The overarching framework and discussion of the liberal or “late liberal” made me think a lot about our current political situation, with Black voters largely winning Joe Biden his white house seat while he now has done little to nothing to address voter suppression (although there’s debate about this of course because, politics). But he used Black voters to make it to the white house and then upon getting there, backed off one of the issues impacting the Black community most. It left me out of hope for the future of “progressive” politics really making change in Black lives without some kind of revolution. It also made me think, what would abolition look like in the United States?
The idea that, for Shange, social justice is “living happily ever after with the antiracist, distributive state,” while abolition is a “messy breakup” with the state is a really interesting metaphor to draw. It reminds me of the equality vs. equity vs. justice framework. There’s that cartoon that depicts the three people of different heights trying to see over a fence, with equality giving each person the same size stool, equity giving everyone stools according to their height, and justice has a chain-link fence, so that everyone can see from the outset. This framework does not even imagine what it would be like have “abolition,” because it can’t conceive of life in the absence of the state. Within this metaphor and using Shange’s idea about abolition, I wonder if “abolition” would be these three people not even watching the game at all. Maybe they’re sitting in a circle and talking, not paying any attention to the game going on behind them.
This quote, “Black people descended from slaves held in the US have almost the inverse predicament: we have won the prize of legal emancipation without access to meaningful sovereignty” also rings true for Indigenous groups in the United States (8). I’m wondering: how do we (we being any anyone studying this) balance relating lessons drawn from other oppressed ethnic and racial groups without erasing Blackness?