Rev Left Radio - White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide

Episode Date: March 12, 2021

Professor and Author Dylan Rodriguez joins Breht to discuss his book "White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide".   Find the book here: https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823289394/white-reconstruction/ Dylan's other works mentioned in the show: https://level.medium.com/abolition-for-the-people-397ef29e3ca5 https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/04/abolition-as-praxis-of-human-being-a-foreword/ http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2021/01/campus-safety-task-forces-as-police.html CR Problem with “Community Control of Police” and Police Review Boards   https://drive.google.com/file/d/12q4eWZQzwIj-EFrLUU2XbnLipKnXIuxG/view UC and national Cops Off Campus campaign    https://linktr.ee/uc_ftp twitter: @dylanrodriguez IG: dylanrodriguez73 Outro Music: "Samoan Cricket Bat" by Bambu ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. Have a wonderful episode for you today. It is with Dylan Rodriguez, centered around his book, White Reconstruction, Domestic Warfare, and the Logics of Genocide. I think this is a really important work that reframes so much of the machinations within liberalism and capitalism, clarifies important distinctions, discusses the importance of abolition, and covers so much interesting ground, both contemporary and historically.

So I was absolutely honored to have Dylan come on the show and discuss this wonderful work with us. I'll definitely have Dylan back on at another time to discuss more of his interests, more of his work. He's just a really affable, informative, and insightful human being, and I really appreciate everything he does. And as always, if you like what we do here at Rev Left,

you can always support us on patreon.com forward slash red-left radio and in exchange for your support you get access to bonus monthly content. So without further ado, let's get into this wonderful discussion with Dylan Rodriguez on his book, White Reconstruction. Enjoy. What's up, Brett? This is Dylan Rodriguez. Thanks for inviting me. My day job is I'm a professor at University of California, Riverside. My 20th year is a faculty member there. For 16 years, I was in the Department of Ethnic Studies. I chaired that department for seven years. And then since 2017, I've been in the Department of Media and Culture Studies. But more importantly, in this period of time, I've been intensely engaged with a statewide and national

COPS off campus campaign based at University of California. That's the group I'm working with across California. We're trying to abolish police presence at all the University of California campuses. And we're working in collaboration with California State University, junior colleges, and organized groups of student, staff, and faculty all over the country to try to rethink and refurbish how we do collective accountability, community, what we call safety and security against state violence, against police presence. We're trying to actually obsolete police presence. And we're hoping that that's a domino effect so that we can exemplify how to do police abolition elsewhere. So I've been involving lots of other kind of

movements, lots of other kind of organizations. I'm involved with the Justice for Angelo Quinto coalition right now, 30-year-old Filipino man that was essentially choked to death, killed by the Antioch police in the Bay Area. So I'm working with that group recently. I've been working with critical resistance and other abolitionist organizations for a long time. And I love to write. I love to think. I love to talk to people. I like teaching. I like learning. So I'm looking forward to our conversation. Yeah, absolutely wonderful. And, you know, everybody hates on Twitter these days,

but I actually came across to you because of Twitter, so there's still some good things that Twitter gives rise to. I don't know if I should be embarrassed by that. Not at all, not at all. And the book, of course, that we're going to be discussing today, which, I mean, there's so much more we could discuss, and I'd love to have you back on and discuss some of your other interests, because I know it expands beyond just this one text,

but this book is called White Reconstruction, Domestic Warfare, and the Logics of Genocide. really interesting text. I really wanted you to have you on right when I started engaging with it. And maybe a good place to start with the assumption that obviously most listeners won't have read the book. Why did you decide to write it? And can you maybe give us just a basic summary of the main thrust of the argument and the thesis so that listeners can sort of orient themselves to the rest of the discussion?

Yeah, I can do that. And I can also say that this project did not just pop up. It was a, it took me 10 years. It took me 10 years to really, not even just to write the book. It took me 10 years to think through the present tense and the historical context in which I was trying to pose my argument. And a lot of this was just trying to make sense of what was happening around me. I'll tell you that what spurred the book was the campaign, not even the election of, but the campaign of Barack Obama. The first Barack Obama presidential campaign, that's when the idea for this book started.

And it was animated by a deep concern. I would even say, I mean, I hate to sound like I'm moralizing, but even a kind of political disappointment in people around me who identified as leftists, as radical, as radical feminists, as, you know, people to the left of the liberal progressive spectrum, people who were talking about liberation and freedom and revolution and abolition in different ways, suddenly kind of finding this, what I found to be a really misled and potentially dangerous political hope and, and, and kind of historical optimism in the Obama campaign. And then forget it once he got elected, forget it, right? That's when I realized that I probably had some kind of political responsibility to try to harness what I was thinking and harness my critique and harness my reaction and response to this block, the Obama multiculturalist bloc that had been seemingly quickly assembled

during that period of time. And then I realized it really wasn't quickly assembled. This was something that was the logical outlet. the logical product of years and years, really decades of political reassembly and cultural rearticulation. And so that's where this book comes from. It's the idea that the period that most people have in, you know, in the last, probably the last 20 or 30 years referred to as the post-civil rights period, right? People refer to a post-civil rights period, generally meaning at this point now the ongoing half century since the formal abolition of U.S. apartheid, the formal

and, you know, by virtue of federal juridical decree of Jim Crow segregation, right? So people call that the post-civil rights movement, or sorry, the post-civil rights era, the post-civil rights period. And it seems to, for a minute, it seemed to have culminated in the Obama campaign and the election of Barack Obama. And then this kind of really, you know, fleeting moment where people were trying to begin to raise this concept of post-racial, right, the post-racial era. of the post-racial period.

So what I saw happening around me was none of that. I didn't see it as a post-civil rights period in the way people were talking about. I certainly didn't see it as post-racism. What I saw it as was another moment of kind of reformist and liberal reconstruction. And in this sense, it was a scramble to sustain, to reconfigure to articulate and sustain the logics of white supremacy, the overlapping but not identical logics of anti-blackness, and colonialism, colonialism and anti-blackness, both in the kind of national domestic sense, in the global sense. And the reconfiguration, re-articulation, and sustaining of those

logics relied on various forms of liberal racial reform, liberal gendered reform, and so forth. So I started thinking of the phrase white reconstruction in dialogue with a bunch of colleagues. It was actually the late Clyde Woods, the amazing black radical geographer, Clyde Woods, who was kind of sitting with me, listened to me, Babylon, during a conversation. And I said the phrase white reconstruction. I said, yeah, I actually don't think it's, I said it kind of off the cuff.

I said, I said, we got to stop calling this the Postal Rice Creek. We've got to start calling this White Reconstructions. That's what it is. And Clyde interrupted me, and he pointed his finger at me. He said, you know what? That's the book you've got to write. You got to write that book. This is around 2008, 2009, right around that time.

That's the origins of the book. And so what I'm trying to think about in this, book is, first of all, a renaming of this half century that's followed the nominal, formal end of U.S. apartheid. I'm trying to reference a kind of continuity, a historical continuity of this logic of reform, of rearticulation, of adaptation that tends to reproduce the normalized violence of white supremacy, of anti-blackness, and of colonialism. I'm trying to address this period of intensive, liberal progressive reform, which, of course, oftentimes, neoconservatives, and even some right-winger's will be on board with, right?

I'm especially trying to think about how these periods of reform, these technologies of reform, in the legal sense, in the cultural sense, in the institutional sense, not only sustained, but they reproduce and they expand the architectures of, in the book, what I call in the book, asymmetrical domestic war. I'm thinking of that as the kind of, of rubric through which I want to understand these logic, the concreteness of these logics of white supremacy, anti-blackness, and what in the book I call racial colonialism. So the period of white reconstruction is that, is to say that it's not just, you know, far-right rejuvenation. It's not just kind of the mounting of this kind of white nationalist

grassroots proto-fascist aspiration that produced Donald Trump. It's not that. In fact, In fact, I would argue it's minimally that it's much better signified by the period of Barack Obama's, you know, two consecutive terms and the kind of post-racial optimism that was grounded there. And I want to think about how it's those periods of racial optimism, those periods of rearticulation and reform that actually reproduce and expand these logics of warfare and asymmetrical suffering that's kind of grounded in anti-blackness and colonialism. So that's the overall concept here, and I'm trying to think through not only a deep suspicion of reformist approaches that seem to follow periods of really kind of calcified forms of oppression, you know, of unilateral oppression like apartheid, like Jim Crow. For that, for that matter, you know, like formal colonialism, I want to cultivate a deep and rigorous analytical suspicion of the kinds of reform. that follow in the aftermath of those kinds of regimes because what I see is that those periods of reform tend to not only sustain but actually expand the logics of domination that preceded them in those in those crystallized structures of domination so that's overarchingly

that's that's the argument and the concepts that I'm trying to put forward in this book absolutely yeah incredibly well said and that's why I think I wanted to have you on it's such an important way to understand these processes and just the framework just the title white reconstruction it really flips so much bias or assumptions of the liberal order on its head and the book dives in as you said into the processes of actually reformation and seeming like progress within the system more so even than like the trump reaction that really consolidates this whole process so you know brett this is something that i've said more than once depending on the audience, whether they're going to hear me or not.

And some people get mad about this, but that's all right. But I think I might even say this in the book at some point. What if we thought about Barack Obama and Donald Trump less as kind of divergent opposites, which certainly they are in terms of personality, right? Like, that's fine. But I'm saying in the realm of politics, in the realm of what I'm trying to call here domestic war, what if we thought about them as kind of semi-alienated cousins? You know what I mean?

What if we thought about them as cousins who don't like to speak to each other, but they're still fucking cousins, all right? Like, let's think about it that way. And, you know, the thing is that a lot of our friends, a lot of our friends, colleagues, comrades, and so forth, they're basically saying a version of that when they, you know, or they were anyway saying a version of that when they were finally putting Barack Obama up to the same level of scrutiny that they were putting George W.

Right? When they're talking about, I mean, I think from drone warfare to what a Barack Obama did in the ongoing war on border crossing, brown and black migrants and so forth and so on. It's like, you know, you look at this thing in terms of an actual sober political analysis, right? And again, an analysis of how domestic war happens, how these geographies of war happen.

And rhetorically, they're very far apart. But in terms of the kind of strategies and the technologies of waging war, they're not that far apart. They're actually relatives. Yeah. Right? They're not, they're not,

it's fine to juxtaposome for the purpose. of trying to sophisticate your analysis, but let's not be naive, right? Like, it's not like the Trump regime is something altogether different than what preceded it, right? I mean, it's what it is.

We just need to be sober about that. Absolutely. Yeah, I could not agree more. And as you make clear in the book, I just want to make this very clear up front, you know, the processes of anti-blackness, settler colonialism, white supremacy, etc. They're multi-century-long historical processes

and they're constantly evolving and adapting. and as such can't be confined to one specific historical era. However, we can't investigate certain epochs to get specific understandings of how these processes manifest in a given period. And there's something very dialectical about that that you made clear that I deeply appreciate. We've talked about the period that you've dubbed as white reconstruction. Can you maybe talk about some of its core features? Right.

So I will just emphasize that I'm searching constantly for a different, analytical and organizing language to frame the period that we unevenly and differently inherit in which we are trying to do political and cultural and pedagogical work. So I just was deeply dissatisfied with the notion of a post-civil rights period for a bunch of different reasons. I also did like the way in which I heard it being brand, you know, brandished by people in the kind of mainstream left-right spectrum because I found it intellectually and politically dishonest. Everything from the notion that

there's an implication that the struggle for this thing we call civil rights was somehow essentially one, right? That it was that it was in some fundamental or foundational way one, which of course it wasn't. And on the other hand, the

implication that because the formalities of U.S. apartheid had been obsolete, that the logic of U.S. apartheid had disappeared. That was deeply offensive, right? And I don't mean offensive just in a kind of emotional, affected way. I mean, it was offensive in the sense it should insult our political

intelligence to walk around saying this kind of thing, like, that this post Jim Crow, post civil rights and all that kind of thing. So one of the core features that I would argue is distinctive about white reconstruction is exactly the specificities of the kinds of institutional and cultural, for that matter, aesthetic, symbolic, reconfiguration and reform that happened in the immediate aftermath of an official declaration that U.S. apartheid is done, that it's over. And, of course, that's followed by a bunch of other kinds of things that are defined by the rise of neoliberal capitalism, right?

Everything from the emergence of global corporations, this particular moment in the so-called post-colonial period. So there's a kind of period here in the latter, the beginning of the latter part of the 20th century where there's a kind of broadly scale. differently scaled set of disavowals that these regimes of domination that defined most of the 20th century had been left into that they've been banished to the dustbin of history that they were over right that now there was a kind of teleological progressive movement into a new moment in civilization in human history and I use the word civilization and human history with capital C and capital H's right that this is a this is a canonized kind of violently universalized set of terms. So I'm not taking them for granted. I'm using them in the sense that these are enunciations of oppressive power,

like the statement of civilization, the statement of human civilization is an enunciation of power. But this is part of this period in the latter part of the 20th century. There's an enunciation that this civilization, that this particular form of global human being had matured, that it had left behind these brittle, unilaterally violent, you know, calcified forms of domination of other peoples and other geographies and other ecologies and lands and was somehow moving into a more enlightened period, a period of

relative, you know, democracy of a slow but gradual movement toward equity. And, you know, Barack Obama said it, right? And he's kind of famous for, for amplifying the notion that really Dr. King made famous, which is the notion that, you know, the arc of human history bends toward justice, right? And it's like, well, there's a reason to say that. Dr. King had a reason to say that, but I don't think it was the same reason that Barack Obama said it.

Exactly. You know, so it's kind of challenging that. And so in this period, it's a lot of, a lot of the specificities of this period is indicated in the aftermath of these particular regimes of domination, apartheid colonialism, and so forth. At the same time, I want to say that one of the primary arguments

in this book is that white reconstruction doesn't just refer to one historical period. It's referring to a, to a persistent and resurgent logic of civilization, again, civilization with a capital C. It's a logic. It's part of how the kind of aspiration of global civilization as something that is grounded in what I call white being, which I, which I kind of borrow in some ways and elaborate in others from Sylvia Winter's life work. But this is, this is actually what it is, right? That this is, this is a logic of, of how white being constitutes the civilizational project. There's a constant reference, a constant resurgence of periods of reconfiguration and reform that attempt to rescue and vindicate the

civilizational project primarily from revolutionary abolitionist, rebellions, insurgencies, and revolts. That's what it is, because there is a threat to the assumptive global supremacy and ascendancy of civilization and white being that is relatively constant, but is intense in certain periods, right? And so what this particular last half-century period of white reconstruction is responding to is one of those moments in which you had global revolts against the assumptive ascendancy of civilization and white being by oppressed people who had been historically oppressed in various different ways, generally through these logics of white supremacy, anti-blackness, and colonialism. And in fact, some of these insurgencies were

converging with each other, they were coordinating with each other, and they were actively overthrowing, actively overthrowing these regimes of domination. So there's a scramble at that point. And one of the core features, and I'll start up after this, one of the core features of this particular period of white reconstruction is something that I learned actually most principally from Robert Allen's classic book, Black Awakening in Capitalist America. And he's writing in the period of the 1970s and 1980s, and what he's kind of walking us through is the set of directives that really constructed what I argue in the book was a kind of plan of soft counterinsurgency. And what I mean by that is at the same time you have domestic counterinsurgency happening

through the direct state police, you know, counterintelligence program, et cetera, repression of radical movements from the Panthers, right, to, to, to American Indian movement, to the weather underground, to radical feminist struggles, into global queer liberation struggles and so forth. At the same time, you had the hardcore police and state counter-surgency that was criminalizing and attacking radical and revolutionary movements in the U.S. context. What Robert Allen's book walks us through is the kind of extended set of conversations between liberal philanthropy, meaning owning class liberal philanthropy.

I'm talking about like the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation. By the way, all foundations that tend to fund a lot of me and a lot of my, you know, co-workers in universities to do our research prizes, right? These are the same foundations. There's a reason for that, right? But what Robert Allen's book teaches us is how those blocks of philanthropic foundations started developing really intense conversations with state officials,

with police, with district attorney, to try to figure out how the hell they were going to harness the elements of revolt and rebellion back into U.S. and global civil society. In other words, to prevent the downfall of white being and the civilizational project. So the soft directive became a kind of ongoing set of internally debated campaigns of reform. That's what it was. That was the soft counterinsurgency, is how do you engage in ongoing, widespread debates and conversations about reform that don't actually fundamentally challenge these arrangements of power, these technologies of domination? But in fact, maybe what they do is they invite non-white people, right? Maybe they invite folks who are in criminalized black communities. Maybe they invite even members of people who are prominent members or prominent leaders in some of these.

social movements into the apparatuses of thinking through piecemeal institutional reform, right? And maybe you fund their electoral campaigns. Maybe you create scholarships and research programs and fellowships to try to bring so-called people of color into, you know, academic and university and public policy spaces. You know, the first chapter of the book, the prominent example I talk about that's now, shoot, it's going on 20 years now, is the way the Los Angeles police department manifests this very logic, which is through the joint LAPD campaign. It is one of the most aggressive, kind of domestic, militarized, affirmative action campaigns in history, possibly the most aggressive because it's still ongoing.

You drive through Southern California, you're going to see a joint LAPD billboard with a black, brown person with a kind of openly signified LGBTQ person with women, cisgender women, etc. prominently featured, visually featured on these billboards, inviting, you know, a kind of diversity, equity, inclusion approach to the police force, to police personnel. And it's not just, that's not just the low-level personnel. It's like, yeah, they're inviting you to join the police academy. They actually want a diversity, a representation in administrative and leadership positions. So that's the counterinsurgency. That's the specificity of soft counterinsurgency and hard counterinsurgency. And, you know, there's always that mushy

middle between those that I think is distinctive about this last period. And I'll stop there, but I got a lot more to say about that. Yeah, incredibly interesting. Definitely that last part made me think about Kamala Harris as the perfect encapsulation of that. Right on, right on. My friend's Oakland caller Kotmala. Exactly. And before we move on to talk a little bit more about white binks, I just want to drill down on that before we move on. But I want to make a point about something you said and just reiterate it, which is the teleological nature of liberal, the ideology surrounding liberal progress. And it's a really insidious aspect of liberal ideology, and most people really do feel as if this system self-contained is moving toward a better world, towards justice and truth, and

really they conceptualize it as without any necessary break from capitalism and imperialism and colonialism itself, and the co-option by Obama of the framing that MLK put forward of the arc of history bends towards justice, I think what MLK was thinking of is, at some point that that arc is going to rupture from capitalism imperialism Obama took it and said no it's all going to be a part of it right yeah yeah one of them was talking about struggle one of them talking was was talking about anti-imperialist anti-capitalist struggle the other one was talking about restoring liberal faith exactly that's the difference

and it is an antagonistic irreconcilable difference between those positions absolutely so you mentioned white being can you before we move on you just want to drill down a little bit more on what you mean and how it's specifically used in your book. For sure. So I have to confess, this is borderline plagiarism. I got to tell you. But luckily, luckily in the book, I take pains to kind of articulate my intellectual and political indebtedness to a number of people who kind of lend to this concept. The only thing that might be different is just the way I phrase it, but the idea is not new. So I just want to be really clear about that. I'm not inventing some kind of new concept here. The term is a little bit different, but,

you know, there's a reason for the way I use the term. But I'd say I'm primarily guided by Sylvia Winter's lifework, which is a radical critique of European and Euro-American humanism in which she thinks about the figure of man, and she uses capital M, she thinks about the figure of man. And again, this is a kind of vulgar crystallization of her thesis, but she thinks about the figure of man as a kind of canonized architecture, a canonized paradigm that creates a normativity around the genre, what she calls the genre of human beings. right so let's think really closely about that right part of what she's getting at is how there is a civiliz global civilizational project in which in which a primary element of the work of civilization is to install man to install a canonized paradigm of man as the normative mode of human being the normative mode if you like of being human and of course what that means then is all other genres all other practices all other geographies and modalities and ecologies of being human must be conquered.

They must be conquered. Perhaps they must be eradicated. And if there's anything that is a civilizational telos, it would be that one. And that's much of Sylvia of Winter's life work is, is toward a demystification of this. And what I'm interested in doing in my book is kind of riding with Winters insights, along with other people, but Winters especially. And I want to think about the ascendancy of this thing called man. And I want to abstract it even more in a certain kind of way by thinking about white being.

Because I want to think about the specificity of the kind of module of being that is kind of assumptively grounded in white existence. And here's where Franz Fanon's work comes in, right? I think, along with many other people, I think really closely with Franz Fanon's notion of epidermalization, the way France Fanon talks about how. this famous quotation, right, that how in the colonial context, the old Marxist formulations have to be rethought because the cause is the consequence. You are rich because you are white. You were white because you are rich.

So I want to think really closely about that. And then understand how part of the genius of white reconstruction of this particular period of white reconstruction has been the abstraction of white being, the module, you know, the paradigm of white being, the abstraction of white being, so that it is no longer necessary. necessarily exclusive to white people, that there is a selective, weaponized solicitation and

invitation of so-called non-white people, in fact, of people who are subjected to anti-blackness, subjected to colonial power, subjected to Islamophobia, transphobia, and massagin, a selected invitation and solicitation of those people, of those populations into participation and membership in the apparatus of white being. This is what Barack Obama emblematizes. But it's also what joint LAPD, I think in a more broadly scaled, if you want to call it, grassroots level also emblematizes, right? Is that there's a, it's a grift. There's a notion that white being is now been opened up because apartheid's over. It's opened up because colonialism's over. Now everybody can be participating in the accoutrements, in the pleasures, you know, in the benefits. You know,

in the benefits of white being. So this is what I'm getting at is I'm trying to think about how, and of course this is also hand-in-hand with another one of the primary concepts that I try to think through in the book, which is multiculturalist white supremacy. Right. It's the one end it's rethinking what multiculturalism actually is, what it's always been in terms of its intention, which is it's never been about transformation.

It's never really been about radical anti-racism in any way. What it actually is is an expansion of the apparatuses of anti-blackness, colonialism, and white supremacy, so that there's a more diverse administrative repertoire, right? Meaning that, you know, the fucking catalog photograph of the university administration now looks, you know, gender balanced. It's black and it's brown people in there, right? Maybe you've got a few Asian and Asian-American people in there. And so it signifies something different. But the logic of the institutional apparatus, the logic of power, the paradigms of being,

in a human being that run the thing, that animate the thing, really have not changed. If anything, they've been strengthened and expanded precisely because of multiculturalism and diversity. So that's what the notion of white being is trying to articulate. It's about a kind of a canonization of a mode of being in the world that is dangerously, I think, promiscuous. Let's put it that way, right?

There's a dangerous promiscuity to white being that tries to draw people's in who at other points in history would have been obliterated by the violence of white being. Exactly. So just to sort of summarize it and let me know if I got anything wrong here, but the system is now allowing and in fact encouraging individual and diverse representation within power structures as long as those entering the power structures are, you know, whether implicitly, explicitly, consciously or not, aligning with the quote unquote genre of human being that

white being is gesturing towards. Is that a fair way to put it? Yeah, that is more than fair. And I would say what this also equips all of us who are, you know, you and I who are talking here, all of us that are like listening to this conversation, it equips us to now have a more deep and radical analysis of things like DEI initiatives, right, which is, it's not just in the universities and colleges. It's pretty much every fucking mainstream hegemonic institution has some form of diversity, equity, and inclusion imperative attached to it. So we need to understand what exactly these so-called DEI mandates actually are doing. It's kind of the 21st century equivalent of, you know,

1980s, 1990s multiculturalism, you know, the rise of affirmative action, all that stuff. It's a kind of reiteration of all those things. But let's think really closely about what DEI are intended to do. And here's the thing, Brett, I think it's actually even more flexible and dangerous than maybe your quick articulation of it was here, because it's not, it's not merely that there's a solicitation and invitation of people who are willing to cooperate with these logics of domination in these institutions, right? It's not just trying to find women and queer people and black and brown people and native people who are willing to cooperate. There's also, there's fuckers like me that are actually invited into it. There just can't be too many

of us. You follow me? Yeah. There's a certain kind of flexibility to it that they actually want a selective fair, at least in, I mean, I'm talking about the administrators of these apparatus, right? They want, they want a kind of selective, relatively isolated inclusion of even voices of what they would call dissent, which they would really not even call dissent. They would call diversity, right? It doesn't mean they're going to take you seriously, right? It doesn't mean they're going to treat you well. But it does mean that in this, in this twisted kind of way, there's a belief in these administrative, in these administrative kind of blocks that it provides these institutions even more legitimacy if they have these isolated pockets of disruption

and dissent actually included in the institutional context, in the institutional fabric. And so that's where the contradiction lies, I think. So when I articulate this kind of framework, I don't want people that are listening to think that it somehow forecloses, you know, radical resistance, insurgency, revolt, rebellion, and transformation. To the contrary, right, what it actually creates are new openings of possibility, new openings of contradiction. And what it demands of those of us who would identify as being on the side of revolution, revolt, and transformation or abolition is a better analysis, right? A better

analysis, a closer analysis, and more rigorous and sustained collective forms of tactical movement within these different kinds of institutions. So that's what I would say about that. I think we've got to be really careful about how we understand these gestures of inclusion and solicitation because, hey, I just talked about Fanon a second ago, right? Franz Fanon's biography is in some ways a great parable to think about this, right? Fanon was invited into the French colonial administrative and pedagogical apparatus to facilitate, to assist in the colonial project in Algeria. And of course, that's not what he did.

Yeah. Right? He flipped. And he became one of the major kind of revolutionary figures and intellects of the 20th century. So we think about this along those lines. and I think there's actually some unintended possibilities for collective work and thought that get instantiated by these gestures of piecemeal inclusion and reform. Yeah, incredibly, incredibly interesting.

I have an urge to take this in a million directions, but I'll keep going through the structure of the outline because I think it's getting building to a point. And I want to talk about this idea of racial capitalism as a conceptual framework. And really, I would like to hear your thoughts. on why it's essential to understand capitalism as inherently racialized. Yeah. So I am, I'm, you know, a loyalist to Cedric Robinson's definition of racial capitalism in, you know, this durable, in my mind, in my mind, foundational text, Black Marxism.

And especially in Part 1 of Black Marxism and hopefully people that are listening to this will read it if they haven't already. I know you can find that shit online. There's a PDF to have it all over the place. But I think we have to have a kind of a careful attention to how Cedric Robinson actually defines racial capitalism. And what he says is, and the reason I say that is this. The way in which I kind of read and hear a lot of uses of the term racial capitalism circulating, I'd say, over the last five to ten years, is not really what Robinson was saying when he defined it. racial capitalism is not simply capitalism that also takes racism seriously, right? It's not that. It's not just capitalism understanding that labor markets and, and, you know, global corporate capital are unevenly or asymmetrically distributed across racialized groups and categories. That's not what it is, actually. What racial capitalism means, according to Cedric Robinson, is that the violence, the power and the different

differentiation that we understand to be racial, to be racializing, and to be racist, were not corollary and are not corollary. They were and are not epiphenomenal. They were and are not simply thinly ideological manifestations of capitalism, but in fact are fundamental to making capitalism. And it's Robinson who actually writes this. And I keep this quote with me all the time. So pardon me for kind of reading this sentence from Robinson. But this is Robinson's words. Robinson says the tendency of European civilization through capitalism was not to homogenize, but to differentiate, to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into racial ones. What he is arguing is that racialism, what he calls

racialism, racial power, is rooted in the formation of European civilization itself and therefore is constitutive of the very roots and foundations of capitalism, of capitalism's formation. that's what racial capitalism is. If we understand that historical fact, right, that historical picture, then we can begin to make different kind of sense of the persistence of anti-blackness, colonialism, racial violence in the contemporary period. That's why I think we need to understand the kind of primary definition of racial capitalism as saying that, yeah, the forms of violence and so-called irrationality that people

tend to attach to terms like racism, like white supremacy, anti-blackness and police violence and so forth. Those things are not deviations from the capitalist script. They're actually necessary to it. They're what constitute and render the conditions of possibility and reproduction for capitalism in its different stages. Yeah. I think that's incredibly interesting and important to remember because a core liberal delusion, I think, is this idea that you can keep capitalism but get rid of the war and the racism and the corruption. And there's a really good analog and popular culture that more people I think would even have a visceral understanding of. And that's the term like crony capitalism. It's often used by like libertarians to suggest,

well, capitalism itself is not inherently corrupt, but this is a corrupt form of it. And we all know on the left, that's a nonsense argument. And in the same way, racism as epiphenomenal and not constitutive of capitalism is a similar sort of bait and switch. tactic i mean i mean here let's let's think about it this way right like if we want to think about racial capitalism in in in a really concrete way if we understand that the building blocks of the conceptual building blocks of property um and in of accumulation that make capitalism possible on the one hand it's chattel it's human chattel i mean there's now at this point there's an entire archive there's an entire bibliography of work that historians and and writers have done especially

in black studies, in diasporic Afrikanah studies, and black studies, that have thought through this, that have thought through how it is that the chattelization of enslaved Africans was fundamental to the creation, the conceptual and material creation of modern capitalism. You don't have one without the other. What's that old saying, right? No tomatoes, no gazpato, right? Like, it's foundational to it. And then, in addition to that, you think about the kind of global colonial conquest project, the whole expropriations, not just of land, right, not just of land and territory, but of ecology and of culture, you know, and for that matter of economy, right, the notion of economy, those things are so, are so embedded in the global conquest, colonial conquest

project that now if you take those two things kind of in their, in their side, relative historical accompaniments, right, meaning the Chattel Project and the Colonial Conquest projects and all those different iterations. Those are the things that constitute capitalism. And it doesn't just fucking go away, you know, with the nominal abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery. It doesn't just go away because, you know,

people enunciate the end of a colonial authority, right? Because you still, you know, neo-colonism, post-colonialism, and the persistent logics of anti-black chattel. If you follow those logics across the different lives that global, forms of capitalism have taken in these different periods. Now you can begin to understand why it is that we have to understand something like the police murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and so many countless other black folks are a primary expression of racial capitalism,

not a corollary one, not an accidental one, not one that can be fixed or reformed or addressed in some kind of piecemeal way, that these things are a logical expression of racial capitalism in a million different kind of ways. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So let's go ahead and move on. And I want to talk about chapter three of your book in which you explore the concept of post-raciality as a condition of white reconstruction and a precursor to the post-racial discourse. Now, you conduct this exploration in part through an examination of Barry Goldwater, which I found incredibly interesting. Can you explain this general argument and talk a bit about how you used Goldwater in this context? yes i'll walk i'll walk you all through this like because i know people listening to this like you know probably folks probably have a certain understanding of who very goldwater was right and i had the same one that most of y'all have which is you know i was trying to figure out um when

i this is i started doing the research around goldwater in the early phase of writing this book and i'll be honest like i was i found out that there was an archive of barry goldwater's personal letters and personal materials and whatnot at arizona state university and so and so i made a trip out there to look at that archive. And I'm dead honest, full transparency, I was looking for shit that would confirm a certain kind of narrative that I thought I was going to premise the book on of Barry Goldwater being, you know,

one of the primary architects of like the kind of open white supremacist anti-black state violence that defines a kind of particular stream of white reconstruction, right? And I'm saying this because, you know, at this point, rioting on my understanding of the significance of Barry Goldwater's Law and Order speech when he lost the presidential, you know, when he accepted the Republican nomination for presidential office, you know, of course he lost the election, but his law and order

speech, as Christian Parenti and so many other writers and scholars have told us, that law and order speech has become virtually paradigmatic for elected officials, including district's attorney for, you know, the 25, sorry, for the 55 going on 60 years that's followed that Republican convention. So I was looking for that. I was looking for, you know, give me archival evidence that depicts this narrative of Goldwater being the kind of political architect of a moment in, in anti-black, white supremacist domestic warfare that builds on his law and order articulation, right, of, you know, marauders in the streets and all this language that he was using. Now, what's interesting is, you know, I found some of that. But what

I actually saw in the Goldwater Archive was way fucking creepier than that. It was, It was weird. Like there was letters from to and from Jackie, you know, Jackie Robinson, right? There was a letter that I write about in the book, a letter he, a draft of a letter he wrote to Colin Powell. What I found was that Barry Goldwater was not the dude I thought he was. And in the sense that he had this weird Indian fetish, for example, right? He was part of this, he's part of this weird group of folks that only recently got disbanded, by the way. It was only a few years ago got disbanded.

He was part of this white business men's club in Arizona. In Prescott, Arizona called the Smoke Eye, the Smoke Eye people, S-M-O-K-I, the Smoke-Ey people. And these were white men. They were openly identified white men, generated from the business and kind of, you know, kind of white bourgeois community right there, and white business community out there, that would engage in these kind of weird Indian fetish rituals. And they would tattoo themselves. So they literally invented a kind of, um,

I don't know, you know, kind of like a white face native tribe. Yeah. And they prided themselves, they prided themselves on, on doing these kind of yearly performances that were loyal, that were kind of loyal imitations of what native people in the Southwest actually did. So there was that piece of them. And then you also saw all these gestures throughout his archive where Goldwater is articulating his kind of humanist attachment to black equality, right? despite the fact that he's famous for opposing the civil rights act, right? Like he makes these different gestures of identification with black people.

He bragged all the time about how the military outfit he was in was one of the first desegregated ones and how his family's drugstore operation was one of the first ones to hire black people in Arizona and so on and so forth. So here's what I'm getting at in this particular chapter is what creep me out about Goldwater is that this stuff, and I'm looking at this right around the time Barack Obama got elected. I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, man, this guy who I projected to be a kind of pretty, pretty kind of unilateral, unilaterally narrated architect of law and order white supremacy and warfare, which he certainly was, was also kind of giving indications of these early stages of post racial identification among powerful, in this case, among powerful white people, you know, among powerful white people, elected officials, business people, and so forth. And here's here's the logic of what I called post-raciality, is that what this does, what post-raciality does is that it gestures toward a disavowal of the violence that is created in apartheid and anti-blackness in colonialism. It disavows that violence. and at the very same time

that it also tries to expropriate and appropriate kind of these different cultural forms that black people, native people, and other people embody in their daily lives under conditions of duress, right? So it's gestures of white remaking, white self-remaking, that actually

refine white supremacist power, refine anti-black and racial colonial power by way of disavowing implication in their violence. And so yeah, this is kind of the early... So I've seen like, okay, see this post-racial thing is not new. It's actually there in very Goldwater's archive, which is, which is, you know, makes it even creepier.

Creepy as fuck. And yeah, that is so interesting because I think it's, it breaks down the caricature of Goldwater as simplistically an explicit bigot and shows this undercurrent of really fetishizing colonized people

in a way that sort of is a precursor to certain forms of liberals now, white liberals, who will manifest their sort of latent racism through ostensible acts of over glorifying, romanticizing

and fetishizing. And it's sort of what, Jordan Peel and get out, like the white dad and get out, right? He's gesturing towards that. That's right. No, it's this constant gesture that you see in Goldwater's archive that he wants Indians and he wants black people to believe that

he is their fucking friend. If I'm going to really break it down and be simple about it and just, and just cut it. It's like that's what Goldwater. Goldwater wanted Colin Powell to believe that he understood the black man, right? And I say that and I say that very pointed Colin, if you look at that particular letter that I write about in the book, like he wanted Colin Powell to believe that he was a friend of the black man. These smoke eye, this smoke eye tribe, these white people smoke eye tribe, they wanted, they wanted southwest, multiple southwest Indian tribes to believe that they were like friends of them and that they were doing honor to their cultural. practice and cultural heritage under these conditions of conquest by imitating what they call the snake dance every year right and they would fucking get tanned like there's these weird pictures of bury goldwater with a fucking tan um with with other members the smoke eye tribe getting ready to perform their ceremony right so they went all out with this thing man and this is this is something

which i think is not unique to bury goldwater so i'm i'm writing about him but i'm thinking about him as symptomatic as as as typical rather than unique yeah yeah so interesting you know i was thinking of like when Biden said you know if you're not voting for me you ain't black or even when Trump himself says stuff like I'm the least racist person in the you know and that you've ever met or like you know I love the blacks or whatever like there's this overt attempt to to display his love or unity or appreciation of the very people that the forces he's marshalling white supremacist violent reactionary forces are are explicitly going against it's very strange well it's the disavow that that's one of the primary

I think themes of this of this book is that is that there's a persistence to the kind of white disavowal of implication in fucking evil, in violence. And the point is not merely to identify the disavowal. The point is to think about the political work that the disavowals do. Right. Right. How primary the disavowals of white implication for responsibility and accountability for historical violence, how primary that is to the rendering of these invitations. to multiculturalist white supremacy to join LAPD and all the rest of it, right? Like, you have the disavowal of implication is what accompanies the invitation to, you know, participate in the apparatuses of white being. Yeah.

Damn. Incredibly, incredibly essential to understand. I find that entire exploration fascinating. I want to continue moving on. And in your book, you critique the narrative of mass incarceration, which I found incredibly interesting and you you just you put it up as sort of intrinsically linked to a fundamentally liberal reformist project that reproduces and maybe even intensifies the processes it's claiming to critique i was hoping that you could just elaborate on this argument because i think is really really important and gets at a lot of

these ideas yeah so so let me say this i want to be really careful about how i kind of address this concept this phrase really mass incarceration because it's gone it's had different rhetorical lives and it still does have some different historical lives. There's a particular, there are different historical moments in different political circles in which the use of the phrase mass incarceration means something very pointed and specific, by which I'm saying what it really means is domestic war against criminalized black populations, right? And people will use mass incarceration as a shorthand to refer to that, right? So I have no problem with that.

And in fact, a lot of folks who use the phrase in those contexts, they'll call it mass black incarceration, right, in a really explicit way. My concern is with the period that generally follows the publication of Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, in which the phrase mass incarceration, the concept of the rubric mass incarceration gets canonized. It gets canonized into a common sense language among philanthropic, liberal philanthropic organizations, a certain crowd within academia, a certain scholarly crowd in academia, a certain crowd of activists, certainly elected officials, certainly media pundits, right? So that's when I say canonization, I'm talking about that circulation among that kind of set of overlapping groups or constituencies in which mass incarceration then becomes a common sense language. That's my concern. What are the grounds of that canonization? Because what I would argue is that the grounds of the canonization of the phrase mass incarceration among these overlapping constituencies is not an abolitionist one.

It is not a black radical one. It is not even one that recognizes in any analytically specific. or consequential way that it's actually not mass incarceration. It is targeted. It is targeted incarceration. So on the one hand, my critique is that the way the phrase circulates tends to be rhetorically and intellectually dishonest. There's a way in which there's a kind of subtle universalism,

a subtle gesture toward shared, carcleral and criminalized suffering that is, described by the mass, this notion of a mass of mass incarceration. It's not the mass. This actually really specific populations that are targeted for criminalization and incarceration. Let's be really clear about that. And let's say that in our fucking language, right? The other part of this is to think about what the political and organizing, you know, meaning the activist and scholarly consequences are of just rolling with the phrase mass incarceration as a canonical notion. what it what it leads to is is a set of proposed solutions and even a kind of critical framework that doesn't account for the asymmetry the asymmetry of criminalization policing and incarceration right which is the opposite of mass incarceration so so if we're going to be serious and analytical and take the activist scholarly implications of the asymmetries of policing criminalization and incarceration seriously then we have to

really come at this phrase from a from a from a from a you know uh an opposition on corrective position we got to stop saying that phrase we have to name it for what is and that's part of the reason why you know the subtitle the book uses the phrase domestic warfare right i often will use that phrase as the replace as a kind of corrective for the phrase mass incarceration depending on who i'm talking to right if i'm talking to people who i think will understand or i think will be willing to like listen to what i'm saying when i call it domestic war or specific asymmetrical domestic war, I'll use that phrase. Other contexts, I might use a slightly different phrase. But the point is that we can't be attached to the way that this phrase mass

incarceration has been canonized. It kind of sneaks this multicultural humanism in through the back door. It's not mass. Yeah. I think that's incredibly important. And anybody listening can now take that critique and weave it into the way that you discuss it with other people, even just making that nuance and that caveat clear as you use the word mass incarceration can be an important way to just sort of reconfigure the language and the paradigm around this discussion, because I think that's a great point. And one I've never even thought. I've used the word a million times, never really thought about its implications.

And that's why, I mean, it's so easy, I think, for like liberals on, like, CNN to, to utter the phrase and not have any sort of, you know. Well, you think about, look, look, man, I mean, this is, this is part of the problem is that is that once, once this thing, once something like this gets canonized, now you have entire research agendas and public policy agendas that are funded by think tanks, funded by, by foundations, funded by universities, and then engage and amplified by pundits and elected officials around the kind of canonized meaning of the phrase mass incarceration, which is to say that what the solutions are actually moving toward is not necessarily the end of mass incarceration, right? But by which I'm saying, I'm saying the solutions that are being proposed, they're not abolitionists, right? What they're arguing for is a some kind of unnamed threshold in which it will comfortably no longer be called mass incarceration.

It's just good equitable incarceration. It's rational incarceration, right? Which, again, nobody ever defines, right? With all the kind of prevalent, you know, work that's going on around mass incarceration, there's no attempt to actually define what the end of mass incarceration would actually be. What's the threshold, right? Hey, is the solution that you now have like a kind of equitable demographic distribution across racial gender and other groups, you know, of incarcerated populations?

is that what the solution is supposed to be, right? Is it equity among incarcerated people? What is it? And, of course, there's a reason why it doesn't get defined, right? And it's because it's a kind of self-reproducing technology, you know, that the solutions and the reforms and the discourse of mass incarceration itself are actually, actually end up becoming part of the technology of the kind of carceral society, of the criminalizing and carceral society by way of obscuring what it actually

is, which is this asymmetrical war. Yeah, fascinating stuff. And I think that the thrust of your book is working, and you just mentioned it in the last episode, toward this ideal and necessity, really, of abolitionism. And this is, and you even make it very clear in the epilogue that abolitionist practice is a crucial component of true liberation and gestures towards the way out of this entire sort of process of white supremacy and domination. Can you summarize some of your main points from the epilogue and just sort of articulate what abolitionism represents in view of the rest of your work? Yeah, yes, I'll say this. I'll say that one really important thing I want to emphasize over and over again is that the way I think the work of abolition ought to be engaged now and forever is as part of the living ongoing archive of Black Revolutionary and Black Radical Praxis, diasporic, you know, global, black revolutionary and black radical praxis. It's grounded in that. That's the roots of abolition as a practice. It doesn't mean that it can't proliferate. and inform other forms of anti-colonial practice, right? Other forms of revolutionary and transformative practice.

But let's just be really clear that it's coming from a kind of black radical tradition, a black radical episteme and pedagogy. So that's explicit, right? I think about, in that sense, I think about abolition as a kind of living archive of collective obligation, of collective responsibility that is, I think, best manifested or best articulated as a radical accountability to that Black Radical and Black Revolutionary Archive, right? And if we think about it that way, it requires certain kinds of things. Number one, it requires whatever form of collective study and collective engagement,

pedagogical engagement, political education, that a collective can muster, right? Whatever form that can take, whatever form that collective conversation, collective political education can take, I think it is critical that the engagement with the black radical, black revolutionary black abolitionist tradition is primary. Because that tradition, that archive provides a set of concepts, a set of organizing practices, a set of analyses and political theorizations that are distinct. And again, which inform and challenge some of the existing paradigms of doing radical revolutionary political work. So that's number one. I want to say that is number one. The, I think,

the second thing that I'll mention as a point of emphasis about how I understand abolition, I see it as a kind of principled and rigorous counter to reformism. And again, I'm distinguishing reformism from reform. I'm thinking about reformism as a kind of ideological and programmatic position that tends to reify or kind of presume that the outermost possibilities of collective movement against relations of historical domination, violence, and genocide are only reformist outcomes, right? Are only reforms as outcomes. So reformism tends to do this. And we're living in a long period.

That's part of what the counterinsurgency of white reconstruction has done is to kind of install reform as the outermost limit, the outermost practical and ideological horizon of what can be done politically, right? It's really difficult to push beyond reform as the possibility. And I'm talking even among people who self-identify as radicals, as revolutionaries, and sometimes as abolitionists too, in the end, what you will end up kind of experiencing with different collectives of people who even identify as part of those left formations are proposals that say, well, what we need to militantly push for are militant reforms. Now, let me say something about reforms, right? reforms are a tactical necessity okay i understand this um i understand that that there are various contexts in which there's an urgency around pushing for reforms as and i say this all the time pushing for reforms as essentially as a form of casualty management right i mean i'll say this

over and over again that if i take my if i take my own analysis seriously then i also take certain kinds of tactical reform as a necessity because they will prevent people from being eliminated, all right? So I'm not, I'm not, I'm not kind of pushing that aside. I'm not, I'm not discounting that. What I am coming after is reformism, right? Reformism as an ideological horizon. So that's what abolition challenges is that. And then secondly, I'll say, sorry, thirdly, I'll say this, then I'll stop. I understand abolition as a language, a rhetoric, a kind of encouragement, a collective and dynamic encouragement, to think about the meaning of, of key terms like freedom, right? What does freedom actually mean, right? What does freedom look

like? What does community? What do notions of community? And for that matter, security, what is security, right? What is self-defense? What does, you know, kind of autonomy or self-determination? These are key terms that, that we use all the time in our organizing, in our scholarly, and in our other forms of political and cultural work. But I think what the work, what the kind of framework of abolition does is it pushes and challenges us collectively to constantly revisit and rethink what those terms actually mean and how, for example, we can engage in visions and practices, and I mean practice in the everyday immediate sense of freedom, for example, that do not rely on the reproduction of

existing relations of state domination, of power of policing, of incarceration, of criminalization to secure the meaning of what we call freedom, right? How do we do abolitionist freedom? So I think part of what abolition also does is that, is it kind of builds on this black radical and black revolutionary tradition to say that, you know, what what needs to be thought through in some collective way here are practices and modalities of being human to go back to, you know, what Sylvia Winter's work talks about and to, you know, what I'm trying to do in this book around this notion of white being, what does human being look like

in the abolition of the ascendancy of white being? Right? That's, I'd say those are three, some of the three points that I'm really concerned with in thinking about abolition. Yeah, incredibly interesting.

And I really also love the point about reforms as casualty management and separating reforms from reformism as an entire approach. I think that's really helpful in clarifying. But let's talk about abolition a little bit more and one concern regarding it, as with so many other things, is its relationship or non-relationship to a broader revolutionary project or organization. And I think we can kind of see this, especially with the Black Lives Matter protest, where there's this historical energy, historical upheaval, grassroots as it comes, but because there's no real ability to force those demands, put pressure on the system other than protesting, what tends to happen.

And it's not just Black Lives Matters, a million movements like this. It gets more or less co-opted or it loses momentum or it doesn't get much accomplished. And when it comes to material changes on the level of policing, very little relatively has been done. That's not to take away any of the victories that have been gained. They're beautiful and important and 100% a product of this agitation and organization. But with all of that in mind, you know, what are your thoughts about abolitionism as disconnected from a revolutionary formation and being reduced to a mere set of demands without any actual mechanism to get those demands met? Just what are your general thoughts on that general?

Yeah, this is a really important, it's a really important tension, I think, to sit in and inhabit consistently. But I'll say, let me start with this. I think it's really critically important to simply reject the notion. And I say that like in a principled way, right? I would encourage, I would encourage people to reject the notion that abolitionist practice is reducible to a set of demands, right? Like, I think, I think that is a really superficial, a historical, and uninformed way to try to think about what abolition is. And it tends to reflect the positions of folks who, number one, they're scared shitless by the prospect of having their political organizing methods and paradigms challenged by thinking differently, right? which is what abolition really does, does for us, right?

It forces and challenges and stuff, constantly think differently. So there's a rejection of abolition, I would say especially among people who are kind of liberals and don't realize they're liberals because they're fucking militant as shit, right? And they call themselves revolutionaries, but they realize, come face to face with abolition, like, oh, fine, I can't deal with this, right? And they're like, ah, this is a bunch of demands. And then there's a kind of oftentimes there's, I've seen the script played out so many times. There's oftentimes a gesture to say, yeah, abolition is a great demand, but that's down the line.

Right. Let's think about what we can do right now as part of an immediate program, an immediate agenda. So I reject that. I reject the premise that abolition is reducible to a set of demands or outcomes. And this is something I was saying over and over again for many months, especially during the summer of 2020, abolition is not an outcome. Like I'll say that a thousand times until people get it. Abolition is not an outcome, just like abolition is not a demand. I think what we need to do is push back against the tendencies. to simplify and collapse abolition into some kind of mystified outcome or some kind of set of demands. And here's what abolition actually is, I would say. I would say abolition is more of a method. It's more of a method. It's more of an analytical frame. And it's more of a pedagogy than it is a discrete program or agenda or set of demands. Right.

I'll say that again. I see in this moment, in this particular historical moment, I see abolition as a method, as an analytical framework. and as a pedagogy, more than as a kind of discrete set of demands or a discrete agenda. So when I say method, I'm just echoing and amplifying what people like Merriam Kaba and Ruthie Gilmore and all these folks around me who have informed my thought and my work over many years, right? I'm amplifying, all I'm doing is amplifying what these folks have said about what abolition is as a method, meaning that, as Ruthie has said, it's a way of making and creating

things, right? That's what abolition actually is. It's a modality of making and creating things. What this then means is that abolition is a method, is a method of organizing. It's a method of teaching. It's a method of critically theorizing and analyzing. It's a method to form collective principles of struggle to build liberatory, insurgent community, to try to create liberated forms of justice and so forth and so on.

So that's how I understand what abolition is. Now, there's something that's correct about abolitionist practice not necessarily being analogous to notions of a revolutionary project or revolutionary organization, right? Like, I mean, in the sense that I understand those notions being used by folks, people who are part of a revolutionary project, part of a revolutionary organization. That's fine. Like, I can roll with that. And I'm down to, like, be with and be in conversation with anybody who claims. is a revolutionary project organization, right? Like, I've got the receipts for that.

You know what I mean? Like, I'll be in conversation with any of you who did that kind of work. What I will say is that there's no revolutionary project organization that I think can legitimately engage with the contemporary period without being methodologically informed by abolition. So that's how I would think about that relationship, right? I think there's something correct. I don't see abolition as a discrete project or organization in the sense of a revolution.

project organization in a canonical way. I see it as a dynamic, as a dynamic ongoing method of analysis, of struggle, of pedagogy, and of creation that can and must inform any notion of revolutionary struggle. So I think that there's something correct about the anxiety, but I also think that part of the anxiety is a misconception of what abolitionist practice actually intends and what it does and the way in which I think it can and should be co-constititive in a critical way, right, in a critical way, in maybe a transformative way, of the way different people and different organizations are doing their work, right?

And I'm talking everything from, from, you know, indigenous sovereignty to radical feminist work and, you know, black liberation work, you know, anti-capolis and liberation from capitalists where, you know, people that are down with communist socialist formations of a revolutionary program. Abolition is a method to inform all those things. And I think that's where a kind of beautiful, creative, you know, kind of critical mess can kind of help push us out of this fucked-up genocidal context for you. I welcome that mess. Yeah, nuanced and interesting take.

I really appreciate that. And we're sort of zooming into the last couple of questions. Sure. Before I totally let you go, I do want to touch on what we discussed before we started recording, which is the academic versus other forms of intellectualism. But maybe one way to lead towards the end here is just, you know, ultimately what core lessons do you ultimately hope that readers take away from engaging with white reconstruction?

So let me give you, let me give you three. I thought about that. So let me give you three, and then maybe the last point will kind of lead into that discussion about, let's not thinking critically about what the relationship is that some of us should have with people we call academics. So one lesson I would say is that is that the book is pushing for a necessary, productive principled skepticism about the forms of concession and piecemeal change that administrators institutions and other historically anti-black colonial and white supremacistism. systems will give in moments of uprising and insurgency. So I think that there's a certain kind of momentary timeliness to the book's publication in October 2020 that feeds into the very present moment that we're in right now on

March 8th, 2021, which is a moment in which there is a kind of rush toward a kind of debate around police reform, right? And the problem is with the kind of structure of these debates themselves. themselves, which are oriented as much around the expansion of policing power as they are around, you know, so-called defunding the police, right? Like there's a notion that, oh, yeah, maybe we should like, maybe there should be a shrinking of what police do in a deputization of police power so that non-police engage in the work of policing.

That's the kind of general contours of the hegemonic police reform discourse that we're in, right? Not only that we've entered, but that we are in. So what that does is, obviously, is it crowds out all of the, I think, beautiful and creative work around police abolition and, and kind of liberation from police and state violence that has been ongoing for many years, you know, before and beyond 2020. So that's one thing, right, is that kind of principled skepticism. That's one lesson. A second lesson is, I think, it's not really a lesson. It's more of, I think, an analytical approach, a methodological and analytical approach to the purpose. political and cultural work that a lot of us do, especially in collective settings. I think what

I'm arguing in this book is that we have to understand the political and culture work we are doing as occurring within a condition of asymmetrical war and counterinsurgency. That if we take that seriously, if we understand that the conditions are those of asymmetrical war, of particular bodies and people and geographies and populations being asymmetrically targeted by policing criminalization, incarceration, and displacement, and so forth. And at the same time, take seriously the various

sophisticated forms of counterinsurgency that try to undermine the work of radical and revolutionary people and insurgent abolitionist people in trying to overthrow the apparatus of asymmetrical war. If we take those things seriously, I think it transforms necessarily transforms the political and cultural work we do. That's the second thing.

And the third thing that I hope that I hope, you know, I try to signify in this book is that we have to engage in constant, rigorous, and hopefully somewhat joyful collective study. I think there has to be a kind of seriousness and joyfulness to the collective work of critical analysis and critical thought and just study so that different communities and collective to people can build shared analysis that avoids the pitfalls of reformism. I think that's probably one of the most crucial things that I feel like I have to emphasize over and over again. And, you know, I argued this a long time ago, and I think I would still argue it now, which is in this particular historical

moment, I think one of the probably the primary method of abolitionist practice is probably pedagogical, right? In other moments, it might be paramilitary. In other moments, it might be policy-oriented. I think right now the primary modality of abolitionist work is pedagogical. That's what I mean by collected study. I think that there is a need to engage in building shared analysis so that there can be a kind of principled commitment to challenging the canonization, the normalization of reformism as the exclusive way in which social change and justice and liberation of freedom can be approached. So those are three things I would say, but there's, you know, there's obviously more, but I'm hoping that folks would like be willing to think about

those things after paying attention to what I write in this book. Yeah, no, I love that. And, you know, academic research and work is incredibly important. And I appreciate folks like you who do the radical academic work and then come on to explain the concepts to, you know, for the most part, just regular working people. And that sort of back and forth is essential. And it breaks through the barrier that's often put up between academia and the rest of the world. Do you have any, like when you engage in this sort of work within academia, I mean, what are some like maybe obstacles or hurdles that you have to deal with

when you're presenting a fairly very radical critique of the system overall within an institution of the system, which is academia writ large? Yeah. I mean, I think part of this is there's a kind of, I think there's something specific about this to the U.S. context in which there is, An industrialization that I think still is underanalyzed, there's an industrialization of social movements and activist work that is largely funneled into a kind of Sol Olinsky paradigm of winnable victories.

And it is kind of disciplined in a bad way, right? Disciplined in a narrowing way by a nonprofit industrial complex, which again, Robert Allen writes about in Black Awakening and capitalist America. I think he's writing about the early stages of the nonprofit industrial complex. But a nonprofit industrial complex that insists on a kind of discrete reform-based campaigns as the exclusive method to signify viable movement towards social change. Okay, now you think about those dynamics and what they crowd out is the messiness of collective engagement with critical analysis. and kind of study in critical theorization. And the reason is that critical theorization,

critical analysis, especially in a collective and shared sense, that shit does not tend to produce satisfying short-term practical agendas. What that shit does is it actually complicates everything you fucking do. And here's the thing, if you look at the historical record

of collective movements for transformation, revolution, and insurgency, right? without exception, without a single exception, that kind of engaged an ongoing collective study in some kind of sophisticated way and in some kind of collective way was and is essential, right? The problem that I see is this kind of, on the one hand, on the one hand, is what I just depicted, which is this kind of the formation of this, of this kind of a lispheus paradigm around social movements that's, I think, toxified what the United, what people in the U.S. especially do.

And then on the other hand, you have this other complex, which is the academic one, right? You have this kind of this thing we call academia, which is, by the way, it's an abstraction. It's not actually a brick and mortar thing. It's not a place. It's a fucked up aspiration, right? So a lot of us that have day jobs in universities, I think, need to more explicitly disidentify with the term and with the kind of aspirational position of being an academic. Right.

I think there's actually a political project there in pushing back against the identity. and in the aspirational structure of academia and of the academic in large part because if you look at it historically they don't want a lot of us in there right and like to the extent that we're struggling for respectability and inclusion in this thing we imagine as the academy it's going to fuck us all up right it get man it's given way too many people i know it's given them high blood pressure and cancer and i mean all kinds of bad shit comes from that right so if you think about if you think about this this intellectual and scholarly pedagogical work we do the labor we do the jobs we have in universities, colleges, community colleges, et cetera, if we think about it as

labor, you know what I mean? If we think about it as a fucking job, as work, I think it frames a little bit differently, right? Now it's not kind of abstracted from the conditions of the labor. That's what the notion of academia wants to do. It wants to abstract your actual physiological, intellectual labor away from the conditions in which it is happening. So I say, fuck academia. Let's forget about that. And fuck the identity of academic. Forget about that. Let's think about what it means to be scholarly. All right? Like,

let's think about what it means to be scholarly. This is one of the things, this is the beef I have with this Netflix film about Fred Hampton and the snitch that just came out, right? The film that will not be named. Yeah. All right. So, like,

one of the problems I have with that film is it fails to do any justice to how rigorous and scholarly Fred Hampton actually was as an organizer and as a thinker, right? Like, there's a much, There's the classic documentary, the murder of Fred Hampton, which does, I think, in my view, a really phenomenal job of tracing Fred Hampton's political, scholarly, political, scholarly activist work, you know, as part of a grassroots, you know, revolutionary struggle. And it kind of re-signifies what it means to be scholarly. That's why I'm saying scholarly instead of academic, right? And I say to my colleagues in different spaces, and I don't mean colleagues in the universe, I mean colleagues in social movements and organizations and activists,

cultural circles and so forth, abolition circles and so forth. I say what I insist that we have to do is we have to engage in much more scholarly activist practice, much more scholarly creative practice. And that doesn't mean you go into academia and that you study strictly academic texts. It just means that you take the analysis and the thoughts seriously and rigorously. So I would push for that. And that's what I try to identify as. Like I'm not saying that you don't also have an analysis of the relative institutional privileges that you have working at one job versus the other. But I do think it is important to think about it as labor, right? And to push back against this abstracted notion of the academy, which is so fucking elitist and petty bourgeois and bullshit anyways. Absolutely. I love that answer. I love the distinction between academia and scholarly investigation. And I certainly hope here at RevLeft,

we help contribute to that general scholarly work of bringing some of these ideas. Oh, my God. Tate, before we went online, before we started recording, I think I was telling you that, like, I see what Rev Left radio does as, I should say this out loud. Y'all are actually exhibiting. You are performing exactly the kind of collective study that I'm talking about as being necessary, right? So, like, this is the work that you all do is contributing to exactly that kind of collective practice.

So, like, that's why I'm appreciative of what you do. That's why I'm so happy to be invited to be part of this. Yeah, well, thank you so much. That's incredibly kind. It means a lot to me. And, you know, Dillon, when I invite people on as guests, you know, often just reading their book, you never know how they're going to be on air, but as well, as being a great writer and thinker you're a wonderful orator this has been a fascinating

episode i've learned so much i know my audience has before i let you go can you please let listeners know where they can find you and your work online and anything else you might want to plug all right on um true i got a bunch of links i could send you man yeah but um but let's see i guess i guess you could you could hook up with me um send me send me messages my email address is just my name dylan rodriguez 73 at gmail dot com hit me up um hit me up more than once if i'm slow to respond my Twitter handle is at Dylan Rodriguez. My Instagram handle is Dylan Rodriguez 73. I got some links I could send you.

I don't know if you can post that as part of posting the podcast, but I want people to get involved with the national Cops off campus work. So there's the UC University of California Cops off campus campaign has a link tree that I can send out that has a bunch of resources for people that want to get involved locally in that work. And then I have some stuff that I've written recently that people might be interested in reading. Colin Kaepernick curated a series called, along with Angela Davis, wrote the intro article for a curated series called Abolition for the People that's on Medium that I contributed to. That's one of my favorite things I've contributed to in recent years, actually. Just to be included in this group of a couple dozen people, my good friend Connie One was one of the editors for this thing.

But yeah, Abolition for the People is a series of short essays that came out on Medium. You all can find that pretty easily. Another thing I think some folks might be interested in reading that I wrote recently was for the preface for a special issue of the Harvard Law Review called Abolition as Praxis of Human Being. It's a forward. You could pretty much Google that. That's online as well. So, yeah, I can send you a few links that you can circulate out.

But I hope people reach out to me if there's anything I can do to kind of help with the work they're doing and thinking they're doing. Okay. Yeah, absolutely. And, yeah, shoot me an email with links and I'll put as many as I can into the show notes of this episode. to make it as easy as people or for people as possible. And again, Dylan, I love this conversation, loved this book. Open invite. Anytime you want to come back on Rev.

Left, we've got to do it again sometime. Right on. Hey, hey, likewise, you just corral me and bring me in and you got my information. So, yeah, I hope, I'll just be the first of many visits to the show. I really enjoy this. Dumbies ask me why I'm always yelling fuck a cop. Like they don't repost all this shit that I've been talking about. See, they don't think we're criminal intent.

Crooks have to balance out the risk and consequence Like if you crush a cuff man by his neck And that results in the death Then the punishment is debt And if he got a gang protecting that said killer Then y'all gonna turn all these victims into killers No I'm talking about My big old Samoan homie named Jackson

Keep a cricket bat the size of shotguns in a passenger 3-03, free Billy T Free my homie dumper caught my brother on his third swing That punk ass judge called striking And since he told spokes like a bite, gave him life They took our OGs off the street into a prison And now we put a grown man's burden on his children And now we're getting lessons from a lion-ass rapper

That take all they directs from a cracker Know I'm talking about I'd rather eat a bullet for free Than I have a scooter braw and say he fucking with me Nah I'm down to kill a white supremacist I'm down to put a side phone just to settle shit I'm down to leak up like a gang full of gangs

And Pranglo Oh, homie, do you think? Let them have it, bro. I'm down to kill a white supremacist. I'm down to put aside for him just to settle shit. I'm down to link up like a gang full of gangs and bring. Love me, do you think? Let them have it, bro.

See, I ain't really tripping up of statues. I'm focused on the crackers protecting the statues. The white people who believe what they believe, you'll be dead as robbery. Fucking with someone like me. She! Tell your teeth I have my baton in the oven. And fuck your dumb trunk, loving Filipino cousins. Boom, same energy

A Snoop in New York Talking shit like Snoop did it The source of wars But in court The judge ain't got no love for bamboo Let it been on it Judge went and hung me out to dry Like a clothes pin

Q and I theory That's an era Trump and little girls Are you really not the wearer Defund the police means Move money Abolishing Police now That's a free country

Defund the police Move money to the streets Then abolish the police La Dones go free I'm down the police kill a white supremacist. I'm down to put a side phone just to settle shit. I'm down to link up like a gang full of gangs and bring low, homie do your thing. Let them have it, bro. I'm down to fight a white supremacists. I'm down to put a side phone just to settle shit. I'm

down to leak up like a gang full of gangs and bring low only do you think. No I'm talking about. Yeah, we ain't got the luxury of time. Police and militiamen is drawing out a line. They've made a couple statements but you ain't read the signs I answered back with nines A K's with quick slides Iba Taitai di Pue de shamsu ma fai He li binyu langshajan He gonna dry up in time

We ain't border design to say the islands A line 7,000 fucking islands Bro quadruple the tribes Just to illustrate that there ain't been control from the jump But since we fight and let's unite And turn that million of one Sound like a million from one

Oh that's a hundred round drum That's a kid squeezing the trigger sicker eating on crumbs See he think where the criminals He knows he see money made He see money spent He talked with an accent but he don't give a fuck Cause the only thing he needs to say is get that shit Love

Run it Running All over the price that we have been paying in the fans There's been freedom for the white man We fought abroad so that the white man in America could be free today To sick police dogs on us I'm down to kill a white supremacist I'm down to put aside phone just to settle shit

I'm down to link up with a gang full of gangs and bering Little. Hummy, do you thing. No, I'm talking about. I'm down to kill a white supremacist. I'm down to put that side phone just to settle shit. I'm down to link up with a gang, full of gangs and brang, a little homie do your thing. Let them have it, bro.

I'm down to kill a white supremacist. I'm down to put aside fun just to settle shit. I'm down to link up with a gang full of gangs and branglel little homie do you thing. No. I'm talking about. What's up the chat's going to do? Have it, bruh. Yeah!

Don't get to do it. I can't think, trick. Brang. Now the only way you can have these is to eliminate those injustices and the American white man is not going to eliminate those injustices and the American white man is not going to eliminate him. He's going to talk that pretty talk. talk, but he'll still continue to practice those inhuman deeds.