[News] How Today’s Abolitionist Movement Can Fundamentally Change the Country

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 https://theintercept.com/2020/06/27/robin-dg-kelley-intercepted/ Scholar
Robin D.G. Kelley on How Today’s Abolitionist Movement Can Fundamentally
Change the Country
Jeremy Scahill - June 27, 2020
------------------------------

*We are living* in a moment of change and upheaval, a time of immense pain
and suffering, but also a time of hope and tremendous possibility. We are
nearing four years of an incompetent but dangerous authoritarian — Donald
Trump — occupying the most powerful office in the land. We are in the midst
of the deadly coronavirus pandemic. And we are just four months away from
presidential and congressional elections.

*Jeremy Scahill:* Robin D.G. Kelley, thank you so much for being with us
here on Intercepted.

*Robin D.G. Kelley:* Thank you.

*JS:* So I want to begin just with the most recent events. We had Trump on
Saturday giving this rally to six thousand people. They had a stadium that
could have fit 19,000 people. Six thousand people are in there. Trump
originally was going to hold it on the Juneteenth holiday. He then moved it
one day later. At that rally, Trump claimed that the left is trying to
“desecrate our monuments.” And as people across the country are continuing
to rise up against police brutality, police murders, systemic racism in
this country, demanding the removal of Confederate monuments to
slaveholders, put Donald Trump’s comments and his decision to hold this
rally in Tulsa in a historical context.

*RK:* Right, well there are a couple of things. One, this also happens to
be the 99th anniversary, or commemoration, of the Tulsa race massacre of
1921. And so choosing Tulsa wasn’t an accident. Just like choosing
Juneteenth, June 19th, as the original date for this event wasn’t an
accident. And I think Tulsa has a very interesting story, not because of
what we typically talk about — that is the destruction of the Greenwood
community in 1921, which was a Black community often called Black Wall
Street because there was a significant Black business district — but
there’s a carceral story to it. And that is after destroying this
community, with the support of the police and deputized white men in Tulsa,
destroying hospitals, public libraries, businesses, churches. After that,
they literally incarcerated some 7,000 people, Black people, interned them
in camps and held them there through the winter of 1921-1922. So imagine
you’re rendered homeless and you’re forced into internment camps and your
crime was being Black. Because in some ways victims of that kind of
violence was the Black community and, again, it’s sanctioned by the state,
sanctioned by the state department. White mobs come in and they literally
destroy homes and loot. And so here is an example of looting in which Black
property is stolen, taken, and destroyed. And over 300 Black people were
killed, at least that much, we know that.

So the other aspect of course is that choosing June 19th initially was a
kind of double slap in the face. Juneteenth represents emancipation, you
know? It is the date, June 19th, 1865, when Galveston, Texas was occupied
by the Union army and there was a declaration that slavery had come to an
end. In other words, it was when Texas fell during the Civil War. It’s not
true to say that Black people didn’t know they were free. Many people did
know that, but the point of the fact is that Juneteenth had become a day of
celebration of abolition, but it was also, historically, at least for the
last century and a half, a day of reflection and organizing on the part of
Black communities. I mean Juneteenth was the day in 1968 chosen to have a
massive solidarity rally in support of the Poor People’s Campaign.
Juneteenth was the date that the Black Radical Congress was launched in
1998. Juneteenth is the day that a lot of struggles around housing,
opposition to police brutality, other issues, also just reflecting on the
question of freedom and democracy. So there’s a long history of Juneteenth
as representing the very opposite of what Trump tried to claim, and that is
to turn that date into a reassertion of his authoritarian rule and in many
ways it was a white rally.

Tulsa, Oklahoma as a whole is a really interesting place for another
reason, which I don’t think anyone ever talks about, and that is that
during the 19th century, with the Homestead Act — which itself was a means
of continuation, of the continuation of dispossessing Indigenous peoples —
the Homestead Act actually created an opportunity to have all Black towns.
Oklahoma happened to have more all Black towns than any other state in the
Union. And many of these towns were, like the Greenwood district, places of
Black autonomy, economic independence, and those towns were all subject to
racial pogroms and violence. Many of them were razed, destroyed, or just
starved of basic necessities like access to water or other kinds of things
that people need to maintain towns. So, in some respects, Oklahoma has been
a battleground state for both Black freedom and, in some respects, for
white supremacy.

And one other small thing about Oklahoma, and we don’t talk about this
either, in the period of disfranchisement — late 19th century, early 20th
century — Oklahoma was one of those places where poor whites, many of whom
were also disfranchised. And that’s an echo of a memory that many people in
that stadium, all 6,000 of them, have no understanding of. Even in the
framework of white supremacy, the class politics, the class rule in a place
like Oklahoma could lead to the disfranchisement of poor white people. I
mean, this is the reality that we’re facing and to me it has echoes for the
next stage of American politics.

*JS:* You wrote a very powerful op-ed in the New York Times recently and I
wanted to ask you a bit about that because at that same rally in Tulsa,
Donald Trump claimed that Democrats want “rioters and looters” to have
“more rights than law-abiding citizens.” In your New York Times piece
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/opinion/george-floyd-protests-looting.html>,
you explored how this obsession with looting and looters has been used for
a pretext for expanding the police and their budgets and their operational
capabilities and how it ultimately centers on the question of: What kind of
society values property over Black life? How is Donald Trump using that
word “looters” in this instance? I mean, set it in the historical context
of this country.

*RK:* “Looting” is a Hindi term that says more about the British looting of
India — that is, colonialism — than it says about, you know, what we call
“flash looting,” as these massive riot-related acts of theft. And so in
some ways what Trump does is so typical. In other words, he’s not, he
doesn’t break with tradition. The tradition in this country has been to
identify looting as criminal behavior. That is, to either treat it as an
extension of protest strategy, but what it does is it creates a false
equivalence between the state’s relentless use of lethal violence — as if
that’s the least important thing — and the kind of episodic political
violence by people who are trying to fight back, or people who are taking
advantage of the crisis, of the lack of restraint, to try to get
commodities. Especially in a context where over 40 million people have
applied for unemployment. But to me that’s even less important than what
Trump is doing. By targeting, by marking people as looters, it not only has
a kind of racial context — that is the looters are the people who are
disrupting the country, who are the folks who are dependent on welfare,
poor, violent — but by focusing on looters, there’s a long history of
identifying looters as a criminal element. Yes, there are lots of reasons
for looting, but once you do that, it justifies increased expenditures and
expansion of police, and even the militarization of the police.

And let me just give you an example. So in the 1960s, you could pick up
almost any article in the press from the 60s and you’ll see the exact same
question being posed today. Why do they loot? Why do people loot? And we
know that the answer’s always wide-ranging: economic, political, it’s
criminal, it’s senseless, it’s normative, it’s deviant, all these things.
But one thing that came out of those articles was what became the
prevailing theory of law enforcement. And that is that once looters were
identified as hard-core criminals who just hadn’t been caught, as thugs,
political scientist James Q. Wilson took this idea that looters were
basically criminals — they were not people in acts of desperation, they
were not people who were acting based on the lack of restraint or
responding to a crisis — but once they become criminalized then, Wilson, in
this 1968 essay, extended the argument to say looting is an expression of
latent criminal tendencies in Black communities. And from that seed, he and
criminologist George Kelling created broken windows theory. And broken
windows theory policing basically makes this argument that criminals
flourish in bad neighborhoods. And when people disrespect their community,
they disrespect the authority and therefore law and order. Looters are
those who disrespect authority and law and order. Therefore, we have to be
able to tamp down on the smallest infractions, because any infraction —
loitering, jaywalking — could lead to violent crime.

And so broken windows theory, which of course we know now has been
repudiated, ignores the structural racism that created horrific conditions
in these communities, that suppressed home values, that led to the
divestment of services to certain urban communities that cause health and
environmental problems, that reduce jobs, led to high unemployment, and
also reduce legal protections for working people, people of color, the poor
in urban communities.

So in some ways, it was like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You create
policies that quite literally kill people, deny them basic goods and
services, deny them employment, deny them a livelihood, and that level of
desperation — people who are basically desperate and you police them
through what is essentially a kind of fascist structure of violence,
rendition, and we’ve seen that in places like Chicago, where people are
brought to places and tortured, and you have this criminalization of
community as opposed to dealing with crime. And so broken windows theory as
a response to the notion that poor people are, themselves, poor people
themselves hold — or Black people, in particular — hold latent criminal
tendencies then leads to this kind of violence and it allows the police to
basically function, with almost no boundaries.

The police, under broken windows, targeted Black and brown communities. It
targeted street vendors. And the targeting of street vendors, which is
pretty interesting, not only undermine aspects of Black economic
livelihood, but it also in some ways reflects the high profile killings of
people like Eric Garner and Alton Sterling, and others, under the pretext
of prosecuting people who are selling things illegally. And so that pretext
becomes the basis for prosecution, the basis for violence, and then
ultimately some of these killings. And so to me, that’s part of the story
of looting. What I try to do in the article is kind of flip the question of
“What is a looter? Who is doing the looting?” And what we’ve seen, often,
is that the very system of racial capitalism has, in many ways, been the
source, has been the looter.

*JS:* You just mentioned the term “racial capitalism.” I hope people are
familiar with the work of Cedric Robinson, but if you can lay out your
understanding of that term, of “racial capitalism,” and really explain that
for people.

*RK:* Racial capitalism, as far as Cedric Robinson, the late political
scientist, understands it or explained it basically was built based on this
idea that capitalism itself is not distinct from racism. The way we think
of racism is that racism is a by-product of capitalism. That is, capitalism
emerges and racism is a way to divide workers. It’s a way to extract
greater value from, say, enslaved people, Indigenous people, etc. But what
Cedric argued was that the grounds of the civilization in which capitalism
emerges is already based on racial hierarchy. And that racial hierarchy is
not necessarily the global one, it’s even within Europe itself that racial
distinctions were ways in which early capitalism was able to take advantage
of certain groups over others, whether it’s in terms of wages, whether it’s
in terms of dispossession and forcing people off the land, using violence
against the Irish, for example. We don’t think of the Irish as a racialized
group, but in many ways, in the 16th century, that’s what they were.

And so if you think of race as assigning meaning to whole groups of people,
convincing, ideologically convincing others that some people are inferior
to others, that some people are designed as beasts of burden and other
people are designed to accept, to embrace the wealth of that, then what you
end up getting is a system of extraction that allows for a kind of
super-exploitation of Black and brown people. And racial capitalism also
relies on an ideology or racial regime, and the racial regime convinces a
lot of white people, who may get the crumbs of this extraction through
slavery, through Jim Crow, through land disposession, convince them to be
or support or shore up a regime that seems to benefit whiteness based in
white supremacy but where their own share of the spoils is actually pretty
miniscule. Du Bois called this the “wages of whiteness.” It’s like an
ideological wage that doesn’t always translate materially. Sometimes it
does, sometimes it doesn’t.

So if you think of capitalism as racial capitalism, then the outcome is you
cannot eliminate capitalism, overthrow it, without the complete destruction
of white supremacy, of the racial regime under which it’s built. And we can
see how this works with the police all the time. I mean, when we talk about
the police and we talk about defunding the police, we know of the police as
generators of revenue, currently. That there’s an accumulation of fees and
fines that the police rely on. We also talk about the kinds of support that
police unions get, qualified immunity, for example, is part of the
contract. We think of qualified immunity only in terms of the power of
police unions against a democratic state that says, oh we actually want to
tamp down on that. But, if you think about what the police do, the police
protect capital. The police were designed to protect property going back
to, not just the slave patrols, but even the system of jails in cities in
the 19th century. Those jails were designed to hold fugitives, runaways.
When you’re trying to track down a runaway slave you pay a jail a fee to
hold that enslaved person until the master could come, identify the person,
and take them back into slavery. So when you think about the whole system
of policing, it’s organized around property. Protecting property against
union strikes. Protecting property against anti-racist movements.
Protecting property against workers in subjugated groups. So if that’s the
point of the police, then we shouldn’t be surprised that qualified immunity
or that the violent acts of the police would be supported by capital. Why
is that? Because capital needs a police force that could terrify people.
That’s what the police do. So when we look at the relationship between the
cost of police, the police budgets, and the amount of money being shelled
out to settle police misconduct cases, we’re talking about billions.

In my city, in Los Angeles, $880 million was shelled out between 2005 and
2018 over police misconduct suits, wrongful death suits, these kinds of
things. Why do we do that? Why do we let that happen? Companies like
Target, Walmart, they give money to police foundations, donate money to
make sure that the police are operable. Wall Street benefits from police
violence through the use of these police brutality bonds. That is that they
facilitate the creation of public bonds to pay out these settlements
because cities and municipalities don’t have the money to pay them out so
they borrow the money. And then Wall Street benefits from facilitating
these things. Banks do as well. Not just loaning money, but in terms of the
fees that go into these kinds of transactions. You would think that
capitalists trying to be as efficient as possible would say, this has to
stop. But imagine if you have a police force that’s not a terror force. A
police force that says, of course, labor has a right to strike and to
occupy a workplace. Of course people have a right to protest and to protest
freely and to protest militantly and to engage in forms of civil
disobedience that disrupts business as usual and the police back off.
That’s not going to work. And so there’s a way in which even the notion of
racial capitalism is undergirding police activity in municipalities that
support violent police activity, even though it may undermine their
reputation as cities. A place like New York City is a good example.

*JS:* Recently we featured the work of the abolitionist and scholar Ruth
Wilson Gilmore and at the beginning of that special that we did with her,
she set the context for the murder of George Floyd by beginning with the
deputizing, the kind of informal deputizing of a clerk at a convenient
store who suspected that Floyd was trying to pass off a counterfeit $20
bill. And that individual, as she described it, was sort of deputized, then
brings in the armed forces, the police. That was sort of the moment that it
started. And we also see this with white people calling the police on
African-Americans who are entering their own buildings where they live.
This sense in our society that, oh, well, we need to immediately call the
people with guns to respond to our discomfort, or our sense that maybe
someone is violating, when we boil it down to it, a nothing law. The idea
that he was passing off a $20 bill, even if it was true: really? You want
to call in armed thugs to respond to him who then kneel on his neck for
almost 9 minutes? But that broader culture that exists in this country now,
where everyone is essentially deputized to snitch on other people or to
call in the armed squads to take care of the problem.

*RK:* Oh, absolutely. And what’s sad about this, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore is
absolutely right, what’s sad about it is that everyone is deputized in many
ways — immigrant communities, even Black communities — because we have
been, in some ways ideologically brainwashed to believe that any
disruption, anything that’s not quite right, the first people you call are
the police. Rayshard Brooks is another example, in which a Wendy’s
employee, not knowing what to do, wanting to make sure the drive-thru line
continues as Rayshard Brooks falls asleep at the wheel, calls the police.
Now, we’re getting to a point where people are realizing that the police
are not the people to call. But imagine that’s your first call, thinking,
OK, if you could just wake him up, the option, of course, would have been
to go outside and try to wake him up and move the car out. But no one knew
what the outcome was going to be, or at least they didn’t think about the
outcome. And as a result of that phone call, this man’s dead.

And so, I do want to give a happy example, like a positive example of an
alternative to calling the police. Part of defunding the police is a
recognition that the police, as constituted, make life more dangerous for
vulnerable populations even as it creates a sense of false safety for white
people. And so a really good example is in Brooklyn there was a group
called Sister to Sister and they were dealing, in their community in
Brooklyn, in the 1990s, they were dealing with a lot of cases of domestic
violence. And these were immigrant communities for the most part, working
class communities. They would call the police. Individuals would call the
police. The police would come, and rarely come. When they did come, the
first thing they would often do is arrest people for violating their
citizenship status or their undocumented workers, harass people, and they
wouldn’t solve the problem. So Sister to Sister, a group of young women,
decided: we need to keep the police out and we need to figure out a way to
deal with domestic violence on our own. So they develop workshops, street
theater, vigilance committees, trainings, so that men, women, kids in the
community, understood how to deal with domestic violence, how to reduce it
and recognize that this is not something that, that intimate violence is
not simply within a single household, but it affects the whole community.
And as a result of their work, they were able to reduce the number of calls
to police and reduce domestic violence significantly.

So part of what we have to think about is, how do we get out of the habit,
or the reflex, of dialing 9-1-1 or calling the police to solve the most
basic issues, issues that should have been solved by simply compassion,
neighborliness, and just thoughtful responses. Because the fact of the
matter is, Rayshard Brooks was probably terrified at the very moment that
he woke up and saw a police officer in his face, because here’s someone who
had gone through the system, who had been incarcerated, who knew the
consequences. Even if he didn’t think the consequences would be he’d be
shot, but just the arrest alone could have destroyed his life, an economic
livelihood that he barely cobbled together as a convicted felon. So part of
it is, many people are deputized and don’t realize it. Unless we learn
better ways or different ways to care for one another, we’re going to
continue to have this situation where we call the police and the police
will continue to kill us.

*JS:* You have a new book coming out, “Black Bodies Swinging,” and in that
book you write, “Reverend William Barber is right, we are living through a
third Reconstruction and the great rebellion of the summer of 2020 marks a
moment of reckoning between real freedom and fascism.” Can you expand on
that?

*RK:* Yes, of course. So this is a third Reconstruction and there are two
things I’m trying to deal with in this book. One is to really amplify the
fact that this generation, this generation of abolitionists, have the most
visionary conception of abolition in history. The first Reconstruction in
the 1860s, and I know The Intercept had a great, great piece about Du Bois
and Black Reconstruction, but that first Reconstruction was an effort to
expand social democracy to include everyone. And it faced a backlash, that
is it was crushed under the weight of racial terror, Jim Crow,
disfranchisement. The second Reconstruction was an attempt to expand the
democracy we had to include all people, but also deal with some of the
social justice issues of housing and police violence, but had a conception
of it which is still based on a system where you can just sort of tweak the
Constitution, or tweak our rights and have them apply. The presumption was
the constitutional basis of our system was sound, we just had to fix it to
include everyone. This generation is saying it’s not sound and it never has
been sound. It’s been based on dispossession, white supremacy, and gender
violence. And so this vision of abolition is not simply, and from Ruth
Wilson Gilmore’s work, it’s not simply: better jails, better police, better
training. It’s: no police, it’s no jails, no prisons. It’s creating a new
means of justice that’s not based on criminalization but based on
affirmation and reparation, and by reparation that is trying to repair
relationships that have been damaged and destroyed as a result of five
centuries of warfare against Indigenous peoples, Africans, poor white
people, Asian-Pacific Americans, and Latinx populations.

So here is an opportunity to actually transform not just the nation, but
the entire world. And what I’m hoping will not happen, but may happen, is
what happened after the second Reconstruction and the first Reconstruction,
that is a kind of backlash. The fascism that we recognize in the 1930s
resembled the fascism of slavery and the fascism of the post-Reconstruction
period, resembled the 1970s in which the Klan was resurrected and, the
prison-industrial complex expanded, in that period. What we’re witnessing
after 2020 is going to be either fascism or abolition, or maybe something
else, I’m not sure. But this is a very exciting time, and so what the book
tries to do is, not so mucccccccliikkdtch predict what’s going to happen,
but understand that 500-year history through the autopsies of particular
individuals who have died over the last few years and then to recognize
what is unique about the generation that emerged. And by that I don’t say
emerged in 2012, but I’m saying a generation that really emerged in the
late 1990s that developed this particular vision of abolition.

*JS: *As you’re speaking I’m also just thinking of the fact that’s in front
of all of us now and that is that it seems pretty clear that on the ballot
in November, in terms of major party candidates, there’s going to be Donald
Trump and Joe Biden, and you’re talking about a generation that came of age
in the late 90s. Joe Biden was a major player in shaping the so-called
criminal justice policies of the United States government. He was, as he
said, a close friend of the segregationist Strom Thurmond. Joe Biden has
repeatedly lied about his own involvement with the civil rights movement,
about getting arrested in apartheid South Africa trying to go and visit
Nelson Mandela. By all fair accounts, Joe Biden has been a major part of
the problem in this country and yet here we are with the basic choice
boiling down to Donald Trump for four more years or Joe Biden. I’m
wondering your bigger picture thoughts on what that says about our society
that those are the two major party candidates at this moment in history.

*RK:* Right, it says something about the failure of electoral politics to
solve this problem. Because, imagine a political conundrum that leaves us
with the choice of going back to Clinton-era policies, the policies that
stripped us of the protections of Glass-Steagall, the policies that
expanded the prison-industrial complex, the policies that criminalized
immigration even further than before. I mean these are the same policies
basically and Biden represents that. And so if we see this as, “elect Biden
by any means necessary,” then I think we’ve lost. I do agree that a Trump
White House, with the backing of the apparatus of state violence, is a much
more difficult place to fight these fights, but at the same time, I think
that this radical generation sees a much bigger fight ahead and that no
matter who is elected, no matter who is in the White House in the fall,
this fight has to continue. Because this is not just a fight to restore an
old democracy, but to create a new one.

And it’s happening in the electoral sphere. Some of the most exciting
campaigns, like in New York City for example, there’s all these people
contesting incumbents, many of whom consider themselves liberals, making
real strides at the local level, state legislature, city council. And in,
also, all these fights around who’s going to be district attorney. That is
the so-called law enforcement officer in many major cities. Progressive
district attorneys, in fact, are embattled against police departments and
police unions who see them as putting some handcuffs on their ability to
conduct violence. So there’s these battles going on at the very local
level, but I think that there’s a much bigger thing going on and as long as
we silence the critique of Biden and the Clintons and Obama, because then
we miss, we miss what the struggle is really about.

And I’ll give you just two more examples, two more interventions. One is
that, in this book, I make the argument that the 1990s was critical and
it’s not an accident that some of the most visionary organizations and
movements emerge in the Clinton era: Critical Resistance, the Black Radical
Congress, groups like Power — these were organizations that were fighting
Clinton era reforms and policies. And the same thing with 2012, with
Trayvon Martin — Black Lives Matter emerges in opposition to Obama era
reforms and policies locally, and nationally, and internationally. And one
last thing I should say, because none of this stuff can be limited to the
domestic sphere. The kind of visionary abolitionist politics that we see as
a throughline from the 1990s to the present was also directed at foreign
policy — Clinton foreign policy, certainly George Bush foreign policy, and
Obama. And recognizing that, as long as we continue to have a foreign
policy that is built on war, built on drone strikes, the same violence that
is replicated in the cities of the United States is replicated in the Arab
world, is replicated elsewhere. As long as the happens, as long as we
continue to maintain relationships between, like, the repression of
Palestinian populations and populations in the United States through tax
dollars, then we’re going to be stuck. This vision of abolition is one
that’s trying to end forms of state violence and American expansion
throughout the globe. And it’s very important because this is also a
generation that recognizes that much of what we think of as policing, that
modern policing got much of its training abroad, abroad in Haiti during the
occupation after 1915, abroad in the Philippines, during the U.S.
occupation of the Philippines, abroad through the daily exchange campaigns
or relationships between Israel and the United States, where training of
U.S. police officers by Israeli military was part of preparation for urban
insurgencies, that sort of thing.

And I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know the outcome. But I do
know that if there’s ever a time when a Reconstruction might actually lead
to democratization of the United States and the end of American
imperialism, this is the opportunity we have. And there’s no possible way
that a Joe Biden is going to lead that. If anything, he and his folks are
part of the problem.

*JS:* When I was preparing to talk to you, one of the subjects and a piece
of your work that I was most excited to ask you to share from is your book
from a couple decades ago, “Hammer and Hoe,” which tells the story of the
1930s and 40s, coming out of the Great Depression, how Communists took on
Alabama’s repressive, racist police state, and engaged in a battle that is
not so different from the analysis that you’re offering now from this newer
generation of radical abolitionists. I’m wondering if you could share with
people an overview of that book, of “Hammer and Hoe,” and share some of the
stories that you researched and brought to life in it.

*RK:* Right, right. That’s actually really a great question. So that book
is 30 years old, that’s how old I am.

*JS:* I have the 25th anniversary edition.

*RK:* Right [laughter], exactly. It came out in 1990. And it came out at a
time when the Cold War had been declared victorious by the Reagan
administration, I mean, before that. And after that was, that’s the end of
the Cold War and so Communism is dead. That was the story. And so this is a
story about the 1930s. A party made up overwhelmingly of Black working
people in rural areas, as well as in cities like Birmingham and Montgomery,
and in many ways they carried what some might argue is kind of the radical
tradition, radical sort of wing of the civil rights movement. Fighting for
the right to organize, fighting for relief for the unemployed, fighting to
keep people in their homes and not be evicted, and ultimately trying to
fight for democracy in the South and throughout the country. And, in some
ways, it’s a very exciting story because it precedes the civil rights
movement and it recovers a vision of social democracy that even the civil
rights movement at its heyday didn’t quite grasp.

The Communist Party in Alabama had some white membership. It actually
organized white working people. They actually tried to organize former
klansmen into the organization and got some in there and, most importantly,
they saw themselves as a multiracial movement that can create democratic,
anti-capitalist society — true abolition for the entire United States, but
also in solidarity with what they saw as a worldwide movement.

One of the things that made the Communist Party in Alabama different than,
say, other movements was the confidence that they had that they were part
of a global insurgency. I mean, there were people, right, I interviewed
people, like a man named Lemon Johnson, who believed that when cotton
pickers went on strike in 1935, he believed that any significant violence
from the planter class would be met with the possibility of Stalin sending
troops through Mobile, Alabama to protect them, to engage in class warfare
against the planter class. I mean, that belief in internationalism was
extraordinary. This is also an organization that believed in armed
self-defense and practiced it when they could, but they also believed in
making themselves invisible when necessary for the movement to survive
another day.

So there’s so many lessons to be learned from the Communist Party of
Alabama, but there’s also a lesson to be learned about how movements can be
wiped out, how their history can be destroyed, because by the Cold War, by
1948, though individual communists continued to do their work, the party
wasn’t simply outlawed but it was crushed under the pressure of Bull Connor
and his regime. We think of Bull Connor in the streets of Birmingham in
1963, but in 1948 he was doing much the same thing in terms of crushing the
Black left, or the interracial left in the South.

So that history, really, we need to come to terms with it because I do
think that the best of this generation is an echo of that moment and it
proves to me, and this is a really important lesson, that anti-racism and
class solidarity, are just, are not trade-offs. They’re not mutually
exclusive. We’ve been living in this world where we’re sort of deciding,
are we going to be fighting for the class or fighting against racism? As if
somehow these things are separate. This was a generation that laid the
groundwork for the generation of activists we’re dealing with now. And it
really does show the importance of fighting all forms of oppression, not
just race and class, but gender oppression, sexism, transphobia,
homophobia, ableism, that none of these things can be separated off and
left to the side. That a truly, fundamental abolitionist future requires
that they all be held together. And the Communist Party of Alabama shows
that that actually could happen.

*JS:* On that same issue and sort of to bring it into the contemporary
moment, there’s been a lot of talk from the Trump White House about Antifa
and outside agitators being the real problem here and in your work you’ve
studied and written about how this trope about outside agitators has been
used throughout history in a systemic effort to attempt to discredit
legitimate political movements, including Black rebellion. What is your
assessment of the way that Trump is using that trope of the outside
agitator right now?

*RK:* So the outside agitator is a very old trope to delegitimize any
legitimate claims of social movements. It’s been used all over the world
and in this particular instance, and specifically Antifa, which stands for
anti-fascism, or anti-fascist, is a way of not just delegitimizing
movements, but it’s also a way of delegitimizing struggles against fascism.
And it is a way of targeting groups like anarchists, for example, many of
whom have been at the forefront of mutual aid campaigns and working really
around how to try to prefigure, new communities of solidarity. And so you
vilify these groups and when you vilify those groups you do several things.
One, you justify the criminalization of them. Outside agitator equals
communist has been a way that the United States has been able to pass
legislation to jail, imprison, and deport people who are considered outside
agitators. It’s not an accident that anti-sedition laws in this country
have come very close to anti-immigrant laws. In other words, they follow
one another. Much of anti-immigrant laws have been based on the fear of
sedition within the United States. And we’re seeing the same thing now. I
mean, even the idea that immigrants are responsible, not just for the
violence, but immigrants are responsible for Covid deaths. This sort of
thing happens all the time. The xenophobia works. The other thing is that
outside agitators is a form of xenophobia that works to shore up white
support, despite the fact that many of the people that support the Trump
regime don’t benefit from those policies. And so it’s a very effective
strategy but one that, in this particular generation, particular moment, I
don’t think is working very well.

One of the things that we see in these demonstrations in 2020 is the extent
to which they’re vastly multiracial and diverse. Diverse not just in terms
of race, ethnicity, nationality but diverse also in terms of age and even
status. So that’s something that, where there’s evidence that the old idea
that you could sort of divide, create a wedge in a movement using the
outside agitator, that’s kind of problematic. On the other hand, there are,
I should say this, because this is actually important, there are examples
where the outside agitator claims have been effective, in part because of
the violence perpetrated by agent provocateurs. I mean, in other words,
there are some outside agitators, not Antifa, but the Boogaloo Boys, for
example, which is not uncommon to have agent provocateurs cause violence,
promote violence, perpetuate disruption and even engage in forms of
assassination as we’ve seen recently in California. And so, there’s a way
in which Trump and his ilk can take the idea or the fear of the outside
agitator and flip it to vilify those who are genuinely fighting for social
justice and for an end to policing and ignore, completely ignore if not
justify the activities of groups who are actually trying disrupt these
really important movements for social justice.

*JS:* You also have outside agitators in the form of actual police or FBI,
the COINTELPRO program for instance. But that also is an element of this
throughout history, that “law enforcement” agents actually infiltrate
movements and try to encourage acts of violence. We’ve certainly seen that
post-9/11, where the FBI has had a PhD in breaking up its own terror plots
that we discover later they were actually at the center of it. It’s not
just private actors, it’s also state actors that do this as well.

*RK:* Absolutely, absolutely. And a lot of taxpayer money, a lot of
taxpayer revenue went into paying for police, local police, red squads, and
FBI agents who have been at the center of these kinds of disruptive plots.
One of the unfortunate things maybe was one of the unfortunate outcomes,
recently, of the film “BlacKkKlansman.” It left a lot of people with the
impression that undercover cops do good things. And that is that the story
of a Black police officer in Colorado infiltrating the Klan, though it’s
not quite what happened but the story that he infiltrated the Klan makes
the police out to be the heroes. In a film, by the way not to criticize
Spike Lee because, who wants to do that, right? But in a film in which the
Black student organizations are seen as incompetent. And it’s a very scary
thought that we’re being taught through popular culture that the police
actually do these really good things. The same police officer, by the way,
Ron Stallworth, also infiltrated groups like the International Socialist
Organization, some of the left organizations. And, if I remember correctly,
also had, supported or was involved in some of the other Black movements
like the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party.

So what we see mostly — and again this is across the board, this is not
just the Trump administration but the last century of administrations — the
focus has been on infiltrating and undermining movements that have at least
set out on an agenda for liberation, abolition, social justice. So what are
the organizations? Go back to the Garvey movement of the early 20th
century, the Social Party, communists, the Black Panther Party, the Black
Liberation Army, all the way up through to this idea of the Obama
administration infiltrating Black Lives Matter. The idea of the “Black
identity extremists.” The notion that there’s a black identity extremist
without the equivalent — The fact that organizations that are saying, “we
really want an end to police killings,” are “black identity extremists.” By
the way, a movement that had always been open to people across racial and
ethnic lines to participate, and yet the kinds of resources that are needed
to try to outlaw or end white racial terrorism — the Klan and similar
organizations, anti-semitic organizations, the militia groups — these are
not the groups being infiltrated or undermined or even outlawed. These are
the ones that President Trump has described as being filled with, “very
fine people.”

*JS:* As we wrap up this conversation, Robin, I wanted to bring it full
circle and return to the discussion on racial capitalism in this moment of
the pandemic. Arundhati Roy, the great Indian writer, described coronavirus
as a portal and I’m wondering what your assessment is of the racial
capitalist system at this moment in an election year with this rebellion
that shows no signs of ceasing, with Trump in power and with so many people
having their lives and their livelihood put in the sniper scope of the
government and the pandemic.

*RK:* Right. Absolutely, I totally agree that this pandemic is a portal.
And as a portal, it is just an opening. And as an opening, nothing’s
guaranteed, but it’s an opening because it exposed the structure of racial
and gendered capitalism and the violence meted out to people who are most
vulnerable. So Covid-19, of course, exposes the fact that it’s a lot of
poor people dying, exposed, not protected. That the healthcare industry and
the industry assigned to care for the aging have utterly failed for lack of
resources and forms of structural racism. That the same kinds of
inequalities in the same, the same kinds of limits that have made Black and
brown people not just poor but unhealthier, having lack of access to health
care, all that became clearly exposed through the Covid-19 pandemic. And
then following that, the fact that people are already dying from Covid-19
and then dying from state violence, with the video of Ahmaud Arbery, for
example, the killing of Breonna Taylor — Breonna Taylor as an EMT worker in
Louisville — that these kinds of things exposed both the underside of the
health crisis, but also the topside of it, that is the continuation of
racial violence, state sanctioned violence that are taking peoples’ lives
or making it difficult for people to live. So when folks carry the sign
around a protest saying “Stop killing us”— “Stop killing us” is a slogan
that we’ve been carrying for centuries, and in some ways it’s aimed at
ending state sanctioned racist violence, but also ending the violence of
poverty; the violence of a health care system that has continued to ignore
our own health care crises and to reproduce inequality; the violence of
dilapidated housing; the violence of a kind of economic strangulation. That
would lead people like Rayshard Brooks, for example, to cobble together a
life working in a Mexican restaurant and sitting in Wendy’s in a community
where the unemployment rate and the per capita income — the unemployment
rate is staggeringly high and per capita income is incredibly low. I mean,
it’s not an accident that these things converge.

The question is, what are we going to do in this portal? Do we have the
political will to basically recognize the fact that all these conditions
are inseparable, that all these conditions — you cannot simply reform your
way out of this. But they have to be destroyed and be built all over again
in order to create a humane society, a society that cares about human
beings and life itself — not just human life but all life — over wealth
accumulation and property. I mean that’s really the question that I think
Arundhati Roy is posing and many of us are posing. What kind of society
will we have? And this is an opportunity to change it all. Whether that
happens or not remains to be seen. But I don’t think many portals open up.
And this particular portal, I would argue, wasn’t simply rendered open by
Covid-19. It was rendered open by what Covid-19 revealed in terms of the
contradictions of society that claims to be a democracy and claims to care
about people but actually cares more about property and wealth accumulation
than the lives of the most vulnerable.

*JS:* I have to ask one last question then to follow up on that. It’s a big
question, so you can share any aspect of it you want, but I think you beg
the question there. Is it possible to end a society that is rooted in
racism while leaving capitalism intact?

*RG:* That’s a great question and it is the question that has been asked in
South Africa, and that is can you end apartheid and leave capitalism
intact? No. I mean, South Africa is our portal, in some ways, of
recognizing why the only future that is a truly abolitionist future is the
dismantling of capitalism and the racial and gender structures that oppress
us because capitalism was created on the grounds of a theory of inequality.
Inequality was foundational to capitalism. The inequality of who has land
and who doesn’t. The inequality of why certain people should get paid a
small wage and that the wealth produced, the surplus produced should be in
the hands of a handful of people. And that theory of inequality is
sometimes based on the idea of physical differences, intellectual
differences, the idea that no one is the same and some people should be
beasts of burden and other people should be the recipients of wealth
accumulation. I mean that is ultimately based on ideas about race and
gender. And as long as we hold onto those ideas and as long as capitalism
exists as a means of accumulating wealth through exploitation, then those
ideas are not going to go away. You can’t get rid of them. So that’s why I
think this generation is seeing that both need to be dismantled. I’m not
saying everyone says that. I know that there are some people who are making
the argument that we need a kinder and gentler capitalism. But what does
that actually mean if capitalism is still based on extraction of peoples’
labor, and peoples’ knowledge, and peoples’ bodies turned into wealth held
by a few?

So, to me, this is not a matter of a slight redistribution, like let’s give
more crumbs to the poor. Nor is it about just ending poverty as we know it.
It is really about creating a structure of caring and repair in which we
all can benefit from our labor and our kind of collective generosity and
create a whole new ethos, not just for the United States but for the world.

*JS: *On that note, Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley I want to thank you so much for
being with us here on Intercepted. It was my honor.

*RK:* Well it was mine. It was such a great pleasure to talk to you. So
brilliant.
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