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<font size="1"><a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/06/27/robin-dg-kelley-intercepted/">https://theintercept.com/2020/06/27/robin-dg-kelley-intercepted/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Scholar Robin D.G. Kelley on How Today’s Abolitionist Movement Can Fundamentally Change the Country</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Jeremy Scahill - June 27, 2020<br></div></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-line-height4 gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><p><u>We are living</u> 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.</p><div><p><strong>Jeremy Scahill:</strong> Robin D.G. Kelley, thank you so much for being with us here on Intercepted.</p>
<p><strong>Robin D.G. Kelley:</strong> Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>JS:</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>RK:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JS:</strong> 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 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/opinion/george-floyd-protests-looting.html">your New York Times piece</a>,
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.</p>
<p><strong>RK:</strong> “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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JS:</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>RK:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JS:</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>RK:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JS:</strong> 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?</p>
<p><strong>RK:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JS: </strong>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.</p>
<p><strong>RK:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JS:</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>RK:</strong> Right, right. That’s actually really a great question. So that book is 30 years old, that’s how old I am.</p>
<p><strong>JS:</strong> I have the 25th anniversary edition.</p>
<p><strong>RK:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JS:</strong> 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?</p>
<p><strong>RK:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JS:</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>RK:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><strong>JS:</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>RK:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JS:</strong> 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?</p>
<p><strong>RG:</strong> 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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JS: </strong>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.</p>
<p><strong>RK:</strong> Well it was mine. It was such a great pleasure to talk to you. So brilliant.</p></div></div></div>
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