Abolition’s Afterlives

Abstract

The positioning of movements for social and political change as forms of postemancipation abolition democracy has a long history. Abolition has been the watchword under which initiatives proceed to eradicate the death penalty, human trafficking, nuclear weapons, the hegemony of Wall Street, prisons, police, the deportation of immigrants, and more. The essays in this forum examine nineteenth-century abolitionism’s complicated legacy through the prism of contemporary frameworks and agitations for justice and social transformation. The working papers reflect vital ongoing debates about abolition’s afterlives while meditating upon a series of pressing current concerns: migrant justice, the humanitarian rhetoric of some anti-racist initiatives, the activism of Erica Garner following the murder by police of her father, the racialization of madness and violence, the prison-abolition movement, and climate activism. By addressing the mobilization of rhetorics of slavery and abolition in our own vexed political moment, the contributors reveal that to think abolition now is necessarily to rethink abolition then.

 

Abolition’s Afterlives

On 10 May 1865, just a month after Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Frederick Douglass addressed the members of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The Society had assembled to consider the question of whether to permanently disband now that emancipation had been achieved. Adopting the familiar role of historian of antislavery, Douglass considers the past, present, and future of abolition.¹ He recalls his early work as an agent of the Society, agitating against attempts to inscribe white supremacy into law in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. “That was good anti-slavery work twenty years ago,” he says. “I do not see why it is not good anti-slavery work now” (577). Opposing the view of those who, like William Lloyd Garrison, thought it “ludicrous” and an “absurdity” to maintain the Society after slavery had been abolished, Douglass insists “that the work of Abolitionists is not done” and warns that slavery “has been called by a great many names, and it will call itself by yet another name” (qtd. in Yerrinton 1; Douglass 578, 579). Hence, he advises, “you and I and all of us had better wait and see what new form this old monster will assume, in what new skin this old snake will come forth next” (579).

For Douglass, abolition was always about more than the formal end of chattel slavery. Even at the conclusion of the Civil War, he viewed abolition, to borrow Charmaine Chua’s recent formulation, “as a horizon, not an event” (S-132). Douglass’s view thus anticipates what W. E. B Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America (1935) termed “abolition-democracy,” the unfinished business of abolition that sought not just legal freedom but a range of social transformations, including new institutions and new ways of being that are devoted to securing racial justice and enabling the flourishing of Black life (187). But Douglass’s figure for subtle, continually permutating deceit—the snake in new skin—also suggests a wary, prescient understanding of what Dylan Rodríguez terms “White Reconstruction,” the “historically persistent, continuous, and periodically acute logic of reform, rearticulation, adaption, and revitalization that shapes white social and ontological self-and-world-making” (3). Douglass perceived this logic in both “mobs” and in “the combined efforts of priest-craft and state-craft,” and he understood the ongoing work of abolition to be as prospectively urgent as it had ever been in combatting that logic (579).

Abolition thus might be said always to have exceeded the formal end of slavery, designating instead a more sweeping “sense of urgency, relevance, or potential for social change,” in Robert Fanuzzi’s formulation (1). Under this definition of abolition, the chronopolitics of recent social movements and crises may well appear to rhyme with the temporality of nineteenth-century immediatist abolitionism: time is running out for the planet because of global warming; Black Lives Matter activists have had enough of the slow pace of achieving racial justice; immigrants and refugees find themselves stuck in various states of waiting and/or delay; settler-colonial history and its ongoing violence against Indigenous populations have been rendered newly visible by the protests at Standing Rock. In different yet overlapping ways, these movements, among others, all bespeak the kind of impatience and discontent with cautious, reformist measures that typified immediatism in the nineteenth century. And in various ways, all of them have aligned themselves with abolition as both an ethical touchstone and a praxis, frequently invoking the movement to abolish slavery as a guiding legacy. The essays in this forum examine nineteenth-century abolitionism’s complicated legacy through the prism of contemporary frameworks and agitations for justice and social transformation.

The positioning of movements for social and political change as forms of postemancipation abolition democracy has a long history. Abolition has been the watchword under which initiatives proceed to eradicate the death penalty, human trafficking, nuclear weapons, and the hegemony of Wall Street. Scholars and activists working on these movements and others—from the project outlined in Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey’s anthology Race Traitor (1996), devoted to the undoing of whiteness, to the animal-liberation and climate-change movements as well as the struggle to end the deportation of immigrants—often describe their efforts as “the new abolitionism.”² Still other thinkers and activists issue calls for “abolition feminism,” “oil abolition,” “abolition ecology,” and the formation of “abolitionist university studies” (Davis et al. [forthcoming]; Martin; Heynen 244; Boggs et al. 3). Perhaps the most prominent of these new abolitionisms, however, involves efforts to address the violence and injustices inflicted by the US carceral state. A recent series of killings of African Americans by police officers, combined with the racist policies of the Trump administration, have energized and, perhaps, strengthened long-established movements to abolish prisons, policing, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).³

That such a range of movements should all imagine themselves as carrying on the tradition of nineteenth-century abolition comes as no surprise, given the long reach and historical durability of white supremacy, settler-colonial violence, and racial capitalism in the US. And as recent books by Manisha Sinha and Holly Jackson have emphasized, the movement to abolish slavery was itself intersectional, racially diverse, and deeply entwined with a host of other reform efforts—from women’s rights to free love to the abolition of private property. Contemporary abolitionist movements are also united by the conviction that comprehensive transformational work must take place outside, rather than within, existing institutions, social structures, and political systems; they all take abolition, in Fanuzzi’s phrase, as “a byword for opposition to reasonable moderation and conventional reform” (4). Hence, “the object of abolition,” as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten assert in an oft-cited enunciation, is “[n]ot so much the abolition of prisons [or police or ICE or fossil-fuel combustion, etc.] but the abolition of a society that could have prisons” and police and fossil-fuel combustion (42).

Still, invoking abolition is not without problems and risks. In None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (2018), for example, Stephen Best argues against the tendency always to approach the “black political present” in terms of the slave past, making the case instead for what he calls a “history of discontinuity” (2, 24). And among historians and literary scholars alike, nineteenth-century abolition’s legacy remains a matter of lively debate. In her influential study Scenes of Subjection (1997), for instance, Saidiya Hartman reveals powerfully the ethical limitations of white abolitionism’s strategy of cross-racial sympathy. More recently, in Selling Antislavery (2020), forum contributor Teresa Goddu demonstrates how abolition’s culture industry participated in the development of the white liberal subject of consumer capitalism, echoing Fanuzzi’s claim that eighteenth-century abolition “called for more not less capitalism” (2).

These more skeptical readings of nineteenth-century abolitionism’s residues contrast with W. Caleb McDaniel’s The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery (2013), Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause (2016), Jackson’s American Radicals (2019), and Kellie Carter Jackson’s Force and Freedom (2019), all of which emphasize the radical or revolutionary force of abolition. Such divergent assessments of abolition raise important questions: What do we invoke when we invoke abolition? What gets emphasized, and what gets occluded when movements align themselves with nineteenth-century abolitionism? How can the complicated histories of abolition—white and Black, liberal and radical, finished and incomplete—help us contend with structures of oppression, injustice, and violence in the present? In what ways does abolitionist praxis today depart from or duplicate the conceptual and material blind spots of the abolitionist work of the past?

The six working papers assembled here reflect vital ongoing debates about abolition’s afterlives while meditating upon a series of pressing current concerns. Taking up questions of migrant justice (Stancliff), the humanitarian rhetoric of some anti-racist initiatives (DeLombard), the activism of Erica Garner following the murder by police of her father (Joy James), the racialization of madness and violence (Fielder), the prison-abolition movement (Jennifer James), and climate activism (Goddu), the contributors also address the mobilization of slavery and abolition in our own vexed political moment. Thus orienting themselves toward the present as a way of engaging with the past, the essays individually and collectively practice versions of the kind of presentist approach to abolitionist historiography such as I advocated in History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing (2018). Individually and collectively, they reveal that to think abolition now is necessarily to rethink abolition then.

The forum begins with the failure of legal forms to advance transformational abolitionist aims. Michael Stancliff examines collective responses to the intensified, xenophobic border-policing policies instituted by the last presidential administration. Starting with the premise that, historically, citizenship itself “has always been the highest wall,” Stancliff draws upon the traditions of Black abolitionist activity that Derrick Spires outlines in The Practice of Citizenship (2019), to align community sanctuary work with “practices of affiliation” developed in the nineteenth century “that operate self-sustainingly on or outside the dodgy ground of white-defined citizenship” (e10, e11). Yet Stancliff is also mindful of how an “abolitionist ethic of mutual aid” rooted, often, in predominantly white spaces, risks duplicating what Jeannine DeLombard in her contribution describes as “the biopolitical logic of white supremacy” (Stancliff e15; DeLombard e18). DeLombard locates that logic in the humanitarian rhetoric that typified so much antebellum moral-suasionist abolitionism. Tracing the “the semantic slippage from ‘person’ to ‘human,’” DeLombard reveals how “Garrisonians’ humanitarian tactics”—which often entailed making claims for a Black humanity that was in fact “widely undisputed”—“required the rhetorical dehumanization of enslaved people while diverting attention from the more urgent matter of equality” (e17, e20, e19). As a persistent “‘afterlife of slavery,’” DeLombard finds, humanitarian rhetoric sustains the legal forms that produce racial inequality and racial violence, rather than challenges them (e17).

In different ways, Stancliff and DeLombard both seek, in Joy James’s phrase, to “disrupt liberal and progressive politics,” especially the abolitionist trope of “white saviors as rescuers of an imploring, enslaved race” (e28). For an exemplar of such disruption, James turns to the abolitionist work of Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner who died as result of a white police officer’s chokehold in 2014. James situates Erica Garner, who died in 2017, within the tradition of “Captive Maternals”—“Black female, male, trans, or ungendered persons, feminized and socialized into caretaking within the legacy of racism and US democracy” (e29). Emphasizing Erica Garner’s “radicalism,” her “vociferous demands for justice,” and the challenge that her type of activism posed to conventional liberal politics and “popularized forms of protest,” James offers a moving portrait of an activist and ancestor whose life and legacy provide a model of “revolutionary, communal love” (e30, e34, e28, e36). In a different vein, Brigitte Fielder likewise considers the legacy of a kind of activism that remains all but illegible to the tradition of liberal reform. Fielder takes up the abolitionist work of the still-controversial John Brown, whose recent reappearance in US popular culture seems aptly timed for our political moment. Focusing on the longstanding historical question of Brown’s “madness,” Fielder shows how this persistent view of Brown “pathologizes his refusal to adhere to the most familiar genres of white violence” (e41). That is, Brown’s willingness to enact violence on behalf of Black people, Fielder shows, crystalizes both the long tradition of violent Black responses to oppression and the routine and officially sanctioned acts of white violence that too-often have remained unseen. Brown’s putative madness, then, helps to “articulate the inexplicableness of white violence that is not employed for white supremacist aims” (e45).

Of course, one reason that white violence enacted on behalf of white supremacy has gone unnoticed is that it is built into the structure of racial capitalism. Thinking through distinct “new abolitionist” problems that emerge at different scales, the last two essays focus upon sites of often-imperceptible violence: prisons and the planet. Jennifer James considers the continuities and discontinuities between slavery and mass incarceration, the latter often cast by prison abolitionists as “slavery by another name” (Blackmon). But, James asks provocatively, “what paths to Black liberation might we foreclose within that formulation?” (e52). Following Ruth Wilson Gilmore in Golden Gulag (2007), James first observes that the mass incarceration of Black and Brown people has been driven by capitalist profiteering upon idle lands rather than by the exploitation of labor—hence, a racist system, but not a form of slavery. This insight then leads James to reconsider the time before the afterlife of slavery and the “role of jail and prison in maintaining the institution of slavery” (e54). Incarceration was a key feature of slavery, one frequently depicted in slave narratives. Jails and prisons were often the places where “slave owners and the society supporting slavery . . . [could] hide the brutal operations of the system” (e55). In the forum’s final essay, Goddu identifies racial capitalism as a central problem the climate movement must confront in ways that nineteenth-century abolition never did. After all, she notes, “many of the structures that climate activists seek to dismantle—like consumer capitalism, the neoliberal subject, and class and racial inequality—were forged within the . . . [American Anti-Slavery Society’s] argument” (e61). However much capitalism “enabled Black emancipation,” it also “propelled cultural formations shoring up racial subjugation and inequality, many of which remain today” (e61). For Goddu, the climate movement must move beyond claiming the legacy of abolition as a moral touchstone and foreground racial justice, starting with the recognition that “we cannot disentangle the climate crisis from the history of slavery and the legacy of racial oppression or solve it without attending to racial justice” (e62). Contending with climate change necessarily means dismantling the systems and structures that have produced and sustained white supremacy.

Taken together, these essays contribute to our understanding both of abolition’s past and of the challenges and promises presented by the abolitionist future. Collectively, they argue that the fulfilment of the work of nineteenth-century immediatist abolition entails working outside and against entrenched formal institutions, structures, and conceptual and material systems. Or as Gilmore puts it, “abolition requires that we change one thing, which is everything” (“Making” 14). Yet Gilmore also affirms that “[a]bolition is not absence, it is presence” (“Making” 14). The just world and habitable planet toward which abolitions, past and present, labor and have labored already exists, Gilmore says, “in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities” (“Making” 14). Or as Frederick Douglass so keenly saw, there was good abolitionist work then; there is good abolitionist work now.

Works Cited

Fugitive Community Organizing from the Law of Slavery to the Migrant Protection Protocols; or, Citizenship Is the Highest Wall

Given the chronopolitical focus of this forum, I begin by underscoring Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s position that the “path to citizenship” is a gradualist construct that seeks to normalize interminable delays and a “selective distribut[ion]” of rights (188). I follow Gruesz as well in focusing the discussion on “Mesoamerican” migrants, the term designating the racialization of Indigenous people in Mexico and Central America, who make up the vast majority of migrants arriving at the US–Mexico border. For nineteenth-century abolitionists, gradualism was the contemptible counterpart to uncompromising, risk-taking immediatism, the legacies of which we have set out to track in this forum. In what follows, I chart one postemancipation “afterlife” of Black abolitionism, focusing on community practices on, off, and at the intersection of this “path,” which is made treacherous by the violence of militarized borders, mass immigration detention, and the criminalized status of BIPOC migrants. Naturalization and the promise of adoptive birthright citizenship sound a confident major chord in the siren song that has beguiled reformers, not to the rocks, but toward an always-receding horizon. Even as it enshrines the principle of race neutrality in the Constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment maps a perilous geography for undocumented migrants. Its stipulation excluding from citizenship “Indians not taxed,” which is to say, Native people refusing to abandon tribal identities or submit to geographic confinement, further indicates the calculus of spatial control underwriting the law (US Const. amend. XIV, sec. 2). The legal logic of the amendment sorts insiders and outsiders, inheritors and usurpers of the prize of birthright citizenship. Borders are one distorted mirror image of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Now in the winter of 2021, the failures of citizenship understood as a negative geography of exception and surveillance are starkly revealed, yet again, by Black Lives Matter and affiliated organizations leading an uprising against anti-Black violence in all its forms. Racial profiling, arrest, extrajudicial execution, and incarceration constitute the most egregious forms of racialized social control. We do well to remember that these perverse systems are perpetuated in the name of protecting citizens and the geographic borders that are mutually constitutive with nation-state citizenship. Border control on the US–Mexico line is an eversion of anti-Black policing and incarceration. For Black, Brown, and Indigenous migrants, citizenship is and has always been the highest wall.

Keeping in mind the complexity and potential problems of invoking abolitionism in the context of immigration, I specify that abolitionism names a politics fundamentally at odds with reform. Calls to abolish ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), immigration detention, the police, and prisons all target systems of white supremacy. Calls for abolition rally people around concrete political goals and invite them to participate in a diversity of tactics to achieve those ends. Yet abolition is neither simply nor even primarily an act of negation. Immediatism, the theory and practice of abolition without delay, qualification, or compromise, failed/fails in initiating a transformed world after abolition. Transformational communities exist in the here and now, alive and well in places where (white) people can only see abjection. Projects of mutual aid “reveal a core insight of abolitionist praxis,” as Charmaine Chua has recently argued, “that violent death-making institutions can only be dismantled in tandem with the rebuilding of life-affirming forms” (S-129).

Not recognizing the vast transborder networks of such “life-affirming forms,” a well-meaning but myopic white gaze falls on racialized Indigenous migrants traveling North to the southern US border, as Gruesz has argued. Gauging the public response to the 2014 arrival of 200,000 Central American families and unaccompanied minors, she identifies the limits of white empathy within our paradigm of sentimental affiliation, understanding, in Saidiya Hartman’s terms, the seeming inevitability of white sentiment mobilizing around a “racialized ‘scene of subjection’” (185). Sensationalizing coverage of “family separation” and “children in cages” depends on the abject figure of the stateless, homeless wretch. To be clear, I want to follow Gruesz and recommend another form of necessary disruption, one we learn from Black abolitionists and Native people who first rejected the figures of abject enslavement and the vanished “Indian,” which the Fourteenth Amendment would disappear.

Disputing deficit models still common in our scholarship, African American historiography documents the constructive, organizing practices of Black abolitionists. Very recently, in his expansive history of Black practices of citizenship in the nineteenth century, Derrick Spires details textual, geographic, and social networks of affiliation. These networks are variously at odds with claiming, repairing, circumventing, and otherwise operating outside the imperatives of citizenship as defined and enforced in the era of slavery and colonization. Since emancipation, citizenship has functioned disciplinarily as a profound constraint for the kind of Black abolitionist collectivity Spires chronicles, especially those practices of affiliation that operate self-sustainingly on or outside the dodgy ground of white-defined citizenship. Histories of marronage, fugitive cooperation, nurturing hush-harbors, and radical hospitality show us how politics of transformation are formed in community practice. The legacy of Black abolitionist affiliation can help us center and affirm migrant leadership and theoretical knowledge in the aftermath of ex-President Donald J. Trump’s continual escalation of zero-tolerance policy and his systematic sabotage of asylum processes.

After emancipation in the US, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper put a sharp point on the limits of citizenship left intact as a system of white entitlement. Across her long career, Harper maintained difficult commitments to relationships with vertical institutional power, with a white-led women’s movement, and with Republicans. Her fictions and poetry in the Black press, however, feature a wealth of stories about Black lives meant to inspire mutual aid and racial solidarity. Appearing serially in The Christian Recorder in 1869, the novel Minnie’s Sacrifice rejects any historical break at emancipation, not simply in protest of continued violence and political failure but also in affirmation of the fugitive social ethic elaborated in the first half of the narrative. Here Harper-as-documentarian maps the connections between the Underground Railroad and Black self-determination. Fugitive citizenship functions in solidarity with enlivening effects along its networks, South to North. So learns the character Louis, who, having lived on a plantation as an elite planter, sets out as a fugitive upon learning that he is the son of an enslaved mother and thus legally enslaved himself. Repeatedly on his journey, he is told by the Black people who help him, “Don’t trust your secret to any white person” (62). Louis thus unlearns a lifetime of lessons regarding the character of the Black people who offer him food, water, information about troop positions, and camaraderie along the way.

Harper’s valuation of fugitive networks (for a postemancipation, Black readership) exemplifies Spires’s rendering of Black “neighborly citizenship,” wherein “neighbors do not look for a good neighbor; they make neighborhood” (16). Compare the sustaining bonds of fugitive affection and solidarity to the broken faith of emancipation and the hazards of state-sponsored citizenship that take up the second half of Harper’s novel. Discouraged by the results of the 1866 midterm elections and the defeat of Black voting rights in the few Northern states where they appeared on the ballot, Louis sounds an uncharacteristically pessimistic note. “I see from the temper and actions of these rebels, that they are encouraged and emboldened by these tidings from the North,” Louis laments (76). “State after State has rolled up a majority against negro suffrage[,]. . . . weakening our hands and strengthening those of the rebels” (75).

The resilient, self-determining community in which Minnie and Louis live and work resembles the one Harper would recreate 20 years later in the novel Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892), as legal recourse for Blacks was nearing full collapse. Surely these narratives document the strengths of the communities Harper visited in the South after the war. Indeed, mutual aid of this kind, which exceeds the offices of citizenship, is an everyday reality in our own historical moment as well, one we ignore when we merely lament the millions of undocumented immigrants “living in the shadows” in the US.

Luis Cabrera turns such presumptions on their head, finding in the example of fugitive cooperation and solidarity across national borders a precedent for social and political integration across the Americas. Fugitives and free Black people “questioned the legitimacy of the antebellum economic and political structure, where such ascriptive markers as race and birthplace did so much to determine overall life chances,” just as current immigration systems are now “challenged by the unauthorized movement of millions seeking to address their own deprivations” (225). While hemispheric rights and cooperation remain important political goals, mutual-aid networks sustain the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US. Some of this organizing is done publicly with national and transnational reach, as in the case of groups like Movimiento Cosecha, which support decentralized networks in local communities across the country (“About Our Movement”). As was the case among nineteenth-century free Black communities in the North, however, mutual aid sustains migrant communities much more pervasively in local scenes around families, workplaces, and connections stemming from countries of origin.

Decades of attempted economic recolonization of Central America and Mexico have set the stage for south-to-north migration in the Americas and its resulting hyperenforcement. Trump’s executive order Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States (2017), issued amidst a dizzying series of alarming orders in a few short months, asserts geographic ambitions familiar to nineteenth-century scholars. The order proved to be a telling predictor of the administration’s immigration policies while the geographic reach of the subsequent federal enforcement effort raises fair comparisons to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. New foreign policy measures complement this focus on enforcement deeper within the interior of the US by taking an outward geographic tack, to the south, in an effort to exteriorize immigration policy well beyond the borderlands. Pushing its ambitious program of border militarization and hemispheric control, the Trump administration effectively deputized Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador through “Asylum Cooperation Agreements,” which provide the legal framework for returning asylum seekers to the untenable situations they have left (“DHS Announces”). The dangerous, colonizing geography of delay also takes the form of the US Department of Homeland Security’s absurdly named Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP—popularly known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy). The incoming Biden administration immediately suspended enrollments into the MMP. Whether or not the program will be dismantled remains to be seen.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has rationalized implementation of the MPP by claiming that “[t]he U.S. is facing a security and humanitarian crisis on the Southern border.” It further asserts that DHS “is using all appropriate resources and authorities to address the crisis and execute our missions to secure the borders, enforce immigration and customs laws, facilitate legal trade and travel, counter traffickers, smugglers and transnational criminal organizations, and interdict drugs and illegal contraband” (“Migrant”). The apparent ease with which a claim to humanitarian intent can be slotted into this list of policing functions indicates the fundamental compatibility of militarized borders and path-to-citizenship gradualism. Indeed, militarization and hyperenforcement have not stopped Central American and other migrants from making the journey north. Nor have “immigration crackdowns” managed to scatter migrant communities any more than the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 managed to undo Northern communities of free Black people or the workings of the Underground Railroad.

A diachronic consideration of abolition makes legible a shared ethic of itinerancy and dignity amidst geographic dislocation. Churches have taken a visible role in assisting these wanderers in what has come to be called a “New Sanctuary Movement,” aligning themselves with a history of justice work that can be traced back to an ancient Judaic and Christian practice, in which persons fleeing persecution under the law could go to places of worship and be protected. Those organizing for migrant justice claim such biblical warrants now as Black abolitionists did in the nineteenth century. People of conscience enacted this theology of radical hospitality when tens of thousands of Central American immigrants fled repressive violence of US-backed regimes in the “dirty wars” of the 1980s. Though hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans and Salvadorans died, the US government, sponsors of the violence, rather than acknowledging culpability, refused to accept asylum seekers, designating them as economic migrants, subjects lacking, it seems, the virtues required to receive even a sentimental hearing as petitioners to citizenship. Church people volunteered by the thousands, and communities of faith declared their houses of worship sanctuaries when the rate of Mesoamerican migration rose again in 2014 and 2018. We may argue with merit that sanctuary ministries in predominantly white churches risk reproducing the assumption of criminality inherent in anti-immigrant discourse since it is common to accept into sanctuary only those judged to have viable legal cases. Sentimentalized and confined to church grounds, hypervisible as the subject of church press releases that claim theological high ground, the figure of the good immigrant in sanctuary ministries thus makes an ironic double for the figure of the criminal migrant.

While ICE has for the most part adhered to the “sensitive location” policy that makes church sanctuary relatively safe tactically, state and municipal sanctuary strategies have become a flashpoint in immigration debates, coming into Trump’s sights on the campaign trail in 2016 (“What Does”). In January of 2018, then-acting director of DHS, Thomas D. Homan, announced that ICE would stage sweeps in the San Francisco area specifically as a response to the passage of California Senate Bill 54, the sanctuary-state law, which significantly limits local law enforcement’s cooperation with federal agents (Aleaziz). Nearly 200 sanctuary laws, ordinances, and resolutions have been passed in cities, states, and counties, and some have been threatened with ICE raids, credible threats given the increased rate of ICE arrests nationwide. ICE shock troops deployed in so-called sanctuary cities, as they were in February of 2020, might make a border town of any municipality in the US (Miroff and Barrett). Would the citizens in these cities, in whose name the violence and cruelty would be perpetrated, be made to feel safe by this militarized presence with a broad mandate and little oversight? We assume Biden’s election will avert further deployments, but there is currently no reason to believe that the affective force of xenophobia rationalized in the framework of security will abate.

The incoming Biden administration has announced the opening, with exceptions and unaddressed barriers, of a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants currently in the US. Whether or not there is a redemptive future for birthright citizenship, coded as it is to whiteness and confined as it is geographically by the stricture of borders, remains to be seen. With hard limits built into the Biden administration’s plan, which is sure to be modified even if it can pass through Congress, the plan still raises hopes, and yet it will be the abolitionist ethic of mutual aid—of sanctuary broadly construed as a way of living—that will sustain migrant families and communities treading this gradual pathway. Rose Cuison Villazor and Pratheepan Gulasekaram argue that no final definition of sanctuary exists, and it is precisely this complexity to which the authors attribute the political potential of sanctuary. Villazor and Gulasekaram bring a network-theory perspective to practices of sanctuary and, in so doing, decenter the questions of federalism to which the courts’ ruling on sanctuary cases have been primarily bound. Thinking through networks of mutual aid makes sanctuary legible as an unlimited system beyond litigation and formal petition to state authority. As practiced in many individual church ministries, sanctuary would seem to risk accommodating a gradualist system of control and to be of limited value, but taken as a general organizing principle, it can “challenge the federal government’s claimed monopoly on setting immigration policy” (Villazor and Gulasekaram 1214). We may not be able to abolish the behemoth of citizenship, but transformational community nonetheless survives and thrives, “making neighborhood” at the crossroads of its narrow pathway.

Works Cited

The Claims of the Humanitarian, Legally Considered

The ongoing nationwide struggle over Confederate iconography suggests we are still fighting “the Long Civil War” while the “modern-day lynching” of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd confirms “the boundarylessness of Reconstruction” (Marrs, Nineteenth-Century; Morgan and Cowan; Arbery 00:01:21-00:01:46; Marrs, “Three” 419). Our newsfeeds make it difficult to heed Stephen Best’s caution against viewing “the black political present” through the “prism” of the “slave past” (2). From policing to the pandemic, we seem to see what Saidiya Hartman, echoing Best, calls “the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (Lose 6). In response, millions are embracing Black Lives Matter, a movement founded to “affirm” Black “humanity” (“About”). But what if humanitarian rhetoric itself represents an afterlife of slavery?

In Scenes of Subjection (1997), Hartman exposed the “double-edged” “discourse of humanism,” arguing that “the recognition of the humanity of the slave did not redress the abuses of the institution” and, in fact, served as a “complement to the arrangements of chattel property rather than its remedy” (5, 6). More recently, Walter Johnson provoked rigorous debate by arguing that, in the context of slavery, the language of dehumanization “is misleading, harmful, and worth resisting” (13). Yet scholars and activists remain committed to the humanitarian rhetoric that was the lingua franca of moral-suasionist abolitionism. This preoccupation with the human, I suggest, arises in no small part from the semantic slippage from “person” to “human.” Scenes provides an instructive example. Like many critics, Hartman takes up the “seemingly contradictory” legal definition of the slave as “property and person” by placing “property” in opposition to a “humanity” that is then equated with personhood (80).¹ When, however, we realize the incommensurability of “person” and “human,” we begin to see why, from slavery to “[t]he new civil death” arising from “mass conviction,” appeals to shared humanity have been largely irrelevant (Chin 1803). At its worst, this emphasis on the human fuels the biopolitical logic of white supremacy.

“Person” is the ultimate dead metaphor. For as Lon Fuller tartly observed in 1930, “those who contend that ‘corporate personality’ is and must be a fiction should be reminded that the word ‘person’ originally meant ‘mask’; that its application to human beings was at first metaphorical” (377). Deriving from the ancient Greek prósōpon (πρόσωπον), the Latin persona denoted the theatrical mask and thus a particular role—e.g., dramatis personae. Noting that “law is often defined in Latin as ars,” or “as techne” in Greek, Yan Thomas argues that “person” should be understood as a term of art—not simply jargon but technique, artifice, invention, fabrication, or craft (104, my translation). Thus, Alain Pottage affirms, “legal technique is about making rather than knowing” (“Law” 156). Different legal persons refer not to particular human beings but to various legal roles, with their defining capacities and incapacities. One human being can support several different persons: “foreigner,” “husband,” and “master,” or “citizen,” “wife,” and “servant.” Conversely, multiple human beings can function as a single person, as in Roman patrimony, Anglo-American coverture, or the modern corporation. “[T]echniques of personification,” Pottage explains, are “constitutive rather than declaratory of . . . ontology” (“Introduction” 9).

Inspired by Colin Dayan’s brilliant analyses of slavery and incarceration, Americanists are understandably wary of formalist accounts of how law “makes and unmakes persons” (209). But in her “manifesto” for culturalist scholars of law, Annelise Riles suggests that the profound material effects of law require us to “take the agency of technological form seriously, as a subject on its own terms” (975, 1030). To do so is to eschew a “humanistic” critique that, by enlisting ontology against technology, seeks to liberate the human being from the constraining artifice of the legal person (982). Instead, following Riles, I suggest we examine “the technical aesthetics of law,” paying particular attention to the “literalization” of this “metaphor”: that is, the “transformation of legal form” (here, person) “into an object” (the human body) (976, 1009).

Today, as in Fuller’s time, we are most attuned to the artifice of legal personhood in the corporation. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014), the Supreme Court augmented the extraordinary political and economic power of corporations at the expense of innumerable human beings. Still, justifiable concern about the artifice of legal personhood should not obscure the threat posed by its pernicious naturalization. An artifact of law, the person known as “slave” should have disappeared with abolition; instead, this legal artifice became naturalized and humanized by its biopolitical identification with people of African descent.

As my invocation of Roman law suggests, personhood follows its own peculiar temporal trajectory. Roberto Esposito has suggested that rather than adopting a “continuist hermeneutic” in which history unfolds in “consecutive temporal segments,” we should view personhood as “the resurgence of the archaic in the present” (27). Just such a resurgence occurred when Anglo-American jurists looked to Roman law to accommodate the human bondage unrecognized by English common law. In Federalist No. 54 (1788), James Madison explained the slave person’s constitutive “mixed character” (332). As civilly incapacitated human property, the slave had no standing under civil law to own property, enter into contracts, initiate lawsuits, marry, claim custody of children, and so on. Yet for purposes of social control, the slave was a person with rights and duties under criminal law. Thus, on the rare occasions when enslaved people were subject to criminal process rather than private “chastisement,” prosecution temporarily revived the legal personhood of the civilly dead slave.

The transatlantic abolitionist movement sought to insert a “metaphysical opposition” into the ancient concept of human property by insisting on the humanity of enslaved people (Mussawir and Parsley 49). Hence Josiah Wedgwood’s 1787 medallion of a shackled, kneeling, unclothed Black man silently imploring, “AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER?” (“Antislavery”). The icon is notorious for its emblematic portrayal of a mute, deindividualized, servile, and supplicant slave. Less discussed is that this enduring abolitionist meme solicited affective moral engagement by calling into question the widely undisputed humanity of enslaved people. “The very idea of a slave is a human being in bondage,” proslavery Virginia lawyer John Howard observed in 1859 (“Mail Robbery” 172). Far from disputing that “the slave” is “a human being,—a human body inspired with intellect, feeling, volition,” Howard openly “conceded . . . it is that which makes him so valuable a chattel” (176). Humanitarian appeals were dangerously inadequate to a system whose profit model was to exploit the recognized humanity of the enslaved. “It is the interest and business of slaveholders to study human nature, with a view to practical results,” Frederick Douglass observed in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). “They have to deal not with earth, wood, or stone, but with men; and, by every regard they have for their safety and prosperity, they must study to know the material on which they are at work” (307).

Given Douglass’s practice of “rethinking his personal history in light of the ‘living present,’” this recollection of his enslavers may have been shaped by his encounter with Garrisonian humanitarianism (Insko 145). Coming after his detailed rendering of “Life as a Slave,” Douglass’s account of his early experience as an abolitionist lecturer stands out as the only time in the narrative that he is reduced to a neutered object (My Bondage 139). Douglass recalls: “I was generally introduced as a ‘chattel’—a ‘thing’—a piece of southern ‘property’—the chairman assuring the audience that it could speak” (366). Like the Wedgwood icon, the white abolitionist’s ironic introduction sought to secure support for the movement by seeking assent to the uncontroversial proposition that slaves were human by interrogating that very proposition. Far easier was it to affirm Black humanity than to achieve consensus regarding the equal status of African Americans in US law and culture or to debate the extent to which humans could acceptably exploit each other. The Garrisonians’ humanitarian tactics required the rhetorical dehumanization of enslaved people while diverting attention from the more urgent matter of equality.

Douglass published his exposé of abolitionist racism after he had abandoned the Garrisonian “moral suasionists,” who viewed the Constitution as a proslavery document, for the “legal suasionists,” who maintained the unconstitutionality of slavery (“The Cincinnati” 2). Yet one of his most famous lectures from that period, The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered (1854), offers a cautionary tale of how even the most alert critic could become ensnared by the abolitionists’ humanitarian rhetoric. The speech’s central concern is to reject the aspersions cast by the American School of Ethnology on “the unity of the human race” (10). First, however, Douglass feels he must rebut “the arguments directed against the humanity of the negro” (7). Douglass quotes a passage from the “Richmond Examiner” to demonstrate how a “respectable public journal . . . bases its whole defence of the slave system upon a denial of the negro’s manhood” (6). The excerpt contrasts “the negro” with the “white peasant,” noting that the latter is “not deprived by law of those ‘inalienable rights,’ ‘liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’” which by “the use of” the “will and intellect” enable him, “or at least his offspring,” to “rise in the scale of society” (qtd. in The Claims 6). By contrast, the Examiner explains, “the essence of slavery” is “that we do declare the negro destitute of these powers”: “[w]e bind him by law to the condition of the laboring peasant for ever, without his consent, and we bind his posterity after him” (qtd. in Douglass, The Claims 6). Shunning paternalist apologetics, the Examiner argues that the issue of whether enslavers “have . . . a right to do this” turns on whether “the negro has the same right to his liberty and the pursuit of his own happiness that the white man has” (qtd. in The Claims 6-7). If so, the Examiner concedes, “then we commit the greatest wrong and robbery to hold him a slave—an act at which the sentiment of justice must revolt in every heart—and negro slavery is an institution which that sentiment must sooner or later blot from the face of the earth” (qtd. in The Claims 7). “After stating the question thus,” Douglass concludes, “the Examiner boldly asserts that the negro has no such right—BECAUSE HE IS NOT A MAN!” (7).

Only, these are not Frederick Douglass’s words. He seems to have copied them, along with the Examiner excerpt, verbatim and unacknowledged, from the 1853 Thirteenth Annual Report of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (148). It’s easy to see why first the AFASS, then Douglass, would reprint this gratifyingly, albeit hypothetically, self-condemnatory passage from a proslavery Southern newspaper. Less clear is why, after such a lengthy excerpt, the abolitionists stop quoting and switch to a sensationalist all-caps summary of what should have been the editorial’s most damning lines.

If Douglass had been working with John Moncure Daniel’s “The Right of Negro Slavery” instead of the AFASS’s Report, he would have seen that the Examiner editor does not, in fact, “read the negro out of the human family” (Claims 15).² Rather, like the “bioracists” Douglass takes on later in Claims, Daniel rejects the “equality” of the “white man and the negro man” even as he affirms their shared humanity (Fields and Fields 17; Daniel 2). Like Douglass himself, Daniel acknowledges that human beings are animals. Analogizing “white men” to “horses” and “negroes” to “hogs,” he maintains, “the white is the more powerful animal” (2). Clearly, Daniel’s virulent bioracism does not prevent him from including both Euro-Americans and African Americans in the overlapping categories of “man” and “animal.” What, then, led the abolitionists to conclude that Daniel had maintained “the negro . . . IS NOT A MAN!”?

The AFASS’s misleading all-caps paraphrase points to the answer. The original, full-length editorial argues that “negroes are not men in the meaning of” the Declaration of Independence (Daniel 2). Offering “no denial of the ‘fundamental assertions’ of that document,” Daniel “modestly suggest[s], that as it was addressed by a Congress of white men to a nation of white men, that they were not talking about black ones”—and thus only the latter are “deprived by law of those ‘inalienable rights,’ ‘liberty and the pursuit of happiness’” (2, emphasis added). Alluding to the Declaration’s assertion that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,” Daniel contends that, as a government founded by and for white men, the US did not secure the rights of “black ones” (2).

This is the proslavery version of an argument Douglass routinely attributed to the moral suasionists. Throughout the 1850s Douglass deployed the “forms of law” and “rules of hermeneutics” to reject assertions by his erstwhile “Garrisonian friends” that “Negroes were not contemplated in . . . [the] liberty clause of the Constitution” (“The American” 359; “The Political” 140). “Whatever slaveholders may say,” Douglass chided, “I think it comes with ill grace from abolitionists to say the negroes in America are not included” in the nation’s founding legal documents (“The American” 361). A textualist Douglass reminded audiences that the Constitution does not “mention . . . the term slave or slave holder” and that “neither in the Constitution nor in the Declaration of Independence, is there a single reference to the subject of color” (“The Dred Scott” 176; “Freedom” 224). Indeed, Douglass feared, the “modern” tendency to replace soon-to-be archaic forms of personhood (slave, slaveholder) with their biopolitical cognates (negro, white) threatened to extend the legal logic of slavery into freedom (“Slavery” 540).

To effect just such a biopolitical switcheroo, it turns out, was Daniel’s purpose in publishing “The Right of Negro Slavery.” Happily conceding (an inferior) Black humanity, Daniel rejected the equal personhood of African Americans, regardless of condition. The Declaration’s “unalienable rights” recall the three “absolute rights” that Enlightenment jurist William Blackstone identified as indispensable to “the preservation of our civil immunities”: personal security, personal liberty, and private property (123, 125). Not coincidentally, these absolute rights constituted the civil personality denied the slave under the doctrine of mixed character. Thus, the legal suasionist Douglass contends that the “whole controversy . . . between the slaveholders . . . and the abolitionists” centers on “the question whether the rights, privileges, and immunities enjoyed by some ought not to be shared by all” (Claims 13). It could not, therefore, be the case, as the quondam moral suasionist also asserted, that “the freedom and elevation, in this country, of persons of African descent” will occur “precisely in proportion as the truth of human brotherhood gets recognition” (Claims 13). If Douglass had had access to the Examiner editorial rather the AFASS’s summary, he would have seen that Daniel’s recognition of the essential “truth of human brotherhood” did not stop him from seeking to deprive all African Americans of “the rights, privileges, and immunities” that constitute civil personality. In the long term, Daniel’s racist slurs posed far less danger than the conflation of a particular form of personhood, “slave,” with a particular group of humans, “negroes.” The result, as Douglass anticipated and Daniel advocated, was the naturalization, humanization, and racialization of the slave’s distinctive “mixed character” as civilly dead, criminally culpable person.

After the Civil War, Congress sought to reconstruct the US’ “tiered personhood” with the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), which provides that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” (Chambers; US Const. amend. XIV, sec. 1). The US Supreme Court hobbled this effort in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In the former, the Court invalidated the sections of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that criminalized racist discrimination by private individuals and entities. In Plessy, the Court allowed Homer Plessy’s status as a “colored person” to criminalize the otherwise civil activity of selecting a train seat (549). Had the Court ruled for the African American litigants in these cases, it would have signaled a decisive end to slave personhood. Ruling against them, the Court made it easier to extend the slave’s constitutive civil incapacity and criminal culpability to those it now called “persons of color” (Plessy 546). Over the past century, as observers from Ralph Ellison to Claudia Rankine have pointed out, hypervisibility as would-be criminals often renders African Americans invisible as civil persons: passengers, pedestrians, motorists, homeowners, renters, customers, employers, employees, students, parents, or children. The mask of the slave has settled into the “Veil of Race” (Du Bois 55).

Humanitarian appeals feel particularly urgent at a moment when Black Lives Matter protestors have been called “animals” by the son of a US president and “vicious subhumans” by a white police chief (qtd. in “Eric”; qtd. in “Police”). Marcus Arbery, Sr. made such an appeal when he apostrophized his son Ahmaud’s murderers: “If he committed a crime, why don’t you call the authorities? . . . But you came at him like you were hunting an animal” (qtd. in T. Thomas). In fact, Ahmaud Arbery’s activities—running, exploring a construction site—were reported to authorities. The 911 calls created the pretext for former police officer Gregory McMichael and his son Travis to claim that they killed him while trying to make a citizen’s arrest. Like George Zimmerman’s shooting of Trayvon Martin, Arbery’s murder mimics the similarly pretextual killing of unarmed African Americans by on-duty police officers. Either way, presumed criminality forms the pretext for the constant “racializing surveillance” that structures the everyday reality of #LivingWhileBlack (Browne 18).

Marcus Arbery, Sr. therefore draws an important distinction: to be hunted like an animal is to have one’s humanity denied whereas to be suspected of a crime is to be defined as a legal person. “I can’t breathe” is, definitively, the cry of a human being. By the time a police officer’s (equally human) knee or arm elicits that cry, however, law as technology has already generated the person known as criminal suspect. That particular form of personhood is disproportionately assigned to humans of African descent. The humanitarian rhetoric we have inherited from moral-suasionist abolitionism makes it hard to see that the ongoing crisis posed by racism to liberal democracy arises less from a refusal to recognize Black humanity than from the persistent failure to reconstruct personhood in the US.

Works Cited

Abolitionist and Ancestor: The Legacy of Erica Garner

1. Ancestor as Tradition

Most peoples . . . seem to believe that the spirits are what remains of human beings when they die physically. This then becomes the ultimate status[,] . . . the point of change or development beyond which . . . [one] cannot go apart from a few national heroes who might become deified. . . . [One] does not, and need not, hope to become a spirit: [s]he is inevitably to become one, just as a child will automatically grow to become an adult. . . .

John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophies (77-78)

Within worlds where captivity and violence are racialized features of conquest, political leaders who die prematurely from illness or violence while in movements for social justice can become celebrated as icons. Without slipping into hagiography, we can note the importance of more obscured ancestors who illuminate avenues for liberation without becoming wrapped into the symbolism of heroism. In abolitionist discourse, those who are historically iconic from the antebellum abolition, civil rights, and Black liberation eras, when remembered (or allowed to be taught in classrooms), are often viewed as abstract symbols: Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Mamie Till-Mobley, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Hampton, George Jackson. As activists and agents of change, out of love for family and community, they experienced considerable trauma and risked their lives to further democracy and freedom.

In the quest to abolish racism, heterosexism, classism, exploitation, and imperialism, militant activists do not necessarily live long enough to attain the stature of elders. Yet their purpose is to live long enough to serve the development of community, to work to help free others, and to encourage political and ethical education. In the Americas, John S. Mbiti’s traditional African philosophy evolved out of New World devastations: conquest, genocide, and slavery; convict-leasing, Jim Crow, and sharecropping; COINTELPRO, mass incarceration, and police violence. Hence, philosophy was tied to a political function: freedom from conquest. Philosophy mutated under captivity. Political education would require the spiritual presence of the deceased who pursued justice. Ancestors as spiritual forces, released after the death of the political leader, would guide human development.

In Congolese philosophy, political education requires that the one/collective experiences a nonconventional reality, one “found between the spiritualized ancestors and the physically living thinkers” (Fu-Kiau 62). Today’s progressive activists can be considered the physically living thinkers and leaders who analyze and contemplate abolitionist possibilities and promises—which exist in varied ideological forms. Seeking knowledge for equity, de-carceration, and community care, living thinkers, as abolitionists, find the “deepest reality”—as aspiration or secular religion (Fu-Kiau 62). That deepest reality requires not just acknowledgment of historical ancestors but also engagement with the spiritualized ancestors who have recently departed and whose activism disrupted political gamesmanship. Sometimes ancestors are so spirited that their fierce, radical critiques disrupt liberal and progressive politics and diverge from popularized forms of protest, e.g., the sectors of Black Lives Matter (BLM) aligned with the Democratic Party. When the “deepest realities” become contested, an ancestor who challenges decorum and convention with political rebellion can become an amnesiac ghost. For example, Erica Garner, a departed-combatant “Captive Maternal,” delivered cutting critiques of liberal politicians—whom radicals viewed as obstructionists—that alienated loyalists to a Democratic mayor, governor, and president who presented themselves as concerned progressives (James, “The Womb”). Those who sided with political power were encouraged to reject the “deepest realities” expressed by Garner.

In theory, ancestors would share the vision necessary to guide communities out of the Minotaur’s maze. Yet the past seems not only to lead but at times to hamper the present moment. The eighteenth-century algorithm for abolitionism enshrined white saviors as rescuers of an imploring, enslaved race. According to Vincent Brown’s Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War:

Slaveholders cited black militancy as a justification for their brutality. In response, late-eighteenth-century abolitionists would rally around the image of a kneeling supplicant begging to be recognized as a man and a brother, as if the condemnation of evil required the meek innocence of its victims. That icon of abjection has shaped the prevailing understanding of bondage and race to this day. (17-18)

The alternative (and antidote) to a white-savior formula dominant in conventional antiracist politics is ungendered Black agency in mass protests against police killings of unarmed Black Americans. As an abolitionist, Garner rejected an eighteenth-century formula to confront twenty-first-century barbarity.

2. Captive Maternal Abolitionist Erica Garner

The only thing I can say is that she was a warrior. . . . She fought the good fight. This is just the first fight in 27 years she lost.

Esaw Snipes, mother of Erica Garner, December 2017 (qtd. in Wang)

As Black female, male, trans, or ungendered persons, feminized and socialized into caretaking within the legacy of racism and US democracy, “Captive Maternals” originate from communities devastated by or disappeared within the legacy of colonialism and chattel slavery. As caretakers who minister to the needs of their communities and families, Captive Maternals expend emotional and physical labor in stabilizing the social and state structures that prey upon them. US democracy built political power by extracting the labor from Captive Maternals. The theft of their generative powers is repurposed to extract material and “existential” wealth derived from white supremacy by way of labor exploitation, denigration, gerrymandering, voter suppression, redlining, educational disenfranchisement, mass incarceration, political imprisonment, medical experimentation/neglect, and police violence. “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft, and the Captive Maternal” references the evolution of US electoral democracy through the Three-Fifths Clause that led to the Electoral College disproportionately selecting Southern proslavery presidents. The Three-Fifths Clause meant that representational power was determined in part by counting enslaved people. Thomas Jefferson was able to defeat John Adams in the 1800 presidential election because those enslaved on plantations, including Sally Hemings and her offspring by Jefferson, “voted” for enslavers as presidents.

In contemporary forms of captivity, the incarcerated at Attica prison in 1971 were also Captive Maternals, whose captivity reproduced the prison. They cleaned, cooked, and nursed the ill, distressed, or dying out of necessity, coercion, kinship, and affection. That first stage of conflicted care reflects more than reproductivity; it also displays conformity to and stabilization of predatory, prison-like structures in order to mitigate harm and obtain benefits. When a Captive Maternal rebels against their role as coerced or conflicted caretaker, they can enter into stages shaped by abolitionism: protest movements, maroon camps, war resistance. 2021, for example, is the fiftieth anniversary of New York’s Attica prison rebellion. In 1971 in Attica, prisoners became human-rights protesters (Kaba). Within prison walls, they organized to change their function from coerced labor or caretakers to protesters, then maroons, and finally war resisters. When protesters took over the prison, they created a maroon camp within its walls, coordinating shelter and food distribution, political education, and media communiques about their liberation manifesto. They became war resisters when, with the approval of President Richard Nixon, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller sent the national guard to treat a human-rights struggle as an act of war (Little). Using submachine guns, the Guard suppressed the prison movement for dignity and to be paid more than “slave wages.” The Guard killed ten prison guards held as hostages and some 29 incarcerated activists (prison guards allegedly tortured and killed movement leaders after the retaking of the prison [Yuhas]).

Erica Garner (1990-2017) was also a Captive Maternal. Her resistance to war waged by police against unarmed civilians took place on New York City streets. She differed from Hemings not because of the centuries and chattel status that divided the two but because Garner left a trail of political rebellion for Black freedom; in that way, she was more similar to those incarcerated at Attica. Garner transitioned from being a loving mother and dutiful daughter to a grief-stricken protester after the police homicide of her father in 2014. Her leadership shaped and inspired a mass movement that rocked NYC streets and subways. It reflected a NYC Black Lives Matter that was more diverse, militant, and distanced from elites and political celebrities. Garner became a protester, a political maroon alienated from Democratic Party politics, and a war resister; her radicalism saw Garner relegated to an outsider status in well-funded advocacy platforms.

The month before Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, by white police officer Darren Wilson, Eric Garner was killed on a Staten Island street by suffocation from chest compression and an illegal chokehold exerted by New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo. Garner protested being harassed for allegedly selling loose cigarettes (the state never provided proof that he was indeed selling “loosies”); he had broken up a fight between two men on the street just before police accosted him. Although Garner asked them repeatedly to leave him alone and explained that he had committed no crime, a police officer attempted to handcuff him while Pantaleo walked behind Garner and put his arms around the victim’s neck to force Garner to the concrete. Garner is recorded on video that circulated everywhere, saying, pleading, begging “I can’t breathe” 11 times before he stopped speaking. Then he was denied medical attention by the white ambulance crew that was called to provide assistance once police observed that he was no longer breathing. Multiple New York City Police Department (NYPD) officers milled around him, including some who had piled on top of Garner before he expired, while warning the gathering crowd of concerned and outraged citizens to stand back (“‘I Can’t’”). Garner’s friend Ramsey Orta took cellphone footage of Garner’s struggles for life, a record he shared with the Garner family and the public. Orta had arrests before he captured the footage of the police violence against Garner and of the negligence by emergency medical technicians that led to Garner’s death. After release of the cell recording of Garner’s homicide, Orta was routinely targeted by the NYPD and incarcerated at Rikers Island in 2015 on weapons-possession and drug charges (Safdar). Orta took a plea deal on those charges and was sentenced in 2016 to four years in prison (Safdar).

According to Erica Garner’s friend and co-activist Reggie Harris, Erica Garner “was a daddy’s girl” who “loved hard.” She was also a “mother, a sister and a loyal friend.” She became an activist in order to seek “justice for her father, Eric Garner.” According to Harris, Erica literally “put her entire life into this fight, not only for herself but for everyone Black, [yet] she got no changes.” She fought for three years, and the stress became unbearable: “The fact that her death took place mere weeks after she took a year off and a few months after having her child is not lost” (Harris).

Media would randomly play the footage of Eric Garner’s homicide in US news coverage about the deaths of other Blacks killed by white police. Erica Garner noted that her five-year-old daughter would try to protect her mother (and herself) by turning her back to the television when the footage of her grandfather’s death appeared; in brief moments of solidarity and care, the child became the Captive Maternal for the parent as she engaged her mother in conversation to check in on her feelings (Day). After the news images of the assault on her grandfather concluded, the child would turn back to the television. In 2015, the NYC government had awarded a wrongful death settlement to Eric Garner’s families for $5.9 million (Goodman). NYC withheld payment for several years. Erica Garner would die without the benefit of those funds at the end of 2017, at a public hospital serving low-income patients (Woodhull 5).

3. Presidential Politics and Abolitionist Activism

I’m struggling right now with the stress and everything. . . . This thing, it beats you down. The system beats you down to where you can’t win.

Erica Garner, interview with Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon, see video 00:00:12-00:00:22).

Historically, racist killings of Black children sparked rebellions and activism. Memories of these mobilizations are covertly or overtly embedded in culture over generations. For example, white Mississippians tortured and lynched fourteen-year-old Emmett Till on 28 August 1955 for an alleged whistle (or lisp) when addressing a white former beauty queen in Money, Mississippi. Eight years later to the day, African American trade unionists organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation) where Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his historic “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial (“Aug. 28”). In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign chose the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington as a symbol of racial reconciliation. As had the Kennedy Administration, the Obama campaign orchestrated an event to affirm civil rights and cultivate the Black vote, using the symbolism of King’s “I Have a Dream” oratory for social justice. Even without direct reference to King by name—Barack Obama’s Democratic National Committee (DNC) acceptance speech only referenced “the preacher,” allegedly in order to cultivate centrist, white Christian voters—many recognized the significance of 28 August as the date on which the first Black presidential candidate of a major party accepted his nomination (“Transcript”). In a late-night interview with Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) journalist Gwen Ifill, Rev. Jesse Jackson, a former aide to King, noted that the historic event on 28 August 2008 referenced more than the 1963 March on Washington (“Jesse Jackson”). One of its “deepest realities” was to point toward the murder of Emmett Till.¹

Black radicals kept the memory of Emmett’s torture and the acquittal of his murderers alive largely because Till’s Captive Maternal, his mother Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on having an open-casket funeral for her murdered child. Photographs of the funeral juxtaposed the mutilated child with images of him smiling and healthy, posing with his mother. Jet magazine published the photographs and circulated them across the globe. They shook people to the core and propelled them into resistance. Indeed, those images helped to spark Rosa Parks’s refusal to relinquish her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, months after Emmett Till’s death (“Emmett”).

The historical symbolism of the 2008 DNC was replicated in 2016 when Hillary Clinton became the first woman nominee for president from a major party. Just as it had been for the Kennedy and Obama administrations, race was central to the narrative of democratic progress. However, after several years of sensational deaths of Black people through interactions with police or vigilantes during the Obama administration, BLM protests and activism dominated the political arena (Donald Trump built his electoral base with pro-police, anti-BLM rhetoric). At the 2016 DNC in July in Philadelphia, Mothers of the Movement took to the stage to advocate for Clinton. They included Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin; Geneva Reed-Veal, mother of Sandra Bland; Lezley McSpadden, mother of Michael Brown; Lucy McBath (now a Congresswoman), mother of Jordan Davis; and Gwen Carr, Eric Garner’s mother (Bradner and Scott).

Erica Garner’s chosen candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders, conceded to Clinton at the DNC (Sanders was booed by delegates who wanted no concession). When Garner endorsed Sanders for president in 2016, she contributed to the insurgent’s challenge against a DNC led by Obama and Hillary and Bill Clinton. Garner pitched the concept of a presidential campaign ad titled “It’s Not Over,” an ad that directly confronts racist police violence, to the Sanders campaign (Garner, “Erica”). Garner conceived, directed, and narrated the ad, which pundits and activists described as the most compelling campaign ad in 2016. In a 2016 National Public Radio interview, Garner explained her support for Sanders: “He’s been, basically, a protester his whole career. He’s not scared to go up against the systematic racism that exists in America today” (“Daughter” 00:01:36-00:01:46).

In the campaign ad, Sanders only appears at the very end; in a rousing campaign speech he asserts that “when a police officer breaks the law” by killing an unarmed Black person, then “that officer must be held accountable” (Garner, “It’s Not Over” 00:03:19-00:03:27). Sanders’s remedy to police violence was the boldest among all presidential candidates in the major parties. In the ad, Garner narrates her journey into activism after police executed father. She addresses both the camera and her young daughter. Garner talks with her daughter about Black lives and struggles, walks her daughter to elementary school, and takes to the streets to join mass protests. The ad went viral and was covered by mainstream-media outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post even though mainstream media rejected Sanders’s candidacy and his denunciations of the “1%” or “billionaire class.” The ad depicts Captive Maternal functions of nurturing and stabilizing family and of sharing life, love, and struggles. When Garner tells her young daughter about civil rights ancestor Rosa Parks, she introduces the child to her inheritance: “This is what Mommy is. I’m an activist” (Garner, “It’s Not Over” 00:00:52-00:00:54). Activism highlights what was and would be stolen from the Garner family—and what would be wrestled back: dignity, purpose, commitment to reconstitution of family, and demands for police to be accountable for their crimes. In October 2016, media reported that DCLeaks released hacked emails revealing that Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein (convicted in 2020 for rape) had approached Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, urging him to focus on the Sandy Hook school shooting and Sanders’s stance on gun rights, in order to counter the impact of Garner’s ad; Mook responded with enthusiasm (Jilani). Erica Garner’s abolitionism was distinct and, for some, threatening. She crafted her own image and advocacy; without establishment mentor or management, her contributions were singular. Garner’s confrontational street theater, especially die-ins on city streets that blocked traffic, rattled and infuriated the NYPD. She criticized the Democratic Party as hypocritical in its concern for Black well-being in the face of constant racism, violent policing, and poverty. She was combative with police officials, rank-and-file officers, and Democratic Party officials (mayor, governor, president) who offered condolences but few if any effective policies (Pinto).

With growing frustration, Erica Garner met with and petitioned politicians to investigate the NYPD. Her rhetorical warfare with Mayor Bill de Blasio included verbal vulgarity popularized by presidential candidate Trump (@es_snipes). She disparaged Governor Andrew Cuomo; she yelled protests at President Obama’s televised town hall on race and policing. A video recording appeared briefly on the internet after Garner’s December death, showing her walking out of that staged town-hall event presided over by Obama on the anniversary of her father’s death. Shouting, Garner declared that she had been told that she could ask a policy question but instead was used as a mute figure in a photo op. Loudly berating the gathering while being whisked away through the hallways, Garner made evident her sadness and sense of betrayal and outrage. The president and his advisor Valerie Jarrett appear briefly in the clip to caution Garner on how best to conduct herself in politics before Obama backtracks, offers condolences, and then repeats the mandate for public civility. (HuffPost released an edited video of the encounter, omitting Obama’s brief chastising about appropriate political tactics [Workneh].) In the hall, Garner asks Obama about the 1033 Program (Workneh, see video 00:01:40-00:01:49).² Feeling silenced, or manipulated, by Democratic leaders was the emotional condition that Garner shared with trusted allies and journalists.

Garner’s truth-telling was rejected by most Democratic politicians and pundits who felt uncomfortable, even resentful, toward her and other radicals. Yet vociferous demands for justice were part of her immense capacity: “Even with my own heartbreak, when I demand justice, it’s never just for Eric Garner. It’s for my daughter; it’s for the next generation of African Americans” (Garner, “Black Lives”).

4. Remembering the Ancestor

[Knowledge is] the experience of that deepest reality found between the spiritualized ancestors and the physically living thinkers.

K. Kia Buseki Fu-Kiau, The African Book without Title (62)

The Garner family did not agree on political responses to the police homicide of their father and paternal head of household(s). Erica Garner’s two sisters, two brothers, and mother rarely appeared as public, political advocates until after her death, when they took on more prominent roles in advocacy for police reform. In 2019, two years after Erica Garner’s death and five years after Eric Garner’s homicide, NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill, just before retiring, fired Pantaleo for using the banned chokehold (Southall). A grand jury had determined Garner’s death a justifiable homicide and refused to indict Pantaleo in 2014 (Eversley and James). The public later learned that Pantaleo had multiple misconduct complaints before he applied the chokehold that suffocated Eric Garner to death; those complaints had been withheld from the public due to New York’s 50-a law (Taibbi). Also in 2019, the Trump Department of Justice announced that it would not bring civil rights charges against Pantaleo (Benner). After the 2020 summer protests decrying Minneapolis police killing George Floyd, New York repealed the 50-a law, which shielded police misconduct files, and passed the Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act (Heastie). Carr appeared with Governor Cuomo at the 2020 signing of the Act (Lardieri). Families that had lost loved ones to police violence denounced the ceremony for the new law as a photo op to burnish the image of a governor known as being “pro-cop.” If she had lived, Erica Garner likely would have boycotted the signing of the Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act.

In July 2020, New York Attorney General (AG) Letitia James held public hearings on NYPD violence against peaceful protests in the wake of George Floyd’s homicide. The AG’s report contributed to litigation against the NYPD and NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio for civil rights violations (New York; Offenhartz; Offenhartz et al.). During the Zoom hearings, this author watched NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea assert that among the current legislative changes inspired by BLM only the repeal of the 50-a shield law had a real impact on the police department (James, “‘Amnesty’”). The NYPD subsequently filed a lawsuit to challenge the repeal that released to the public records of police violations (Jordan).

Some (legislative) victories for police reform seem hollow. Some traumas following police encounters appear transformative. A devastated “daddy’s girl” was painfully transformed into a courageous political operative for democratic values after police killed her father. The (re)birth of the daughter as a militant abolitionist tied personal, familial love to revolutionary, communal love. Erica Garner’s exhausting duties as a Captive Maternal preceded the demise of her father; as the daughter of a Black victim of police violence, the mother Erica Garner developed into a militant activist in pursuit of transformative politics. Although a police commissioner, mayor, governor, and president all refused to force police to be accountable to the public, Garner labored for justice until deteriorating health and medical distress following childbirth led to her death. Garner continues to exemplify a caretaker who offers instruction into the realities shaping a democracy built upon violence and Black captivity. An ancestor, Erica Garner embodies the will and memories of Captive Maternals who wage freedom struggles.

Works Cited

Black Madness, White Violence, and John Brown’s Legacy

During the current pandemic, amid the continuing litany of unarmed Black people murdered by police and widespread demonstrations for racial justice and protests against anti-Black violence, increasing attention has been drawn to the possibilities and failures of white antiracist activism.¹ Black lives have always mattered to some people. But they have not mattered enough to the white majority in power. In recent years, images of white allyship (though often merely performative) have proliferated in the form of public articulations of solidarity, institutional diversity statements, variously effective committee work, and edifying reading lists. It has become clearer than ever that white people ought to shoulder a greater burden of the work against racism than they have in the past, and popular conversations contemplate what roles they should play in this labor. White abolitionism’s resonances ring loudly in this twenty-first-century moment, recalling a long history of white action and inaction. John Brown stands at one end of the broad spectrum of examples. Two cinematic depictions of the radical abolitionist debuted in 2020: the Showtime miniseries The Good Lord Bird, an adaptation of James McBride’s 2013 novel, and Emperor, Mark Amin’s film based (rather loosely) on the life of Shields Green, a (possibly) self-emancipated Black man who participated in Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry.² The first of these has received far more attention while the latter has mostly flown under the radar of popular opinion. Although they differ significantly in tone and focus, their most notable divergence in their portrayals of Brown is the question of his madness.

Discussions of the TV series have focused on Ethan Hawke’s irreverent portrayal of Brown. In a review, Mike Hale casts Brown as “a figure whose intentions, importance and sanity are still up for debate,” lauding Hawke for his uncondescending rendering of a man with what he calls an “unquiet mind.”³ Hawke’s Brown foregrounds assumptions about his madness. In contrast, Emperor’s representation of Brown—played by James Cromwell—is an uncharacteristically understated portrait. Here Brown is determined yet measured. In his review of the film, Peter Debruge describes “a declaration of solidarity between African Americans and their allies—those who join the crusade for equality even when it may not benefit them directly—that has only gained in relevance amid the [2020] summer’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations.” But the idea of Brown’s madness discourages taking such solidarity seriously. The specter of Brown’s madness overshadows discussions of him in ways that prevent the productive tracing of his relationship to white racist violence. I here consider Brown alongside the racialization of both madness and violence. The idea of Brown’s madness, racialized as Black, pathologizes his refusal to adhere to the most familiar genres of white violence—marking his illegibility within the system that understood white violence only as aligned with white supremacy.

Brown’s apparent insanity has been an issue of popular and scholarly debate even though it was decided, in a way, at Brown’s own trial, for which he was determined fit to stand and receive punishment. Brown himself denied any insanity as did many people who knew him personally. But the image of demonic Brown persists. For example, in a review of David Reynolds’s Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times (2020), Robert W. Merry critiques characterizing Lincoln as an admirer of Brown. “Ultimately,” Merry argues, “[Reynolds] can’t get around the fact that Lincoln was a saintly genius while Brown was a murderer, a traitor and a madman.” Moreover, the persistence of representing Brown’s radical abolitionism as madness raises questions about the relation of antiracism to (dis)ability. As Therí Pickens describes the confluence of racism and ableism, “[i]n an ideological construct of white supremacy, Blackness is considered synonymous with madness or the prerequisite for creating madness” (4). Understandings of Brown as mad are rooted in his relation to Blackness; they couple madness and Blackness in the ways Pickens describes.

Pickens’s use of “mad” deliberately employs “a lexical range that includes (in)sanity, cognitive disability, anger, and, for anyone who remembers the slang of the 1990s, excess” (Pickens 4). Brown may not have been insane or disabled, but he was mad—angry—at the many injustices of slavery. Twenty-first-century Black critics such Brittney Cooper and Austin Channing Brown have discussed the ways that Black anger (and Black women’s anger, in particular) is pathologized even when that anger is justified or serves a pragmatic purpose. For Black people’s refusal to simply absorb racism has long been dismissed as illness. In 1851, the proslavery Southern physician Samuel A. Cartwright coined terms describing two imaginary, racialized mental illnesses. The first, drapetomania, described a supposed condition that caused enslaved Black people to flee slavery (707). The second, dysaesthesia aethiopica, was ostensibly the cause of laziness among enslaved Black people who resisted forced labor and—especially—among free Black people, whose labor had to be purchased for white benefit (709). White people have pretended that Black people were mad for desiring freedom or resisting forced labor, pathologizing their justified anger and resistance. Like Black people, Brown was mad and rightly so.

Brown was also, in the 1990s slang sense of Pickens’s definition, mad antislavery. White discomfort over Brown’s abolitionism is not confined only to those with proslavery views; even antislavery adherents have characterized his abolitionism as excessive. Discussing the many possible meanings of “insanity” in Brown’s nineteenth-century context, Robert McGlone notes that it was defined “in narrowly rationalistic terms” (217). Not just mental illness but irrationality, then, attended claims of what was termed as Brown’s supposed madness-as-monomania—an accusation of excess rather than a condemnation of violence. The charge of excess is the idea that Brown cared too much about slavery, particularly for a white person. As Frederick Douglass famously described Brown’s Black sympathy, “though a white gentleman, [he] is in sympathy a black man, and is as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery” (F. D. 2). In the preface to his 1909 biography, W. E. B. Du Bois similarly described Brown as “the man who of all Americans has perhaps come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk” (xxv). These assessments held that Brown cared about Black lives as much as white people cared about white lives.⁴ Black lives mattered to Brown so much that he used violence to effect Black liberty. Brown’s pro-Black violence defies the fundamental logic of white supremacy: that white racism and white violence are inevitable. Claims of Brown’s madness—of irrationality or excess—naturalizes white racism, holding racism as not only probable but necessary. Brown’s excessive action disproves this naturalization, defying the logic of white supremacy and exposing white violence as a choice, something that could be otherwise.

Critics past and present have cited Brown’s violence as their main justification for disapproval. But violence alone did not earn their disapproval; it was violence committed in the name of Black liberation. And that characterization is the foremost reason for Brown’s continued prominence. Countless Black people fought for their freedom—often illegally, and often violently. According to Kellie Carter Jackson, “[f]or many white Americans, Brown represented the black political violence that they understood in Haiti and feared in America” (107). Brown’s legacy is intertwined with a fear of Black violence, accompanied by “a propensity to privilege the performance of nonviolence and deny the possibility and utility of violence as the great accelerator in American emancipation” (Jackson 3). Brown believed not only that Black people ought to be free, but that they had as much a right to use violence to achieve freedom as did white people. These beliefs became illegible in a context in which white violence overwhelmingly supported white supremacy.

Violence was hardly unusual in the antebellum US. Certain kinds of people—especially Indigenous and Black people—could be beaten and raped and killed at will, even as their violent antagonists have never been granted the popular opprobrium afforded to Brown. Meanwhile, Black people and their supporters were expected not to return this violence with violence. Despite his own unwillingness to join Brown’s plan for Harpers Ferry, Douglass declined to argue with Brown’s reasoning. A November 1859 article in Douglass’ Monthly submits that Brown “has struck the bottom line of the philosophy which underlies the abolition movement. He has attacked slavery with the weapons precisely adapted to bring it to the death. Moral considerations have long since been exhausted upon slaveholders. It is in vain to reason with them” (“Capt. John” 1).⁵ Abolition would not be achieved through moral suasion.

The prioritization of decrying violence against white people overlays interest in Brown. To understand Brown, one must acknowledge the larger context for this violence, one that registers not only violence against white people but also a long history of anti-Black white violence that was the prerequisite for Brown’s. While articulating this violence may seem commonsensical, it bears mentioning that certain kinds of violence—particularly the innumerable, mundane violences that are sanctioned by law—are often elided in conversations about exceptions such as Brown. What Carol Anderson has called “white rage,” a differently oriented racialized madness from Brown’s, has historically manifested in white violence. As Anderson writes, “[w]hite rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies” (3). What violence is visible and what is rendered invisible, what is supported by state institutions and what lies outside of these, matters for the question of whose and what kinds of violence even register as such. Brown’s violence is notable specifically because it was not the usual white violence.

It is fitting that Brown was convicted of treason but not treason in the usual, legal sense. Inasmuch as Brown was a traitor to the state of Virginia, he was, more specifically, a traitor to white supremacy. Understanding Brown not only in terms of his legal conviction but as a race traitor is essential to grasping how and why the idea of madness hangs so heavily over his image. The normalization of anti-Black violence is in fact what illuminates Brown by way of stark contrast. Even the Union army hesitated to enlist Black soldiers, preferring the white-savior trope to sanctioned Black, wartime violence against Confederate soldiers. Moreover, even the violence of Confederates was more readily forgiven. Both Lincoln and Andrew Johnson pardoned soldiers who had fought in the Confederate army. The latter, as Annette Gordon-Reed notes, was so generous in his amnesty “that even Jefferson Davis would be pardoned” (140). Johnson found mercy for those who had been traitors to the US while failing, as Anderson reminds us, like Lincoln to repair a racist system (9).

This point was not lost on Brown’s contemporaries. An 1861 newspaper piece asked the question “Why Was John Brown Hung?,” criticizing the pardoning of Confederate soldiers and concluding with a clear “Moral—Fighting for slavery is justifiable; fighting for freedom is treason” (523).⁶ Moreover, Johnson failed to curtail white violence against Black people. Anderson writes that “murder, rape, and robbery . . . were not seen as crimes at all so long as whites were perpetrators and blacks the victims” (13). Gordon-Reed explains that “it is impossible to exaggerate the tragedy of Johnson’s failure” to address anti-Black violence, given its abundance and its prominence (117). The pardoning of Confederates stands in contrast to the execution of Brown and six other participants in the Harpers Ferry raid. On 6 January 2021, when people breached the US Capitol, some also paraded a Confederate flag around its halls. This is no coincidence, given the attempted coup’s connections with various ideologies of white violence. Neither is it surprising that we must wonder what punishment will follow for these actions or whether these people, too, will be forgiven, their white violence again abetted by institutions of US law.

One might compare how allegations of madness failed to save Brown’s life but saved those of Confederates, with how mental illness fails to mitigate danger for Black victims of police violence but is employed as an extenuation for enactors of state-sanctioned violence or even perpetrators of white domestic terrorism. As Anderson claims, “white rage manages to maintain not only the upper hand but also, apparently, the moral high ground” (4). This is how one can place Lincoln and Brown alongside one another and call one a saintly genius and the other a murderer and a madman.⁷ How many people Brown may have killed with his own hands is unknown, but suffice to say, Lincoln was effectively responsible for far more deaths. To give just one example, during the Dakota War, Lincoln abetted the largest formal mass execution in US history, allowing 38 Dakota Sioux to be hanged in Mankato, Minnesota, in 1862. Capital punishment is violence however it may be sanctioned by the state. And in this, one must not forget that Brown was not only a perpetrator of violence but also a victim. The elision of capital punishment as violence is a gaping hole in many popular discussions of Brown, although this too is related to the idea of his madness.

While Brown himself rejected the proposed insanity defense, this legal framing of Brown’s madness also did not serve the purposes of the state of Virginia, which was more interested in enacting a quick trial and public execution that would be a warning to other abolitionists. The choice to execute Brown was so decisive as to risk his martyrdom for the cause. But Brown, significantly, is not framed as a martyr who was unfit for trial and execution. Brown’s madness does not free him from culpability in the eyes of the state. Pathologized, he is voided of any possible sympathy or compassion. Rather, this rhetoric of madness oddly divorces Brown’s mental capacity from the question of whether it is just for a truly insane person to stand trial and receive a death sentence. The perpetual image of Brown’s madness stands apart from the possibility of this line of defense. It is not framed as a mitigating factor for his actions but as a point of additional degradation. It renders him ridiculous though still dangerous—so dangerous that the state needed to murder him publicly.

A November 1859 article in Douglass’ Monthly titled “Capt. John Brown Not Insane” called an insanity defense of Brown “a mistaken friendship, which seeks to rob him of his true character and dim the glory of his deeds, in order to save his life” (523). Moreover, the article calls out Brown’s mental health as a red herring in the conversation about racism and power, explaining that “a Virginia court would hang a crazy man without a moment's hesitation, if his insanity took the form of hatred of oppression” (523). In his study of Brown, Benjamin Quarles observes,

Blacks held that society, rather than John Brown, was deranged. They were innately suspicious of such a charge against any friend of theirs. They were accustomed to hearing that reformers, particularly those who championed blacks, were wrong in the head. They knew that any white who advocated equal rights for blacks was likely to be regarded by any other whites as being not sound of mind. (119)

Allegations of madness articulate the inexplicableness of white violence that is not employed for white supremacist aims. Brown is called mad because his relationship to Blackness has been deemed inappropriate, subverting the supposedly natural flow of white violence.

Without an attendant grounding in white (supremacist) rage, Brown’s violence becomes inexplicable for the conventional narratives. But it is otherwise explicable. Osborne Perry Anderson, who fought with Brown at Harpers Ferry, was the only Black participant known to escape following the raid. He acknowledged that Brown did not initiate but responded to white violence, writing in his account that Brown “regarded slavery as a state of perpetual war against the slave, and was fully impressed with the idea that himself and his friends had the right to take liberty, and to use arms in defending the same” (9-10). In an address at Storer College, Douglass similarly characterized slavery as war and Brown’s intentions as defensive in an 1881 address on Brown. In her discussion of African American war literature, Jennifer James notes the differences between war and slave revolt but also highlights war’s oppositional, national violence, as well as its literary and rhetorical underpinnings. In Osborne Anderson’s and Brown’s framing of their violence as war, we see also a resistance to what James calls a “forgetting” or erasure of violence, which “is encouraged by the obscuring languages of the state” (31). To read Brown within the larger movement of Black antislavery activism is to recall slavery’s violence and to contextualize antislavery violence as defensive rather than offensive, a response that recognizes the white supremacist violence to which Black people necessarily responded.

Black people’s tendencies toward radical abolitionism that included violence make sense, given their experiences and knowledge. Manisha Sinha describes Brown’s Liberty Guard in Kansas alongside the various Black militias in the North and Canada West, which were a precursor to the Union Army’s Black regiments (454). Jackson writes that “[n]o other episode in antebellum history centralizes black thought on the use of force to overthrow slavery better than Harpers Ferry” (106). Jackson decenters Brown in her discussion in order to read this event in light of its Black influences, understanding Brown “not as a leader of a single, anomalous event but as a follower of black revolutionary violence who put this tradition into practice” (107). Reading against the grain of white, moderate abolitionism, Jackson describes “the influence of black activism in accelerating violence at the local, state, and national levels” leading up to the Civil War (9). It is in this context that she reads Brown and in which we might understand popular desires to interpret his violence. Beyond understanding Brown as a precursor to the Civil War (overwhelmingly framed in terms of white antislavery violence), we can view Brown not just as “an anomaly” in his methods, as he is for Reynolds, but also in the larger landscape of violent resistance to white supremacy (138).

It is in the context of Black abolitionism and not white abolitionism that Brown’s violence becomes even more vivid. In the pages of The Anglo-African Magazine, for example, writers did not shy away from discussing abolitionist violence. Joseph Murray Wells envisioned “God, who is ever merciful and just,” having commissioned Brown “[t]o teach the South a lesson through this town— / To make her know the height of her offences,” as part of a holy charge to “[b]reak every yoke, and let the oppress’d go free” (24, 27). Harpers Ferry was explicitly compared to Nat Turner’s insurrection, aligning Brown’s raid (as Du Bois would later do) with slave rebellion (“The Nat Turner”). Frances Ellen Watkins (Harper) interpreted the events as a hopeful allegory leading from the bloody violences of slavery to the abolitionist revolution yet to come.

Reading Brown in this context—as many Black writers have—is also to understand him as a much more dangerous white radical abolitionist. Harriet Jacobs’s tribute to Brown, planned as the last chapter of her 1861 narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, was omitted at the urging of her editor, Lydia Maria Child, who argued that the tribute did not fit well with the rest of Jacobs’s narrative. Scholars including Bruce Mills, Albert H. Tricomi, and Reynolds have supposed Child’s urging stemmed from her disapproval of violent abolitionism. Despite this seeming dedication to nonviolence, Child did approve of some violent representations in Jacobs’s narrative, even asking her to expand upon the violence enacted upon Jacobs’s Black community in retaliation for Nat Turner’s insurrection.⁸ The emendation of Jacobs’s narrative of emancipation suggests that white violence against Black people was explicable, even though it was reprehensible, but that retaliatory violence could not be incorporated into this story. Caleb Smith, however, reads a review of Jacobs’s narrative in the Weekly Anglo-African, as “an incendiary call to arms” that “would move its public to wrathful violence” (745). Thus, the question of what Jacobs may have written about Brown may depend upon how and whether—and to whom—a narrative of violent enslavement made Brown’s violence legible. When one acknowledges Brown’s violence among a larger Black response to slavery, he becomes much less exceptional while his thwarted actions also point to a much longer, larger, and ultimately more successful action against slavery. In this reading, Brown’s madness is justifiable, not pathological.

As white people in the twenty-first century consider their roles as abettors of or adversaries against racism, the resonance of white abolitionism rings loudly—in all the various tones with which white people have responded to the movement for Black emancipation. Whether and how white people are willing and able to participate in the struggle against racism are key questions for the 2020s, as they were for the 1850s. Since 2004, John Brown Gun Clubs have been organized in cities from Lawrence, Kansas, to Puget Sound, Washington, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. These locally operated organizations vary in their priorities, but they generally support armed self-defense and mutual aid, taking up the image of Brown and urging poor white and working-class people, especially, to work against racism. The Truckee Meadows John Brown Gun Club in Reno, Nevada, for example, states an imperative on its Twitter account profile: “Arm yourself against white supremacy” (@TMJBGC). In the late 2010s, these organizations have increasingly included antifascism among their priorities. For those on the Left who more often characterize emphasis on the Second Amendment as excessive—even mad—the grand display of white violence in early 2021 may make one pause long enough to consider whether these methods are more practical than pathological. Many wonder what forms of violence are yet to come and to what extent these will continue to be ignored or even advanced, rather than punished, by complicitous state and federal governments. We may also wonder which white people will rise up to combat white supremacy, and by what means. How one understands violence—whether normalizing it to the point of erasure or deeming it outside the bounds of comprehensibility—matters. Considering the white violence and ableist racism that contextualize the image of Brown-as-madman, we might better recognize the racialization of violence and madness that continues to condemn and pathologize pro-Black emancipatory efforts past and present.

Works Cited

Black Incarceration: Before and Beyond the Afterlives of Slavery

1. Beyond the Afterlife

Activists and academics tend to divide Black abolitionist movements into four historical campaigns: the campaign to end slavery, the campaign to end lynching, the campaign to end segregation/Jim Crow, and, now, the interanimating campaigns to dismantle the entwined institutions of prisons and the police. When framed historically, the calls to abolish prisons rely on a now-familiar temporal narrative. Chattel slavery is abolished. The postbellum practice of convict leasing, characterized as neo-enslavement, replaces it. Then, after convict leasing is declared illegal, mass incarceration begins—depicted once again as a form of slavery. We are familiar with both the language and the analysis addressing this vein of thought: the mass imprisonment of Black people and slavery are structurally continuous, an argument that focuses on the exploitation of Black prison labor in the postemancipation period and after.

For example, in the opening chapter of Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Angela Davis, who cofounded the abolitionist organization Critical Resistance, relies on Mary Curtin’s research into convict leasing in Alabama as a reestablishment of slave labor, to help ground Obsolete’s exploration of the prison-industrial complex. Douglas Blackmon, citing much of the same research, has famously called convict leasing “slavery by another name” in his book carrying that title: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008). Ava DuVernay’s widely viewed documentary 13th (2016) introduced the legal loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery to the many millions who have encountered her now-canonical film. Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a cofounder of the Black Lives Matter movement, and asha bandele call prisoners “literally an enslaved workforce” in their 2018 memoir When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matters Memoir (131). In perhaps the most influential published critique of modern Black imprisonment, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), Michelle Alexander turns to W. E. B. Du Bois’s invocation of slavery in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935) to limn the relationship between Black codes and compulsory labor:

Clearly, the purpose of the black codes in general and the vagrancy laws in particular was to establish another system of forced labor. In W.E.B. Du Bois’s words: “The Codes spoke for themselves. . . . No open-minded student can read them without being convinced they meant nothing more nor less than slavery in daily toil.” (28)

My point in listing these texts and noting their repeated invocation of enslavement is not to debate whether there was structural continuity between slavery and postbellum institutions such as prison “work farms” or the practice of convict leasing. Clearly there was. Nor am I suggesting that comparing current Black prisoners who are compelled to labor within public or private prisons to the enslaved is mere hyperbole. We live in the wake. Still, I would like to consider what analyses get lost within the dominance of the neo-slavery narrative. When we say that twenty-first-century mass incarceration is “slavery by another name,” to echo Blackmon, or the rebirth of a caste system forged in slavery, as Alexander claims, what other operations do we elide? What do we miss? More importantly, what paths to Black liberation might we foreclose within that formulation?

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, another cofounder of Critical Resistance, provides a partial answer. In her award-winning study of the rise of the prison state in California, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007), she poses an important question regarding the explosive growth of California prisons in the decades leading up to the publication of her work: “Why prisons now?” (20). After dismantling the myth of the alleged uptick in crime in the 1980s and 1990s—crime was going down before the number of prisoners went up—Gilmore also targets what she perceives as activists’ overemphasis on private-prison profit-making as the primary cause for prison expansion (20). The incarceration-for-private-profit argument, she contends, is that prison constitutes the new slavery and that millions in cages are there to provide cheap labor for corporations looking to lower stateside production costs.

The problem with the ‘new slavery’ argument is that very few prisoners work for anybody while they’re locked up. Recall, the generally accepted goal for prisons has been incapacitation: a do-nothing theory if there ever was one. There has certainly been enough time for public and private entities to have worked out the logistics of exploiting unfree labor, and virtually every state, including California, has a law requiring prisoners to work. But the fact that most prisoners are idle . . . undermines the view that today’s prison expansion is the story of nineteenth-century Alabama writ large. (21)

The intervention here is that the tendency to reduce prisons to places where capitalists hold Black bodies to extract labor for private industry in the manner of Alabama convict leasing diverts attention from the less visible but more insidious iterations of both racism and capitalism. As she views the matter, the expansion was not a “conspiracy” to corral labor; it was instead rooted in an excess of surplus: the surplus of “certain kinds of people, land, capital, and state capacity” (24, 26-27). Put simply, the collapse of particular industries in California created both massive unemployment and abandoned lands. The purpose of building new public prisons was to find ways for finance capitalists and the state to work together to profit from developing this “idle” land, especially in rural areas. They eventually settled on the solution of building prisons although the solution could have taken many other forms, as Gilmore makes clear. And once these prisons were erected, they could not remain empty. Benefiting from the new anticrime hysteria, legislators were able to target “certain kinds of people”—the “idle” Black and Brown jobless, now criminalized for an endless proliferation of low-level offenses—to fill those new facilities dotting the landscape. “The prison fix” became a “geographical solution to political economic crises” (Gilmore 87, 26). A racist policy? Yes. Just not in the way many claim, Gilmore says. Slavery? Absolutely not. On that point, Gilmore is emphatic.

Her intricate examination of the complicated set of factors driving the California prison expansion suggests that our incarceration problem cannot be adequately interpreted within the framework slavery provides nor fully captured within the imagery it evokes. At the same time, we can recognize that “A Surplus of Certain People, Land, Capital, and State Capacity!” hardly makes for a riveting protest mantra. But as an abolitionist, Gilmore’s goal is to understand exactly how prisons happen so that we can eradicate them. A “‘new slavery’ argument,” Gilmore claims, cannot perform that liberatory work. Without explicitly doing so, Golden Gulag is asking its readers to look beyond the afterlife of slavery.

2. Before the Afterlife

The mobilization of slavery in twenty-first-century prison-abolitionist discourse also contributes to a temporal disjuncture in discussions of Black incarceration. That is, the emphasis on postbellum convict leasing and work farms as a new form of slavery often ignores the presence of jails and prisons and other carceral institutions within the institution of slavery itself. The attention to slavery’s “afterlife” in relation to Black incarceration has the unintended effect of obscuring the afterlife’s long before—a before captured in the abundance of anti-incarceration writing and thought that the nineteenth-century antislavery movement produced. Indeed, as I will suggest, abolitionist condemnation of jails and prisons—decried as tools to regulate and punish Black bodies within the slave system, to nullify Black freedom, and to quash antislavery activism and dissent—may have helped lay the theoretical groundwork for contemporary anti-incarceration politics. These abolitionist critiques revealed how far penal institutions had deviated from the ostensible, original purposes of incarceration: penitence, salvation, and rehabilitation.

After the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, antislavery, abolitionist, and Republican papers were filled with pieces denouncing the immorality of the new law. They denounced it as a clear case of what we might now call “government overreach.” The provisions for imprisoning any person who harbored or concealed a fugitive or who hindered a fugitive’s arrest ended up criminalizing both the runaway and anyone considered an accomplice. It was no less than a state-sponsored form of legal and judicial terror. It terrorized self-emancipated Black people seeking liberation in the North. It terrorized legally free Blacks who could now be declared someone’s property on a whim. And it extended that terror to anyone who had the temerity to stand up for Black freedom. Yet even before this law made jail a symbol of the slave states’ outsized power—a power that the federal government allowed to dominate North—the role of jail and prison in maintaining the institution of slavery had already emerged as a concern.

As Keith Michael Green points out in Bound to Respect: Antebellum Narratives of Black Imprisonment, Servitude, and Bondage, 1816-1861 (2015), famous slave narratives such as those by Briton Hammon and Henry Bibb portray stints in penal institutions. Frederick Douglass mentions being tossed in jail for having run away. In her later narrative, Harriet Jacobs details how the local jailhouse was deployed in handling and managing slaves; in one instance, when she had hidden herself away, her family members were remanded to jail in an effort to coerce them into betraying her whereabouts. Jacobs also writes that the town constable whipped slaves both inside and outside of the jail’s walls. Green notes the function of such jails:

[P]laces like the Chowan County jail abetted African American disenfranchisement and subjugation. In the context of the domestic slave trade, jails served as spaces of “safekeeping” for recaptured runaways and those who would be sold further south. They were also used in daily slave management to control slave behavior, and the employment of whipping through the jail often maintained asymmetrical relationships between blacks and whites. (36-37)

According to Green, the scholarly focus on Jacobs’s time in the garret as an imprisonment has caused us to spend less time with her actual representations of jail. So we miss what Jacobs may have meant to demonstrate in those depictions. In another example, Jacobs mentions how her master wields the threat of jail in a failed rapacious attempt to force Jacobs into a sexual relationship with him. Green indicates that Jacobs wants her readers to see that the jail and the threat of jail were central to maintaining an illusion of white benevolence and innocence. In taking “full advantage of the Chowan County jail,” Green writes, Jacobs’s master could hand off the dirtiest work of being a slave owner—discipline and punishment—to the jail while styling himself a “gentleman” and preserving his “respectability” (37, 38).

Coverage of an event that I recently began researching supports Green’s theorizing about the use of jail to veil the operations of slavery. When an 1849 slave mutiny broke out in the infamous Charleston Workhouse in South Carolina (also known as the Sugar House), a correspondent to The Liberator conveyed their urgent desire to fully represent the workhouse’s operations. The editors ran the lengthy letter under the headline: “THE CHARLESTON WORKHOUSE—THE CURTAIN RAISED!” (Placido 3). The North Star and other papers ran similar exposés of the conditions within the institution. What goes on there, the correspondent claims, is nothing short of torture: “Let me say that it is not a house of industry; . . . it is a house of blood, of cruelties and of murders; an institution erected and licensed by . . . authorities, solely for the imprisonment and . . . punishment of the poor degraded slave” (Placido 3). Like Green’s suggestion about Jacobs’s representation of the Chowan County jail, the coverage of the Workhouse mutiny depicts this penal institution as more than just another horrific part of the system of slavery. It functions, the author implies, as an institution through which slave owners and the society supporting slavery can hide the brutal operations of the system.

Twenty-first-century prison abolitionists argue that mass incarceration also depends on forms of concealment. Disappearing Black people into jails and prisons enables the removing of offending bodies from our sight—largely the people whom our so-called social safety net, left in tatters from years of austerity, has failed. The jail or the prison takes over, and we, on the outside, can feign unawareness about the collective failures that have led to this burgeoning incarcerated population, and feign an equal unawareness about the horrific things occurring inside these institutions. We can say that the peace and order of the unincarcerated world depends on their existences. We can preserve our respectability and maintain our innocence while penal institutions and their injustices proliferate. To underscore this point, I return to a different part of Khan-Cullors and bandele’s memoir. Much of that memoir is concerned with Khan-Cullors’s mentally ill brother who is in and out of jail and prison, largely because of the absence of medical care for the economically marginal and because of the reflexive ascription of criminality to Black men, mentally ill or not. The answers to what her brother experienced while in the Los Angeles County jail come via e-mail:

I’m going through my e-mail when I notice one from the ACLU of Southern California. They have filed an 86-page complaint against the LA County Sherriff’s department for torture. Seventy of the 86 pages are testimonies from survivors and those who were witnesses to torture. The report, which includes prisoners’ testimony and that of jailhouse chaplains who could not be silent, reveals that under the watch of Sheriff Lee Baca, torture in the LA County Jail was, for at least two decades, pervasive, gruesome, systemic and routine. (158)

Ultimately, if we are searching for continuity between enslavement and Black incarceration, we cannot look only to slavery’s afterlife; we can and should examine the way carceral apparatuses were used in the period of slavery itself. The time before the afterlife can offer us insights into the structural and ideological continuities of racialized incarceration. And yet if we focus our analyses of the prison-industrial complex too greatly on the slave past, we might fail to fully grasp how prisons come into being and function in the present. Understanding that will help us answer the most urgent of Gilmore’s questions: “What is to be done?” (241).

Works Cited

Climate Activism as the New Abolitionism

In her conclusion to This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014), Naomi Klein proposes the antislavery movement as a model for the environmental activism needed to tackle the climate crisis: “only mass social movements,” she writes, “can save us” (450). Having spent the body of her book identifying early manifestations of resistance movements currently underway, she concludes by rallying her readers around the belief that since “mass resistance movements have grabbed the wheel before,” they “could very well do so again”—as we have recently seen with the Black Lives Matter protests (452). She singles out the antislavery movement as a compelling historical example of transformative social change: “[t]he movement for the abolition of slavery in particular shows us that a transition as large as the one confronting us today has happened before—and indeed it is remembered as one of the greatest moments in human history” (455). Similarly, a wide range of environmentalists, scientists, and journalists invoke antislavery leaders as a guide for climate activists. Bill McKibben declares that the climate movement needs “the urgency of William Lloyd Garrison, or even more” (qtd. in Stephenson 30); James Gustave Speth states that it “must capture the spirit of Frederick Douglass” (187); James Hansen argues that climate change is analogous to the issue of slavery “faced by Lincoln” (211); and The Guardian presents a gallery of “climate change abolitionists” who, in bravely fighting “uphill battles” for a more sustainable world, follow in the footsteps of Garrison, Douglass, Tubman, and Stowe (Winston). The climate crisis, they all argue, requires a new abolitionism, one that harnesses the lessons of the past to abolish fossil fuels if not capitalism itself.

As an international movement that created a paradigm shift similar to the one needed globally today on climate, antislavery serves as an inspirational success story for many. Its key lessons for the climate movement are economic, moral, and cultural (see Burkett). Economic divestment from the fossil-fuel industry requires, as Christopher Hayes argues, corporations to strand their assets by leaving carbon in the ground. “It is impossible to point to any precedent other than abolition,” Hayes states, that forced ruling elites to relinquish trillions of dollars in wealth (13). A Harvard Faculty for Divestment white paper makes a similar claim: “[p]erhaps the only historical example of an industry nearly as integral to a society’s functioning (while simultaneously destabilizing it) is slavery during the colonial era and into the 19^th century” (Chaplin et al. 7). Britain’s payout to enslavers (5% of GDP), they continue, “compares relatively closely to the estimated value of all publicly traded fossil fuel firms today, which comes to a massive 6% of global GDP” (Chaplin et al. 7). Dismantling the fossil-fuel-energy system requires a “radical economic transformation,” a disruption to business as usual for which antislavery—however problematic its “reverse-reparations” model of paying the enslavers rather than the enslaved—offers some instruction (Klein 453, 457).

As the “greatest human rights victory of its time,” antislavery is also seen as a moral exemplar for the climate movement (Klein 457). According to Eric Beinhocker, climate activists need to assume the moral mantle of antislavery by framing the climate crisis as an ethical problem—much as the Pope’s environmental encyclical or Greta Thunberg’s righteous anger on behalf of her generation do—a deep moral wrong against nonhuman and human life, which needs to be righted. Antislavery embodies the uncompromising rhetoric and ethical arguments that climate activists have not yet effectively employed: “[t]he climate movement has yet to find its full moral voice,” Klein asserts, stating that “we will not win the battle for a stable climate by trying to beat the bean counters at their own game. . . . We will win by asserting that such calculations are morally monstrous” (464). Likewise, in his numerical jeremiad, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” Bill McKibben ends by stating that “the more carefully you do the math, the more thoroughly you realize that this is, at bottom, a moral issue; we have met the enemy and they is Shell.” The way to take on the fossil-fuel industry and its entrenched economic interests is to moralize it as evil. The good-versus-evil construct that US antislavery deployed—the free North versus the slave South (despite the North’s complicity in the slave economy)—is not as easily deployed by climate activists since we are all explicitly implicated in the use of fossil fuels; indeed, McKibben argues that tackling the climate crisis is like trying to build “the abolition movement from slaveholders.” A moral framework, however, provides the clarity, authority, and urgency needed to propel collective action. According to Craig Segall, we need to treat climate change as a “moral crisis” for which we all “must take responsibility and action” (10,862).

Antislavery also provides a powerful example of how social movements can radically transform public opinion and reshape what is politically possible. To address climate change, we need culture change. For Klein, deep social transformation occurs not simply through choosing the right policy battles (the Keystone XL pipeline comes to mind) but also through telling new stories that present alternative worldviews and shift cultural values, stories that make people think, feel, and see differently (462). Adam Hochschild, whose Bury the Chains (2005) chronicles the British antislavery campaign and who is now asked to consult on what climate activists can learn from abolitionist movements, articulates the central lesson (in addition to coalition politics) of antislavery as effective communication (“Adam” 00:37:00-00:37:28, 00:34:43-00:34:56). The British antislavery movement, Hochschild asserts, pioneered the use of new media—creating the first internationally recognized logo, the kneeling-slave icon, and inventing human-rights journalism—to market its message (“Adam” 00:05:40-00:05:55). An understanding of how antislavery produced, packaged, and promoted its arguments can help climate activists identify how they might shape and mobilize their own.

For instance, the first task of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) in the 1830s was to produce the cruelty of slavery as a social fact. It did so by drawing on the emerging discourse of numeracy and new information technologies. By gathering authenticated evidence and compiling statistics about slavery and by iterating them over and over again, the AASS coalesced the cruelty of slavery into a hard fact (think here of antislavery’s iconic image of the slaveholder whipping the slave). Through a mass of facts, it made visible the workings of slavery and produced a knowledge system perceived as credible. By distributing its facts in popular print forms, such as The American Anti-Slavery Almanac, which was a bestseller circulating over 100,000 copies in 1838, it reached a wide audience (Goddu 51). Despite scientific consensus, the climate movement has yet to persuasively frame climate change as a social problem. Al Gore’s charts and Bill McKibben’s math are two examples of the climate movement’s factual appeal to the head, but more appeals are needed, especially those that clearly visualize the data—as the antislavery almanac’s use of graphic prints did (Goddu 44-48)—and translate the science. Most importantly, such appeals need to be more closely coordinated. The AASS’s argument succeeded because it was standardized. All of its facts were made to add up to a single sum: slavery’s cruelty and horror. 350.org’s decision to boil down the complexity of climate science to a single number—the safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—that needs no linguistic translation across the globe is one start.

Besides numeracy, the climate movement needs, as antislavery did, narrative. The AASS understood that its mass of hard facts was not enough; it had to move people. When met with indifference, antislavery agents were counseled to distribute publications in which the slave spoke for himself (Goddu 56). Through the emotive power of sympathetic identification, the enslaved’s first-person accounts animated the statistics of slavery. While such identification hardened racial hierarchies (like the other iconic image of antislavery, the kneeling slave), it was crucial to the success of the antislavery movement. The AASS’s facts might prove slavery’s cruelty, but its first-person narratives asserted enslaved peoples’ humanity and, hence, the need to intercede on their behalf. The climate movement similarly needs to foreground eyewitness testimonies of places and people—as, say, Maya Lin’s memorial What Is Missing? does, by archiving personal memories about what has “diminish[ed] or disappear[ed] from the natural world” (“Share”). The climate movement can also find lessons from organizations like Climate Generation and forums like the Climate Stories Project, both of which collect personal stories about climate change in order to animate the public’s imagination by deepening their affective connection to the issue.

While institutional antislavery offers a compelling model of cultural change, it succeeded because it worked with rather than against its culture’s emerging narratives, especially those of capital and class. The AASS consented to capitalism even as it dissented from slavery. The AASS was a disruptive force—as many who make the connection to the climate movement imagine—and also served a reinforcing function. Indeed, many of the structures that climate activists seek to dismantle—like consumer capitalism, the neoliberal subject, and class and racial inequality—were forged within the AASS’s argument (Goddu 7). The antislavery movement instances as much a cautionary example for the climate movement as a positive one: if US antislavery speaking with the culture of emergent capitalism took 30 years and a disastrous war to achieve its aims, how can the climate movement speaking against the culture of late capitalism succeed on a much shorter time frame?

Perhaps most importantly, the antislavery movement also provides a warning for the climate movement in terms of its vexed racial legacy. As I conclude in Selling Antislavery, the AASS’s media machine enabled Black emancipation even as it propelled cultural formations shoring up racial subjugation and inequality, many of which remain today (224). Proposing white-dominated institutional antislavery as a model for the climate movement, then, means contending with the longstanding whiteness of mainstream environmental organizations as well as the dominant cultural narratives they drive: pristine nature rather than toxic racism, for example (Taylor). While that mode of environmentalism has begun to yield to more intersectional models, its history and narratives remain to be grappled with and undone (Thomas; Heglar). Antislavery’s unfinished legacy of racial liberation underscores how we must locate environmental racism and justice—as the Green New Deal does—at the core of climate activism. We must, as Reverend Lennox Yearwood, Jr. argues, see climate justice as racial justice and racial justice as climate justice.

Meaningfully recentering the climate movement on racial justice requires more than analogizing it to antislavery since even those who make this connection rarely raise the issue of race. Rather, it necessitates a recognition of the direct historical connection between the climate crisis and slavery. As one of the proposed terms for our current era, the Plantationocene, makes clear, climate change cannot be decoupled from histories of slavery and colonialism (Haraway et al.; Davis et al.). For the climate crisis is one of slavery’s many afterlives. The global expropriation of people and plants, labor and land that typified plantation slavery was not only a watershed moment in climate history but also inaugurated a form of racial capitalism that still fuels crises of climate and racial justice (Robinson). The plantation complex’s degradation of the environment—through extraction and enclosure—and subjugation of Black life—through brutalization and alienation from the land as well as loved ones—are the “ugly blueprint[s],” to borrow Katherine McKittrick’s phrase, for contemporary anti-Black environmental toxicity and economic dispossession as well as state-sponsored violence (10). Eric Garner’s and George Floyd’s dying words—“I can’t breathe”—speak to the environmental inequities and institutional racism killing Black lives: Garner suffered from asthma exacerbated by pollution (Yearwood), and Floyd tested positive for the coronavirus, a disease that disproportionately affects Black populations (Neuman). Thus, as David Naguib Pellow postulates, ecological and social violence are “closely intertwined” (35).

The slave narrative, which records the brutal birth of the Plantationocene, makes the connections between environmental degradation and racial oppression clearly visible. It frames the plantation as an economic, ecological, and racial regime whose land and labor practices rely on exploitation and violence. From Charles Ball’s cotton field to Mary Prince’s salt ponds, the slave narrative exposes how plantation slavery destroys the landscape. The slave narrative reveals the clear-cutting of forests and the exhausting of soil to propagate the monocultures of agrocapitalism, as well as the brutalizing of Black flesh, as the whip marks on Ball’s back and the salt boils on Prince’s feet signify. The plantation is a place of ecocide as well as genocide; to address one is necessarily to attend to the other. By insisting that we cannot disentangle the climate crisis from the history of slavery and the legacy of racial oppression or solve it without attending to racial justice, Black intersectional environmentalism follows Black abolition in seeing race and climate as co-constitutive.

The rejection of anti-Black racism, then—and not just the lessons of institutional antislavery—must form the center of climate activism if we are to resolve the climate crisis. We must abolish more than fossil fuels (McKibben) or capitalism (Klein) but white supremacy itself. For Nicholas Mirzoeff, we are living not just in the Anthropocene but specifically the “white supremacy scene,” an age inaugurated by the “‘white’ (Euro-American) domination of the colonized and enslaved African, Asian, and Native populations of the world” (123, 124). Ta-Nehisi Coates links the history of America’s white Capitalocene, which transformed Black people into the “fuel for the American machine,” to its rising seas and the “mechanized death of our ghettos” (70, 150). White supremacy, which plunders and kills Black bodies, also puts “the noose around the neck of the earth.” It is “the deathbed of us all,” Coates proclaims (151).

Likewise, in “The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance,” Saidiya Hartman envisages (in dialogue with W. E. B. Du Bois) mass extinction from environmental catastrophe as the endpoint of racial capitalism. Paradoxically, it is only when the “world is dead” that the Black man is “permitted to live as a human for the first time” (Hartman). For both Coates and Hartman, the end of white supremacy is only imaginable as extinction itself. While Klein ends her manifesto on a utopian note, seeing in capitalism’s demise an opening for a more just and equal society, Coates, who closes his meditation on race in America with a scene of him driving through the streets of Baltimore with the rain “coming down in sheets” (152), and Hartman, who concludes her critical fabulation on the end of the world/white supremacy with the murder of her Black protagonists, are less sanguine that such a transformation is possible. Rather than romance, they leave us with the “Struggle” (Coates 68). It is by attending to how those already “trapped in the graveyard of the world and bereft of any future they can count on” survive—enslaved people’s narratives of resistance and insurgent knowledges, I would suggest—that we will find the lessons needed for our own impossible times (Hartman).

Works Cited

Footnotes