Thread by @BikoMandelaGray

No one asked for this, but I've been thinking a lot about #abolition and #abolishthepolice for some time now. And if I may, I'd like to share my novice perspective, albeit one rooted in my own (anti-)philosophical stance. So here goes.

I'm not convinced that the #abolitionist movement--which I wholly agree with--is an oppositional movement. Philosophically, a call for abolition is not a call to opposition. This distinction, in my mind anyway, is crucial. I'll elaborate.

Hegel told us long ago that oppositional realities (or what he calls dialectics) form a totality in themselves. Think about a fight: if one person chooses not to fight, there is no fight at all--only violence on the part of the aggressor.

The aggressor, then, doesn't "win" a fight bc there is no "fight" to win. there is only the exposure of the aggressor as a pugilistic asshole who has no respect for life or health--in short, a bully. A fight only happens if both sides agree that they're in a fight.

This sounds trivial, but it isn't. Consider the police: cops assume that they are protectors of public safety. Those who would oppose them would also agree about the meaning of the term "safety." The opposition would emerge as a question of HOW cops enact this safety.

The principle challengers to police, then, are not abolitionists but reformers. Why? because reformers already agree about the function of police. They agree on what "public safety" means, and they also agree that cops are here to protect and ensure that meaning.

The opposition isn't at the level of meaning, but at the level of execution. Reformers simply challenge how the police should enact their agreed-upon function. They do not oppose the terms by which police come into being, but instead oppose the self-conception that police hold.

Which is to say, reformers oppose the absolute freedom and discretion cops assume as part of their self-conception. This doesn't stop the game, but keeps it in play. reforms--barring chokeholds, enforcing bodycams, and even charging officers w/ murder--keep the cops around.

Cops might get upset about these "reforms" bc they challenge police autonomy. But these reforms do not constitute a fundamental challenge to cops' existence. Reform(ers) do not seek to do away with cops in general, but instead place checks on cops' freedom and discretion.

In fact, it is this very opposition (the opposition of reform) that serves to keep cops in place. While the checks reform(ers) enact place limits on cops, they nevertheless further clarify cops' functions and therefore clarify when, how, and why they can use (lethal) violence.

If i'm reading Hegel right, then, cops "win" this philosophical fight bc they eventually incorporate the challenge of reform into their collective self-perception. Cops now have no problem wearing bodycams; they pride themselves on barring chokeholds.

In all this, cops haven't went away; they're just more savvy. Their function wasn't challenged; it was only streamlined. Cops are now simply more careful about how, when, and where they enact violence. Their violence hasn't ended; it has just become more sophisticated.

And even if they are careless (as in the case of Timothy Loehmann, who killed #Tamirrice), their REASONING for killing is more sophisticated, more airtight, than it might have once been. That's what reform, as opposition, allows for.

But #abolition does something different. It doesn't challenge the self-identity of police, but instead challenges the TERMS by which police come into being. If police think of themselves as agents of safety, abolitionists raise questions about the meaning of safety.

They call the givenness of a particular understanding of safety into question, prompting and promoting reflection on otherwise forms of care and accountability. The abolitionist position calls for the terms to change--if not be outright done away with.

@prisonculture, along with other abolitionists, speak of this call as imagination, as an envisioning of something other than what we have now. They're not locked in a dialectical opposition with police but instead provide a critique of the totality that would keep police around.

This is why #abolition is by and large opposed by both parties--bc it isn't situated within the totality, but instead calls the whole system into question. The @DNC and the @GOP might be "divisive," but this division is premised upon an agreement about the terms of the debate.

I bring all of this up to say that #abolition, for me anyway, is not reducible to cheap claims that we "hate" the police. Some of us do, but that's not the whole picture. After all, as Sara Ahmed points out, mere hatred would assume an intense entanglement w/ cops.

It would require the cops' continued existence as an object of hatred. Hatred presumes the existence of what it hates; it needs to hate something. But #abolition isn't interested in keeping the cops here--in any form, even as an object of intense hatred.

It is, instead, a profound call to release ourselves from our dependency on the cops. It is a call to unshackle ourselves from the idea of punitive violence as a proxy for justice. #abolition calls for us to do more than fight.

It calls for something beyond opposition. It calls for us to imagine possibilities that this world, in its existence as a dialectical totality, can neither fathom nor incorporate.

This is why some of us receive hate mail and death threats.

But it's also why we keep going.

Because we know better.
We've seen better.

And in knowing and having seen better, we demand more than this world can allow.

Okay, I'm done.