In her foreword to the 133rd<\/sup> volume of the Harvard Law Review<\/em>, Dorothy Roberts writes that \u201ctoday\u2019s prison abolitionists are the heirs to a freedom movement that antislavery activists began.\u201d[1]<\/a> Embracing this idea, Abolition 13\/13 began with a reflection on Black Reconstruction <\/em>by W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois famously referred to the freedom movement of antislavery activists as \u201cabolition-democracy.\u201d This abolition democracy, according to Du Bois, came to understand that the abolition of slavery would only be accomplished if \u201cthe emancipated Negroes became free citizens and voters,\u201d as well as beneficiaries of schools and land.[2]<\/a>\u00a0 Yet such demands, aiming for the full incorporation of Black people into society as equal members, remained unachieved. The southern white worker\u2014socialized through shifts on slave patrols and filled with fantasies of becoming a planter\u2014clung to a \u201cdoctrine of race\u201d that precluded any contribution to abolition democracy.[3]<\/a> Meanwhile, Northern industry deserted its original support of abolition democracy by spearheading a system of exploitation \u201cbuilt on much the same sort of slavery it helped to overthrow in 1863.\u201d In doing so, Northern industry \u201cmurdered democracy in the United States so completely that the world does not recognize its corpse.\u201d[4]<\/a> Du Bois accordingly found that \u201cdemocracy died save in the hearts of black folk.\u201d He rejected any understanding of the Emancipation Proclamation or the Thirteenth Amendment as ending slavery once and for all. Instead, \u201cthe slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.\u201d[5]<\/a> This sobering observation tells us that the struggle for abolition is far from over. Moreover, if the failure to realize abolition democracy constituted a victory of plutocracy over democracy, then we cannot understand anti-democratic and exploitative systems today without taking into account the history of slavery and its incomplete abolition.<\/p>\n The readings for Abolition 4\/13 concern this history, and this blog post focuses on what they illuminate for present-day heirs of the fight for abolition-democracy. Specifically, while many scholars and activists look to the struggle against slavery for a vision of what abolition democracy should build, I suggest that the history of abolitionist struggle also reveals what discourses legitimated and normalized both slavery and its reincarnations. As such, I discuss The History of Mary Prince<\/em>\u2014an abolitionist slave narrative published in 1831\u2014and the work of Dennis Childs in Slaves of the State<\/em> to identify discourses of dependency and amelioration that past defenders of chattel slavery and present-day defenders of penal slavery deploy. The discourse of dependency captures both nineteenth-century accusations that Black people are inherently idle and more contemporary tales of \u201cwelfare queens\u201d and welfare dependency. The discourse of amelioration rested on the idea that reforms could create harmonious slave societies. It resonates with present-day self-presentations of prisons as non-repressive spaces of rehabilitation. Public enjoyment of repression and state violence, while contradicting the idea that prisons could be non-repressive and non-violent, exist side-by-side ameliorationist narratives, providing a further justification of the prison-industrial complex and racialized state terror. After discussing these justifications of both chattel and penal slavery, I briefly review The Second Founding <\/em>by Eric Foner and consider whether the history and content of the Reconstruction Amendments provide a way to defeat such justifications that keep oppressive systems in place and leave the promise of Reconstruction unfulfilled.<\/p>\n The History of Mary Prince<\/em>, narrated by a formerly enslaved woman residing in England, demonstrates how slavery abolitionists fought both discourses of dependency and amelioration. To begin with the former discourse, it is striking how consistently the slave narrative stressed that Black people are not inherently idle. For instance, Prince narrates how she \u201cdid not sit idling during the absence of [her] owners; for [she] wanted, by all honest means, to earn money to buy [her] freedom.\u201d[6]<\/a> What is curious about this passage is that it presents the effort of Prince to pay for her own manumission as not merely stemming from her desire to be free, but also from her refusal to be idle. Prince reiterates this rejection of idleness when she describes the period after she departed her slaveholders in England. She had gone into service with a lady, but when this lady left London, she was without work and saw her savings run out. She narrated her response to this situation as follows:<\/p>\n \u2026 I was forced to go back to the Anti-Slavery office to ask a supply, till I could get another situation. I did not like to go back\u2014I did not like to be idle. They were very good to give me a supply, but I felt shame at being obliged to apply for relief whilst I had strength to work.[7]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n There is a profound resonance between the narration that Prince provides of her shame in asking for relief and present-day discourses that castigate \u201cwelfare dependency.\u201d Such discourses of welfare dependency are both gendered and racialized, as evinced by the rhetoric of politicians like Ronald Reagan who deployed \u201cwelfare queen\u201d as \u201ca not-so-subtle code for \u2018lazy, greedy, black ghetto mother.\u2019\u201d[8]<\/a> This racist and misogynist discourse fueled attacks on the welfare state whose disestablishment, as Angela Davis explains in Abolition Democracy<\/em>, is part of the reason why \u201cwomen still constitute the fastest growing sector of the imprisoned population.\u201d[9]<\/a> Enslavement, attacks on the welfare state, and mass incarceration are thus all at least in part justified by the same discourse, which both slavery abolitionists in the nineteenth century and prison abolitionists today are forced to contest.<\/p>\n One might counter that mid-nineteenth century discourses on idleness cannot be compared to present-day discourses on welfare dependency. Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon have shown, however, that the two are linked.[10]<\/a> Discourse on welfare dependency equates wage labor with both work and independence, allowing welfare skeptics to claim that the caregiving labor of mothers does not constitute \u201cwork\u201d and that wage labor, rather than welfare payments, will make mothers independent.[11]<\/a> This equation of wage labor with independence emerged, Fraser and Gordon argue, in the industrial age, with slaves serving as one of the icons of dependency.[12]<\/a> Slaves, with \u201ccolonial natives,\u201d personified political subjection, one justified by the idea that Black people were dependent by nature and by their very psychology. The History of Mary Prince<\/em>, written in the industrial era, must therefore be understood as challenging this discourse of dependency by underscoring that Prince was as eager as any white worker to be independent and earn wages. To be sure, the critique of Prince left the equation of wage labor with independence intact. As a result, her critique of dependency discourse is insufficiently effective for present-day abolitionists. Abolishing police and prisons implies building a society that does not need policing or incarceration to address human needs. Addressing such needs, under most accounts, \u201crequires radically overhauling the U.S. capitalist economy and replacing it with a socialist or communist system.\u201d[13]<\/a> Seeing the hostility of dependency discourse toward even moderate redistributive measures, we should expect its weaponization against any socialist or communist revolution. The History of Mary Prince <\/em>therefore does not provide a blueprint that abolitionists today can use to put dependency discourse to an end, but it does remind us that the discourse is not new, enabling a historical understanding of dependency discourse and strengthening the tie between abolitionists in the past and the present.<\/p>\n The History of Mary Prince <\/em>challenges not just accounts of inherent Black idleness, but also depictions of slave society as harmonious. Such depictions came not just in the form of rhetoric, but also in the form of art. Agostino Brunias, for instance, was an Italian painter and patron of William Young, who owned plantations and served as a colonial governor in the British West Indies. In his work for Young, Brunias portrayed West Indian slave society as naturally harmonious and left signs of \u201cwhite authority or surveillance,\u201d let alone signs of subaltern servitude, out of the picture.[14]<\/a> This befitted the contemporary pro-slavery discourse of \u201camelioration.\u201d This discourse, as Sarah Thomas argues in Witnessing Slavery<\/em>, suggested that the right reforms could \u201cmeliorate\u201d slave conditions and thereby enable a future for slavery.[15]<\/a> In this future, slaves would live \u201chappily and procreate among themselves,\u201d allowing planters to \u201cbreed\u201d rather than buy their labor supply. The amelioration discourse also implied that the material conditions of enslaved people were similar or superior to those of wage laborers in England.[16]<\/a> Such comparisons appeared everywhere by the 1830s, precisely when The History of Mary Prince <\/em>was published.[17]<\/a> Having performed both slave and wage labor, Prince could personally attest that they constituted fundamentally different experiences. Her repeated descriptions of the brutal, endemic, and gratuitous violence inflicted upon her as an enslaved woman served to undermine any ameliorationist claim that slave societies could exist in natural harmony.\u00a0 \u201cAll slaves want to be free\u2014to be free is very sweet,\u201d Prince insisted. Indeed, \u201cthe man that says slaves be quite happy in slavery\u2014that they don\u2019t want to be free\u2014that man is either ignorant or a lying person. I never heard a slave say so.\u201d[18]<\/a> Underscoring this universal desire for freedom, Prince disconfirmed any contention that slavery could persist without violence. Slave societies could never be naturally harmonious and \u201chappy slaves\u201d were non-existent.<\/p>\n A discourse both resembling and diverging from the pro-slavery amelioration discourse appears in the analysis that Dennis Childs provides of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, unofficially known as the Angola plantation or \u201cthe Farm.\u201d[19]<\/a> Angola has its own museum, and Childs writes that when walking through it, \u201cone is asked to bear witness to the veracity of the state\u2019s claims to progressive modernization, to the death of \u2018old Angola,\u2019 and the prison\u2019s conversion into an arena of \u2018well-managed\u2019 human cargoing.\u201d Rather than the \u201cputatively embalmed practice of repressive punishment,\u201d Angola now maintains an \u201costensibly humane, rehabilitative, and recreational brand of modern imprisonment.\u201d [20]<\/a> This self-presentation of \u201cthe Farm\u201d resembles amelioration discourse insofar as it presents progressive reforms as absolving the need for violent coercion in the maintenance of (penal) slavery.<\/p>\n At the same time, the prison-industrial complex deploys legitimation strategies that depart from amelioration discourse in quite substantial ways. Indeed, while the Angola museum boasts of progressive prison reforms that ostensibly alleviate the need for repression, the prison also hosts annual rodeos that it labels \u201cthe wildest show in the South\u201d and that forces untrained prisoners to suffer the \u201cbroken bones, deep lacerations, and concussions\u201d in which their performances routinely result. As such, at the same time as Angola furthers its self-congratulatory tale of prison reform, it stages these \u201cscenes of perverse amusement, performative dehumanization, and spectatorial punishment.\u201d [21]<\/a> The public enjoyment of such racialized state terror reflects the observation of Alex Vitale that the US \u201ccriminal justice system has become a gigantic revenge factory.\u201d[22]<\/a> And given this public penchant for revenge, the state can subject the \u201calways already criminalized \u2018free\u2019 black body\u201d to the terrors and exploitation of the prison-industrial complex, justifying the violence with greater ease than even certain pro-slavery discourses would have allowed.[23]<\/a> As such, while successors of amelioration discourse still exist\u2014especially in liberal calls for prison reform that leave the prison-industrial complex intact\u2014they coexist with public pleasures that relish rather than reject violence.<\/p>\n What I have tried to suggest in the preceding paragraphs is that the present-day heirs of the abolitionist struggle face not just the continued power and presence of white supremacy and racial capitalism, but also the discourses that then and now serve to maintain oppressive systems. In conclusion, I want to reflect on whether the Reconstruction Amendments contain any potential to defeat these discourses and the systems they uphold. The Second Founding <\/em>by Eric Foner strongly suggests that this potential is indeed there. Next to positing the Reconstruction Amendments as a transformation of the Constitution and the foundation of a new society, Foner identifies Reconstruction itself as a process that transformed the local and hierarchical legal culture of the United States \u201cinto one committed, at least ostensibly, to the equality of all Americans, protected by the national government.\u201d[24]<\/a> Foner goes on to demonstrate this by narrating the history of the three Reconstruction Amendments individually. In chapter 1 (\u201cWhat is Freedom?\u201d), he shows how the Thirteenth Amendment redefined federalism for the first time by making \u201cfreedom of the person \u2026 a matter of national concern\u201d and thus expanding, rather than restraining, the power of the federal government.[25]<\/a> Chapter 2 (\u201cToward Equality\u201d) documents how the Fourteenth Amendment marked the elevation of \u201cequality to a constitutional right of all Americans,\u201d while chapter 3 (\u201cthe Right to Vote\u201d) establishes the Fifteenth Amendment as the completion of the second founding and as a radical change that made voting rights a matter for the federal government, as opposed to one for the states.[26]<\/a> To be sure, The Second Founding <\/em>is not an uncritical celebration of the Reconstruction Amendments. Foner spends ample time discussing, for instance, the use of the Thirteenth Amendment to justify Chinese exclusion and prison labor, the use of the Fourteenth Amendment to defend corporate interests and claims of reverse racism, and the way \u201cbiased voter registration and criminal justice systems\u201d easily circumvent the purpose of the Fifteenth Amendment.[27]<\/a> Moreover, chapter 4 (\u201cJustice and Jurisprudence\u201d) chronicles the nineteenth-century Supreme Court decisions whose \u201cnarrow and artificial reading\u201d of the Amendments enabled the transition away from Reconstruction during the 1880s and the establishment of Jim Crow during the 1890s.[28]<\/a> Yet this white supremacist jurisprudence, Foner insists, \u201cwas a choice, not something predetermined by public opinion or historical context.\u201d[29]<\/a> And since retrogression, as Foner reminds us, need not be linear or permanent, the very ambiguity of the Reconstruction Amendments can pave \u201cthe way for future struggles, while giving different groups grounds on which to conduct them.\u201d[30]<\/a> And even though Du Bois (in my view, correctly) derided the \u201cfetich-worship of the Constitution,\u201d Foner points out that it is this very veneration that grants the Amendments such a powerful claim on both the US legal system and the public imagination.[31]<\/a> As such, the Amendments may very well contain the powers to finally defeat the discourses of dependency and amelioration\u2014as well as the public enjoyment of revenge and retribution\u2014that hampered both slavery abolitionists in the past and police and prison abolitionists in the present.<\/p>\n None of this is to suggest that the Reconstruction Amendments will be the solution to all our problems. Foner himself writes that \u201cthe constitutional amendments that emerged from the Civil War cannot address all the legacies for slavery.\u201d[32]<\/a> And Foner nowhere suggests that the constitutional amendments can forge a path toward radical aims of police and prison abolition. Yet others have. Indeed, in the same foreword with which I began this blog post, Dorothy Roberts argues for an abolition constitutionalism that can serve the goals of prison abolition. This abolition constitutionalism, Roberts emphasizes, does not mean ignoring \u201cthe relentless antiblack violence of constitutional doctrine.\u201d Rather, it means a dynamic engagement with the tension between white supremacist jurisprudence on the one hand and the potential of the Reconstruction Constitution on the other hand. This engagement, Roberts argues, enables abolition constitutionalism to both reject existing jurisprudence and to make \u201cconstitutional claims strategically to help dismantle carceral systems.\u201d[33]<\/a> Such strategic use of the Constitution recognizes the observation of Angela Davis that law has \u201cstrategic significance in the struggle for progress and radical transformation.\u201d At the same time, Davis also insisted that \u201cit would be a mistake to consider law as the ultimate arbiter of social problems.\u201d[34]<\/a> As such, while law alone will not bring about abolition democracy, its potential contribution to the cause has not yet been realized. To quote James Wilson, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 succeeded in turning \u201cthe arsenal of slavery upon itself.\u201d[35]<\/a> An abolition constitutionalism might achieve the same.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Dorothy E Roberts, \u201cForeword: Abolition Constitutionalism,\u201d Harvard Law Review<\/em> 133, no. 1 (November 2019): 48, https:\/\/harvardlawreview.org\/2019\/11\/abolition-constitutionalism\/.<\/a><\/p>\n [2]<\/a> W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America<\/em> (New York: Free Press, 1998), 184, 327.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Du Bois, 27\u201328.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Du Bois, 187.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Du Bois, 30.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince<\/em> (London: F. Westley and A. H. Davis, 1831), 16.<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Prince, 22.<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness<\/em>, rev. ed. (New York: New Press, 2012), 49. See also Gene Demby and Shereen Marisol Meraji, \u201cThe Original \u2018Welfare Queen,\u2019\u201d June 5, 2019, in Code Switch<\/em>, produced by Maria Paz Gutierrez, podcast, 31:57, https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2019\/06\/05\/729294210\/the-original-<\/a>welfare-queen<\/a>.<\/p>\n [9]<\/a> Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture<\/em> (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 38.<\/p>\n [10]<\/a> See Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, \u201cA Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the US Welfare State,\u201d in Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the \u201cPostsocialist\u201d Condition<\/em>, by Nancy Fraser (New York: Routledge, 1997), 121\u201349.<\/p>\n [11]<\/a> Fraser and Gordon, 140.<\/p>\n [12]<\/a> Fraser and Gordon, 128\u201329.<\/p>\n [13]<\/a> Roberts, \u201cAbolition Constitutionalism,\u201d 46.<\/p>\n [14]<\/a> Sarah Thomas, Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition<\/em> (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2019), 68. To view images of Brunias\u2019s paintings, see \u201cAgostino Brunias,\u201d Google Arts & Culture, n.d., https:\/\/artsandculture.google.com\/entity\/agostino-brunias\/m03qbdh4?hl=en<\/a>.<\/p>\n [15]<\/a> Thomas, 81, 84.<\/p>\n [16]<\/a> Thomas, 89.<\/p>\n [17]<\/a> Thomas, 94.<\/p>\n [18]<\/a> Prince, History of Mary Prince<\/em>, 23.<\/p>\n [19]<\/a> Childs, Slaves of the State<\/em>, 95.<\/p>\n [20]<\/a> Childs, 101.<\/p>\n [21]<\/a> Childs, 98\u201399.<\/p>\n [22]<\/a> Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing<\/em> (London: Verso, 2017), 28.<\/p>\n [23]<\/a> Childs, Slaves of the State<\/em>, 62.<\/p>\n [24]<\/a> Foner, Second Founding<\/em>, 8.<\/p>\n [25]<\/a> Foner, 31\u201332. This argument disconfirms common views that it was the Fourteenth, rather than the Thirteenth Amendment, that first expanded the power of the federal government.<\/p>\n [26]<\/a> Foner, 77, 109.<\/p>\n [27]<\/a> Foner, 56, 109, 129, 174.<\/p>\n [28]<\/a> Foner, 126, 131, 169.<\/p>\n [29]<\/a> Foner, 131.<\/p>\n [30]<\/a> Foner, xxvi, xxix.<\/p>\n [31]<\/a> Foner, 19; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction<\/em>, 336.<\/p>\n [32]<\/a> Foner, Second Founding<\/em>, xxix.<\/p>\n [33]<\/a> Roberts, \u201cAbolition Constitutionalism,\u201d 9\u201310, 122.<\/p>\n [34]<\/a> Davis, Abolition Democracy<\/em>, 110\u201311.<\/p>\n [35]<\/a> Quoted in Foner, Second Founding<\/em>, 67.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Mayaki Kimba In her foreword to the 133rd volume of the Harvard Law Review, Dorothy Roberts writes that \u201ctoday\u2019s prison abolitionists are the heirs to a freedom movement that antislavery activists began.\u201d[1] Embracing this idea, Abolition 13\/13 began with… Continue Reading Notes<\/h1>\n