Let us return to that police car on fire.
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It was 2020 and I was wearing a cloth mask that I could pull down to gulp water at a safe distance from other people, and we had gathered on the steps of the Philadelphia art museum and it was still the first lockdown, technically, and so I had not gotten yet to the point where I flinched at the nearness of strangers. At first, it was like the other mass marches of the Movement for Black Lives in that it was angry and mournful and calm and dignified. But the streets were so otherwise empty, the broken windows, the graffiti everywhere. “Vengeance for George Floyd” scrawled in white paint on a window that might have been a bank. We followed the thick black smoke to the police car on fire and watched a group of young people—so impossibly young—walk slowly, deliberately distanced, arms raised, down the street, and the police car that was not on fire backed up from them until they took the intersection and began to dance.
The thick black smoke coated my nostrils and throat even through the mask. A girl on crutches blocked the path of a motorcyclist in the street so the march could pass.
Days later we marched again, more of us, clogging the steps of the art museum that Rocky once ran up. Faces covered, masked against the virus, people held cardboard signs that said “reparations now” and “rise up” and “no justice no peace” and “racism is a public health emergency.” Little red letters on that one also said “I have sunscreen and ibuprofen if you need.” There were doctors and nurses wearing their scrubs and street medics with red-duct-tape crosses on their T-shirt sleeves and people pulling wagons or pushing grocery carts with bottled water and hand sanitizer and masks to give away. I would see a big white CARE NOT COPS banner over and over again.
When we reached City Hall on June 6, under a massive yellow ABOLISH THE POLICE banner, people were handing out hot food, which seemed like a miracle: that underneath a row of police in riot gear lining the level where Frank Rizzo’s statue had just been, there were folding tables and portable heat sources and aluminum catering trays of free food. It was a little piece of the world the protesters wanted to build even if it was under the looming threat of crackdown, even if the smiles of the people who handed out plates were hidden under N95 masks. It was the concrete practice of making Black lives matter, in Philadelphia, in Minneapolis, everywhere. It was a promise that we could care for each other.
In between the marches in the streets in 2020, young activists were reading and holding teach-ins and trading books. Abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore became within the Movement for Black Lives a household name, her work finding its intended audience because she has always been an organizer as well as a theorist. Gilmore is known for many things, but one of them is her oft-repeated definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death.”
It is those group-differentiated vulnerabilities that the millions in the streets were protesting when they insisted that Black lives matter. It was a movement that had grown tired of grieving, tired of the loss and the death and the repression that comes when you dare to say that those premature deaths were brutal and cruel and unwarranted. That this is what racism is as well: the concentration of people in the neighborhoods and the jobs and the streets that kill, places that were defunded long ago.
Gilmore also has a term for this: She calls it, as will I, following her, “organized abandonment.”
Organized abandonment is the necessary precondition for an unequal world, for the continued exploitation of so many in order to make life not just comfortable for others but to speed the accumulation of capital by a tiny few. Racism is the process by which that abandonment is made acceptable. It is produced differently in different places, produced by historic events and the way relations of power shift and change.
That’s how systems work, or rather how they conscript us into doing their work for them. The police officer who put his knee on George Floyd’s neck, the police officers who fired into Breonna Taylor’s apartment in a raid The New York Times described as “compromised by poor planning and reckless execution” didn’t invent racism or policing or the guns they held in their hands; they were doing their jobs, jobs that taught one of them to act with “an extreme indifference to the value of human life” and another to “[abandon] his sworn oath to uphold the sanctity of life.”
The violence is justified because police, we hear, are there to protect us from “criminals,” but “criminal” is a matter of perspective. Participants in uprisings are branded looters, the same way Black people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina were. As if Black people’s acts of freedom have not been considered stealing since they were enslaved and “stole” themselves away from bondage.
The production of criminals is, Gilmore wrote, the process of creating public enemies and of individualizing disorder. It is, like racism, geographically distinct and shifting in time: Think of the uneven spread of marijuana legalization, how something is a crime one day and not the next, illegal in one state and fine just across an invisible border. If protesters are criminals, then mass disobedient protests and the burning of a police station are not justified. If they are criminals, why bother grieving their deaths?
If people are branded “criminals,” they can be locked away for years of slow death, their friends lovers cousins wives left to grieve even as they attempt to hold on. Yet prison removes people from one place that is in crisis and places them in another; it does not solve problems, but like most solutions of capitalism, it resolves one series of contradictions by creating a new set.
The money that states spend on prisons is what might, with a different set of priorities, be spent on services that people need. Care not cops. This is what the movements mean when they say, “defund the police” or “divest/invest”: that the decision to spend our collective wealth on cops and prisons to manage the people who are surplus to production could have been made otherwise.
Racism is vulnerability to premature death. It is a process of justifying deaths when they happen, of justifying the use of violence by state or nonstate actors (officer Derek Chauvin or officer Brett Hankison or self-appointed neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman or former Marine Daniel Penny), of declaring that the people they killed were not grievable. Some of you might say that George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or Trayvon Martin or Jordan Neely did not do the thing they were supposed to have done when they were killed, and yet what if they did? The punishment for making and using a counterfeit $20 bill, as George Floyd was accused of doing, or for selling drugs, which was the thing Breonna Taylor’s ex-boyfriend was suspected of doing, or bothering people on a subway, as Jordan Neely supposedly did, is not slow public torturous death or being gunned down in one’s bed. Innocence is not enough. Innocence is produced in social spaces as much as race is, as much as criminals are. The rules of who and what can be innocent change constantly; Michael Brown was described as “no angel” in The New York Times, as if he ought to have been one. The young organizers who took to the streets and the subway tracks to demand justice for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Trayvon Martin and Jordan Neely insisted that their lives mattered whether or not they were innocent. They were worth grieving because they had lived and been loved, and the system that justified their deaths, the whole damn system was guilty as hell.
That system we call capitalism, which some of us call racial capitalism, following Cedric Robinson, who meant not only the way the slave ship and the plantation were embedded into the thing from the beginning but also the way existing differences between people, real or imagined, get exaggerated into “race,” and race in turn is used to rationalize the inequalities we live and die with. “Capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it,” Gilmore reminds us. It is a system that requires human sacrifice. It does not necessarily require police murders or prisons; those are the fixes for our current iteration of the thing, worse in the United States than most anywhere else in the world. In other times and places, it has meant apartheid, pogroms, segregation, slavery, mass executions, settlers destroying Native homes and food sources. But it does require death making.
And so in 2020 in particular more people realized this than had ever before, realized it as they were trapped behind screens in pandemic lockdown with nothing to do but to consider the world they lived in and whether normal had ever been anything but a different kind of hell, realized it as they kept going to work and their bosses denied them sick time. Realized in their misery that others were miserable too, different but parallel, that as Gargi Bhattacharyya wrote, “heartbrokenness is the class consciousness of racial capitalism,” that in our heartbreak we could come together. The people who came out to protest in 2020 defied simple color lines. The demonstrations were proof that Black lives matter not only to Black people but to many of us, that we too grieve, we take our place in the second line, we remember, we demand justice.
Excerpted from the book From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire by Sarah Jaffe. Copyright © 2024. From Bold Type Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Reprinted with permission.