white on black operation of power. And yet the residues of colonialism are everywhere present in the violations. And so for those who are less familiar the news about the terrorism break and the social unrest and activism to fight back against the violence of the SARS the the special force anti it's anti robbery squad that has been, you know, rampantly causing destruction and criminalizing, actually, not only poor people, but all kinds of people in the Nigerian environment so I think we need to understand that when we are talking about these issues, the settler colonial frame can actually help us to really think about not assuming that we would have a better form of justice if for example we had more black women in charge of the police or, you know, a criminal justice system that was designed with certain kinds of values in mind. I know I have so much to say about this question that I just have one more thing that I do want to say because we're talking about a lot of the scholars that we love and admire and I want to reference Joanne Barker here, because there are a lot of alternatives that we often talk about with restorative justice and sometimes transformative justice has to do with indigenous systems of justice and and questions of reparations and questions of having judicial autonomy to to deal with crimes that are in the Indian country and that sounds like the possibility of returning to some justice system that's fully intact and is pre colonial, but as Joanne and others have written, there is no going back to a pre colonial system so the work of abolition to get in deeply and to think about all the various ways that we all are now inheriting this violence and what ways we need to work on to get past that violence. Angela, did you want to add anything. You've already mentioned Mimi Kim's amazing work and and and I think that in relation to the point that Gina made about transformative justice. Mimi Kim's work is is is so important. Yeah, the settler state and the carceral state. You also asked us how our experiences in Australia and Palestine have helped to shape the way we think about these issues. And in that context I want I want to point out that it creates a framework that's far more complex and feminist abolitionist activism recognizes how important it is not to insist on simplifying the frame. But rather to embrace the complexities and the contradictions, you know, even if it means that we we find ourselves having to start over again. And in in Palestine. We have recognized the extension of carcerality to the community to everyday life as a matter of fact, it's so interesting when when we went to Palestine virtually everyone we met had either been to prison or had relatives or close friends who had been to prison. And then of course the the ubiquity of the checkpoints and all of the military installations made us recognize that we could not focus on the institutions of incarceration alone, but rather on the broader field of carcerality. And, and this is actually a feminist move we often assume that when we rely on feminism we're going to bring, we're going to use it in order to bring gender into the frame and of course that's always important. Feminist approaches, it encouraged us to to work with a kind of messiness that would probably mean that many scholars would shy away from it, because we don't have clean and clear a clean and clear conceptual frame. But just to conclude, we should remember with respect to indigenous people in in this country that the rate of incarceration is highest among indigenous people than any other community in the country. So they've indigenous people have not only suffered as a result of the process the genocidal process of colonialism and the creation of reservations a kind of form of incarceration. One might argue also, but have also been very deeply affected by the expansion of the carceral state. Thank you so much. I'm going to ask the two of you one more question and then turn to audience questions so the, the one last question I wanted to ask. So Angela you earlier mentioned how focusing on women in prison, even though it was a very small number of people basically forced a radical transformation of that analysis. So, I was hoping you could say something about the entrance of trends, practices into the prison abolitionist and anti violence movements, and how they've assisted in helping explain how prisons produce gender normativity and function as both a repressive and an ideological apparatus. You know, it's, it's very interesting. Eric Stanley, who is one of the co editors of this, you know, wonderful book on trans issues and the prison industrial complex, and I'm thinking about captive bodies. Captive genders, I think, captive, captive genders. And he was a student of mine, some years ago, and asked me if I would do an independent study with him about this issue. And I said, Well, I'd be happy to Eric, but I'm sorry I don't know the literature so you'll have to introduce me to the literature. And, and so he went and did some research and said, Well, basically, there is no literature now and I said, Well, I guess you're going to have to write the book. And amazingly, he did. You know, which it's this foundational study about the relationship of trans issues and the prison industrial complex. So, Eric Stanley, Dean Spade and so many others have helped us to understand that that the gender binary is quite literally inscribed it's inscribed into the concrete of the prison system the the the the very building materials of the prison. And of course, we have male prisons and female prisons. Now, you raise the question about repressive and ideological apparatuses and those of us who found out to their work helpful have grown accustomed to referring to prisons and police as repressive apparatuses and formations like schools and universities and churches and media and family are the ideological apparatuses. But of course the distinction isn't so neat when we look at the insights that have emerged from trans scholarship and and activism. And the analysis that has emanated from the activism of or on behalf of trans people required us to think about the role of the apparatus of the prison and producing gender normativity, which is to say that the prison is not only a repressive apparatus as I would say but it's an ideological one as well. Because prison populations are always segregated in accordance with the notions that the notion that gender is a binary structure. And it seems that the work that trans activists and scholars and those who have worked on the issue have done helps us develop a different kind of analytical approach which brings the prison so much closer to the free world in the sense that it serves to normalize aspects of everyday ideological processes that produce our sense of what is normal. And I say this in the context of trying to make the prison more visible and Gina talks about this, you know, all the time and the first issue we were confronted with was how to render this institution more visible, given that it is it has proliferated all around us, but is shrouded in a kind of invisibility. It kind of reminds me of the it kind of reminds me of the the ideological processes that perhaps linked slavery and then the prison to the evolution of US democracy. You know, how do I know I am free. I am free because I'm not a slave, or I am free because I am not in in prison. And so the work of trans intellectuals and activists have helped us to more emphatically engage with the ideological work that this institution does and part of a very important part of the very important dimension of the work of abolition is to engage with those the ideological effects and the ideological work that the institutions do. Fantastic. Gina, did you want to add anything. I mean, I feel like for time sake that I think that was a really important answer I do want to say, because we're this is UC Berkeley and and Eric is your colleague and and seeing I remember I was at in Sweden and abolitionist conference, I'm going to say it was in like 2000 I was right after the book came out it must have been like 2011 or something like that. And that's actually where I first saw the book and and one of the things that's been important about so many people doing work from the standpoint that they that they know best has been the way that it really opens on to a larger way of thinking about the entire prison industrial complex so as Angela explained you know that that is so important for us. I also can't help but think about some of the prison visits we've, we've been on together and and part of them, some of them as a part of a research group at UCHRI and some of those visits. It's astonishing to hear the degree to which the guards who were taking us around would naturalize the, the heteronormative language of marriage, and in terms of talking about prisoners and and even using language as a force to talk about what would happen if they house prisoners together of different races. So the, the, the analysis that comes from the trans lens isn't only helpful for thinking about gender in more narrow way but actually can be widened to think critically about all kinds of other aspects of the our prison system. Wonderful. So the audience questions are flooding in. I'm actually going to begin with one which takes us to a quite concrete location which is advocates who are in Berkeley who are trying to create a first in the nation proposal to establish a protection of transportation of unarmed civil servants who would remove traffic enforcement from policing and actively work on the structural issues of equity to minimize the need for enforcement. One of the most primary concerns is to ensure that they do not recreate the coercive and violent nature of the carceral system with a friendlier uniform. What foundational changes should these advocates ensure are present when endeavoring to minimize the effects of the existing carceral system through restorative yet state sponsored means. I mean, I have to say, Angela I've been talking about how difficult this moment is because the questions now are very specific and localized and complex. Before we were, you know, theorizing about what it would mean to be in this space and now we're in this space where we're trying to determine how to do these things and I would say, you know, the devil's in the details in this it's I assume it sounds from the question that I see an awareness that pink uniforms are not going to make it make it work. But I think one of the hard things to consider now is how we will have the goodwill of the people who have for so long been experiencing violence of policing and prisons. So what do we do in this transitional moment in order to be able to engage with each other differently. And so I don't, I don't maybe Angela has an answer as to how this should happen. I think without seeing the proposal more thoroughly I wouldn't venture one, except to say that I, I am glad to hear that there's a recognition of all the various different ways in which there have been analyses. Based on previous reforms that have failed and have further extended the PIC. I mean we know this when we're talking about everything from ankle monitors to, you know, transitional housing and all kinds of other places that can become sites of further violence so I would say that it has to be supported by the community has to be understood as a community project to the extent that it is it feels that as if it's entirely state in position. It's probably not going to be a successful so you know how has the community made that a part of what they want to see happen. Angela, do you have anything to add. That this is really an exciting moment. And we are engaged now concretely in reconstructive processes that many of us never expected to witness in our lifetimes. I don't know whether there are formulas to govern that, you know, very particular work that is being done within institutions. But certainly, because of the focus on the police and the recognition that we can, we can't work from the footprint of that institution and reform it from within. In fact, I think it might be important to point out that in South Africa, there is, there's an abolition movement unfolding now in relation to the police. And they've experienced some of the worst racist police violence there, even though the police offices are largely black. It's, it's a, I think, a powerful example of the nature of structural racism that all the actors can be black, but they're still involved in a system that perpetrates racist violence. Now, the specific, the specific project that the questioner asked about is one that it's going to have to be an experiment. And that's one of the reasons why this period is so exciting, because we get to do new things and think new thoughts and the idea that the police have been called upon to do all of this work that does not involve the intervention of armed human beings. When a person is experiencing a mental health crisis, and you send armed people to address that more than likely someone is going to end up, end up injured or even killed and we've seen this over and over again. So it makes sense to think about different, a different kind of agency, different kind of formation that would allow people train people to respond to those kinds of difficulties, people who would be sensitive to the trauma, and, and, and, and, and not to be concerned primarily with repression. And whenever we have police, their primary role is repression. So I would, you know, urge the, the questioner to, you know, do to encourage that work. We need right now we need some new models. And I think that that is what we're in the process of producing during this period that follows the massive mobilizations, the most massive mobilizations of people in the history of this country against racism. So thank you. I'm going to take you to another question from this very concrete local location to a more meta theory question which is, how does class play a role in abolition feminism. What's this idea you want to start Gina, and you could start yeah. Well of course classes at the very center. I'm thinking back to Gina's evocation of the triple jeopardy. That was the, the newspaper of the Third World Women's Alliance. Because sometimes now we think about intersectionality as being an entirely new way of thinking and theorizing. In 1970 that there were women's Alliance argued that there that we had to attend to racism, sexism, and as Gina pointed out imperialism or capitalism. I think that, especially in, in this part of the country, we should be thankful for the really important role that radical unions have played. And as a result of the deindustrialization of the economy and, and the union busting strategies, the numbers of unions and the numbers of people who are members of unions has declined. And we still have some, you know, really powerful unions the nurses union, for example, has played such an important role during this period of the combination of the pandemic and consciousness of racism. And the ILWU, the International Longshore Workers Union here in the Bay Area had an amazing mobilization on Juneteenth at the ports and they shut down the ports from, from, I think from Canada all the way down to the border. So, not only should we be attentive to issues of class and, but we should also be aware of the role that organized working class people can play during this period. Thank you. Gina, do you want to add anything about class and abolition feminism. I mean, it's everywhere and we need to make sure it's everywhere and if it's not, there's, it's not abolition feminism. But I should say, because sometimes when we get the question about class, it's because the references to racial capitalism don't seem to satisfy the question about class and so it is really important for us to be clear about the fact that in it by invoking racial capitalism, we are explicitly intending to be speaking about class and the formation of class, but we're also making sure that that understanding of class is thoroughly articulated with the other ways in which classes formed that are sometimes left out of our conversations. And just as I've been saying all evening it seems to talking about the emphasis on the over incarceration of black populations, we do have to remember that the largest prison populations generally are still in local places, white prisoners, and we are, we need to understand the class formation, the class problems of that. So, we can't lose sight of that we have to understand this as a problem of capitalism and as a problem of racial capitalism. Thank you. I'm going to actually read, maybe three different questions and you can choose to answer any of them in the remaining, maybe five minutes. One of them is about the line between being involved in sex work as a chosen profession and being involved in sex trafficking which could be experienced as an extreme form of violence. Could you comment on how we can understand and honor the pursuit of sex work while also working to halt sex trafficking. Second question is about how conventional language and procedures around university academic conduct often appear carceral. I frequently see language on syllabi that plagiarism will be prosecuted and the adjudication process often involves the kind of labeling and punishing that seems to represent a spirit of carcerality. Next question. Can you say a bit more about what progressive prosecutors like Chesa Boudin view differently, and how they may actually, you know, support those who want to go into this, this line of work. Okay, so there's three possible questions. That's a lot. Let me take it easier one. First and maybe Angela, cue you up on the sexual sex work and sex trafficking. I don't know. I could go there too. Let's talk about carcerality in our everyday practice because this is a university talk and it's something that I've really struggled with. I mentioned title title nine earlier and the way in which there is a kind of internalization of carcerality in our relationship to how to address those violences on campus. And it's also true that we need to move into other ways of engaging with students. I don't actually put that plagiarism language on my syllabi and I'm probably in trouble because I don't because it's one of the things that increasingly the university requires of us. I also encourage my students to collaborate and what I try to teach them is what appropriate collaboration looks like with attribution and acknowledgement, so that I actually actively try to break down this notion that it's always a single person who has knowledge and shouldn't share that knowledge unless it's in a certain way. I spend my life doing collaborative work and a lot of times in the collaborative work you disappear and that's just part of what that work is. But we're in an environment where it's very difficult for that to be recognized and so I think it's really important to talk about the abolitionist feminist project as one that when we're saying we're naming a lot of people but we're also not naming so many people. And as Angela started today, I think we have to remember that. I don't know do you want to start on one of the other ones right now, Angela. Well, I can try. Let me see may you know perhaps the first one that you mentioned progressive prosecutors since I brought that up as a part of the criminal legal system that is the larger context of the, the, the work that we're trying to do now around prisons and, and, and police. There's been a trend over the last period of, of, of progressive prosecutors attempting to make changes from within. And of course, Chesa Boudin, whom I have to point out that he's the, he's the son of one of my close friends, Kathy Boudin with whom I went to high school. So I kind of had the opportunity to follow his decision to run and to follow the campaign and to tell the truth. I thought it was a great idea that he was running but I had no idea that there was a possibility that he might win as the son of two of one of a woman who spent 25 years in prison and a man who David Gilbert who was still behind bars. And his, his campaign speeches centered his experiences as a child spending time with his parents behind bars. And, and I, of course, it's very difficult work. Now he's the San Francisco prosecutor. So what can he do. Well, one of the first things he did was to abolish cash bail. And, and I think that's extremely important because when I first went to jail myself I couldn't believe how many people in New York at the New York House, New York Women's House of Detention how many women were there, because they didn't have $100 or $500. And then as a matter of fact, one of the first organizing campaigns we, we were involved in there inside the jail was the creation of a committee to decide which women would be released when bail was organized by a group that existed on the outside. And, and then of course, Maria McAva, so many people have, you know, done work on bail. And so it's really important to have a prosecutor who can just get rid of bail. But of course it's not that simple and he is going to be confronted with, you know, a whole range of issues. But what is important, I think, is that this is a period when so much of what we consider to be literally engraved in stone is now being challenged. And, and so, you know, the fact that Larry Kramer in, I'm thinking about the case of Mumia Abu Jamal in Pennsylvania, that as a result of that work, he's no longer on death row, and, you know, hopefully he'll have the opportunity to engage a more effective demand for his own freedom. I'm thinking about Assata Shakur, these who, who is in Cuba today, and who has suffered for, I don't know, you know, how many years as a result of the power of the police and the fraternal order of the police. It used to be that we could hardly mention Mumia's name or Assata's name without the kind of assaults emanating from the fraternal order of the police who considered themselves to be the permanent and last word on everything. And that's no longer the case. This is really an exciting moment that we get to, at least for the time being, think creatively and experimentally and imagine, you know, what a different world would look like. Well, I think that's actually the perfect note on which to end. That is all the time we have for, for this program. I wanted to thank our speakers, Angela Davis and Gina Dent from the bottom of my heart. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your experiences with us. I wanted to thank our audience for being here with us, for your participation and for listening. Let me also encourage people to check out Gina's series Visualizing Abolition through UC Santa Cruz. Come to our event next week on Black trans intimacies, building features in the present at the Center for Race and Gender. And thank you, everybody for being here. Take care. Bye bye.