What I’m Listening to Today, June 10, 2020
The Intercept podcast, interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, part 1: Ruth Wilson Gilmore Makes the Case for Abolition
Gilmore is one of the world’s preeminent scholars on prisons and the machinery of carceral punishment and policing. In this discussion, she offers a sweeping and detailed analysis of the relentless expansion and funding of police and prisons, and how locking people in cages has become central to the American project. Gilmore offers a comprehensive road map for understanding how we have arrived at the present political moment of brutality and rebellion, and she lays out the need for prison abolition and defunding police forces.
Gilmore’s definition of racism
The state sanctioned and/or extra legal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death.
abolition must be green and red and international
Abolition has to be green. It has to take seriously the problems of environmental harm, of environmental racism, environmental degradation. To be green it has to be red. It has to figure out ways to generalize the resources needed for well-being for the most vulnerable people in our community which then will extend to all people. And to do that, to be green and red, it has to be international.