If you stick a knife in my back nine inches
and pull it out six inches,
there’s no progress.
If you pull it all the way out,
that’s not progress.
The progress is from healing the wound
that the blow made.
They haven’t even begun to pull the knife out,
much less try to heal the wound.
They won’t even admit the knife is there.
—MALCOLM X, MARCH 1964 TV INTERVIEW
More than fifty years after Malcom X’s murder and this country still has not evolved. Admitting the knife is there means naming the trauma and harm. Once you name it and tell the truth about it, you can start to heal the wounds from their depths. Without going deep to repair the harms of racism, discrimination, and colonization, any type of change that one makes to improve circumstances may mitigate harm but does not end the systems that cause harm. Violence is not only historical, personal, and interpersonal, it is also systemic. To change systems requires political courage.
In part I, I described our research that demonstrated how the relationship between racial and ethnic discrimination and food insecurity was not reduced when nutrition assistance was figured into the model. So while SNAP can help reduce food insecurity, it cannot touch the deep relationships that food insecurity has with exposure to discrimination and exploitation. SNAP is a helpful program, but by itself and in its current form, it will never eradicate hunger because people participating in SNAP are kept poor, and corporations profit from it. It is embroiled with capitalism and therefore maintains inequality.
This limited programmatic effect of SNAP can be called what health policy professor Melissa Creary describes as “bounded justice.”1 That is, even if we have equity at the center of policy and programmatic decision-making with the hopes of improving health care and other systems that affect health such as nutrition assistance, if we are not seeking to repair the generations of injustice, then the effects of the improvements can only go so far. Inequality may be reduced, but it will continue, and hunger will persist.
If our political leaders publicly and thoughtfully reckoned with the truth of the harms of colonization, slavery, and genocide, this can set the groundwork for reparations for the harm of slavery and rematriation, the return of land, belongings, human remains, and seeds to Indigenous people who are the original stewards. While policymakers work on making these transformative changes to tell the truth, repair, and heal, the structure of social assistance programs also needs to change (from being targeted only to specific types of people) to become universal. Programs that are only targeted to people who are poor tend to keep people poor and separate people from each other to create a false distinction between people who are worthy or unworthy of receiving support. Finally, ending hunger demands we work to dismantle the systems that separate us from each other and simultaneously envision a new type of society that is rooted in equity, mutuality, and community care. We can begin by envisioning and creating such a world through the abolition of prisons and police, and investing in economies that transcend capitalism to promote solidarity.
Think this is impossible? It is not. There are already movements afoot involving tens of thousands of people, there are congressional bills at the ready, and there are examples of multiple alternatives to capitalism that have been utilized for hundreds of years in the United States. To enact policy change, it takes a different mindset and a willingness to envision a world beyond what we have today. We have to heal the wounds and start again.
Reparations means compensating victims. Not only should victims receive financial recompense for harm, but there should be a formal and broadly publicized confirmation that a serious and widespread wrong has been carried out by specific people, institutions, and policies. The United Nations delineated over twenty principles for reparations, which include the fundamental requirement of ensuring victims and their families are involved in designing those processes.2 Reparations must include opportunities for restitution, rehabilitation (inclusive of mental health care and adequate social services), official truth-telling processes, and a guarantee of nonrepeat.
Many know of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process in South Africa because of the transcendent leadership of Nelson Mandela and Reverend Desmond Tutu. TRCs are formalized processes that reveal and contend with state-supported human rights violations such as torture, abuse, murder, enslavement, genocide, and rape. They hold space for people impacted by the events to share their experiences. These processes are also meant to ensure that perpetrators formally explain what they did, express remorse, and describe the precautions they will take to not repeat offenses. Everything is recorded for the official record, and financial reparations and other types of supports or payments are made to help to repair harms. It is important to name the violence, expose the truth, and ensure there are witnesses and justiciable redress that can create the foundations for new government systems. Worldwide, TRCs are meant to expose the truth and create space for healing by calling individual and state perpetrators to account. They are not always so successful, however, as much depends on commitment for follow through and transparent accountability mechanisms.
Brian Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, is the award-winning author of Just Mercy, a book (and later movie) based on years of helping people tried and convicted as children to get out of prison and off death row.3 He explains, “You have to tell the truth first. You have to create a consciousness around the truth before you can have any hopes of reconciliation. And reconciliation may not come, but truth must come. That’s the condition.”4
To solve hunger in America, we must come to account with the truth, no matter how painful. Healing collective trauma demands our collective attention, official and formally recorded processes of truth telling, apologies, reparations, restitution, and repair. Unfortunately, the US government has a long history of only pretending to repair. In its usual duplicitous tradition, it withholds reparations as unremorsefully as Lucy of the Peanuts cartoon swipes away the football as Charlie Brown comes up for the kick. This goes as far back as the false treaties set up by supposed leaders in the colonial United States as they stole lands, waters, and entire ecosystems from Indigenous nations. Promises of “forty acres and a mule” for all people who were enslaved became yet another a lie.
Today the US government harbors the same reluctance. H.R. 40, a bill in the US House of Representatives, calls for the establishment of a commission to study and develop a plan for reparations for Black descents of people enslaved by white landowners. It was introduced in 1989. Over thirty-five years later, it has yet to pass. Only in 2019 did the Senate sponsor its first bill on reparations. Before that, nothing on reparations had been considered by the US Senate since the Reconstruction period in the late 1800s.
It is not only the living history of enslavement that demands consideration for reparations to help our society work through collective trauma but also so many injustices that have been carried out since. As an example, author and MacArthur fellow Ta-Nehisi Coates points out 250 years of slavery, 90 years of Jim Crow, 60 years of separate but equal, and 35 years of racist housing policy is a long, violent legacy.5 He states,
From 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments—federal, state, and local—repeatedly plundered black communities. Their methods included everything from land-theft, to red-lining, to disenfranchisement, to convict-lease labor, to lynching, to enslavement, to the vending of children. So large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it. Its great universities were founded on it. Its early economy was built by it. Its suburbs were financed by it. Its deadliest war was the result of it.
He goes on to say that “until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.”6
Political leaders say the United States in the “richest nation in the world.” This is nothing to be proud of, as the riches were gained through enslavement and genocide, and half of all newborns are born into poverty today. So people ought to complete the sentence like this: the United States is the richest nation in the world due to historic and ongoing violence against Black, Indigenous, and Brown people, and through the rape and exploitation of women and children.
Since 2015, the National African American Reparations Commission has upheld a ten-point reparations plan. It includes:
Note the inclusion of an apology, attention to the need for health and healing, wealth-building opportunities, repair in the (in)justice system, and education for everyone about enslavement and genocide.
The current backlash against the truth of our history in numerous state legislature bills across the southern states seeking to restrict teaching about enslavement and genocide is deeply harmful. Some people refer to teachings about basic history as “critical race theory.” People afraid of basic education about history are making it seem as if trying to understand our history is something new and unfair. White legislators and the white people they represent are filled with fear of the truth, unable to acknowledge the pain and harms of discrimination. They are desperate to stay on that slave ship. Perhaps this is a trauma response of dissociation. Such people deserve compassion, but those of us who have the courage to allow ourselves discomfort need to find ways to help our cousins understand how they are implicated in promoting the early deaths of hundreds of thousands of people if they cannot accept the truth and reckon with their own emotions about it. They may try to ban books and threaten teachers who are doing their jobs, but they cannot fight the tidal wave of truth that millions more people are learning to face. The United States is changing, and those who are fearful of such truths are already outnumbered by people who have depth of feeling, courage, and, yes, lots of books.
Several books have also been written that can guide the United States through a reparations process.8 For hundreds of years, the US government has long had all the evidence and guidance from Black and Indigenous communities to implement a reparations process. More people need to encourage legislators to take reparations seriously.
But even reparations do not go far enough. The true debt to Black people in the United States can never be repaid proportionate to the damage done. In the words of NYU professor Fred Moten, “What it is that is supposed to be repaired is irreparable. It can’t be repaired. The only thing we can do is tear this shit down completely and build something new.”9
Moten is not alone in his assessment. According to Daniel Wildcat, Yuchi member of the Muscogee nation in Oklahoma, reparations do not solve what is at the root. In direct response to Coates, he asks, How do you quantify spiritual and practical connection to land? No amount of money can replace the loss of so much territory. The lands currently referred to as the United States and its territories consist of at least 1.9 billion acres. But this territory is not just acres, soil, forests, waters, the Great Plains, rivers, mountains, and ecosystems. This is the territory of spirit too. No financial repair can be made for the spiritual loss. In Wildcat’s words, “For many Native Americans, our land (including the air, water, and biological life on which we depend) is a natural relative, not a natural resource. And our justice traditions require the restoration of our land relationship, not monetary reparations.”10
Many groups are actively calling for rematriating lands and all that comes with the land. To rematriate is to “restore a people to their rightful place in sacred relationship with their ancestral land.”11 The rematriation of land is a process of restoring or regenerating Indigenous lifeways along with all that has been taken including land, seeds, and food for survival. The Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance is already making way for the rematriation of seeds—through seed exchanges, education, and seed-storing efforts—to restore Indigenous sovereignty. Returning seeds and showing them respect is a way of demonstrating reverence not just for Indigenous people and their food ways but also ancestors and kin. Rowan White, an earth tender and seed keeper of the Mohawk Akwesasne, a part of the Haudenosaunee Confederation, explains their meaning:
Our life is dependent on that adaptability and that generosity that comes with seeds. [O]ne of the only pathways to a dignified resurgence is to reseed ourselves, to reclaim seeds as part of our bundle and part of our way forward.12
Another part of the process of rematriation is the return of cultural artifacts, ceremonial gear, and other forms of sacred art as well as the human remains of people murdered in the massacres and wars carried out by the US military. This includes the return of the remains of Indigenous children who were either murdered or died from neglect at US boarding schools.
While ideas vary widely about rematriation and reparations to support Indigenous people and lands, the Red Nation, a group of Indigenous activists, also have a ten-point plan:
These reparations extend far beyond those of the National African American Reparations Commission. They demand land be returned and the end of the concept of ownership itself. The places to start with dismantling colonizing forces are right in front of us. The US government should follow its own laws by acknowledging and restoring treaty rights and openly considering treaties that predate the Constitution. Before the United States became a country, there were many treaties between various Indigenous nations, colonists, and crowns. For instance, the living treaty established in 1613 between the Haudenosaunee and Dutch was a treaty meant to establish friendship and peace while living alongside each other for as “long as the grass is green, as long as the water runs downhill, as long as the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, and as long as our Mother Earth will last.” This treaty has been violated continuously by the Dutch and many other people of European descent ever since the land was privatized and waters were polluted. Between 1776 and 1871, the US Congress ratified more than three hundred treaties with Indigenous nations. Yet in 1871, all treaty making was suspended through the Indian Appropriations Act, and all recognition of Indigenous nations as sovereign were destroyed, making way for the US cavalry, buffalo runners, and settlers to steal lands, waterways, and ecosystems. Andrew Jackson, responsible for stopping all nation-to-nation treaty making and the Indian Removal Act, which included the Trail of Tears and many other death walks for Indigenous people, as well as instigating massacres and kidnapping children to boarding schools, remains a hallowed US president whose image still sullies the twenty-dollar bill in our pockets.
Every treaty ratified by the US government and Indigenous nations has been violated by the US government. Restoring treaty rights is a starting point. It is not a good one either, as most of the time, those treaties were signed under threat of invasion, murder, and genocide. Beyond agreements in the treaties, there are hundreds of millions of acres of unceded lands that should be returned that have no treaties associated with them.
Additionally, the restoration of Indigenous lands along with the rematriation of seeds, artifacts, and human remains needs to be ongoing and supported. Most Indigenous people view land, plants, animals, and waters with great respect as nonhuman relatives. All rematriation and repatriation efforts must also seek to restore these lost and violated connections due to toxic dumping, mining, and extraction. Once lands, food, and other objects are returned, going forward, every deliberation with Indigenous nations should have nation-to-nation treaties that are respected. All proposals to use Indigenous land, waters, and other resources should have clearly established and documented free, prior, and informed consent. This is established in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) as well. The US government ought to ratify this international treaty and get to work on repair and restoration (I address this in the next chapter).
In the meantime, it seems that non-Indigenous “settlers” who are not descendants of people who were abducted and enslaved—myself included—ought to be paying a portion of rent or mortgage to nearby Indigenous nations. The precedent for this is already in place in the Seattle area. Through an effort called Real Rent Duwamish, thousands of people are already paying rent to the Duwamish.14 In the absence of government action, people can engage with this in the meantime as standard practice. Similarly, the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an Indigenous woman-led organization in the San Francisco Bay Area, laid the groundwork to ensure that people can reconnect with their ancestral lands. The land trust is working with officials to protect sacred shell mounds and ensure land is returned to the Ohlone peoples. Additionally, it creates community-based initiatives that help people prepare for the climate catastrophe. These are only a few examples of a widespread “Land Back” movement that has been ongoing under a variety of names for hundreds of years. As more efforts have success, and “public” and stolen lands are returned to Indigenous stewardship, more people will learn to reconnect with the land, and biodiversity may have a chance at being restored.
This has transformative and unsettling implications.
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang argue that real decolonization means the end of ownership of land, bodies, animals, and plants. Anything short of this in our dialogue and actions is inadequate to restore the lifeways and livelihoods of Indigenous peoples. This seems almost inconceivable in today’s world. Tuck and Yang insist on an ethic of incommensurability. This, they say, should unsettle white innocence, and is in direct contrast to the aims of reconciliation. Reconciliation, they maintain, is simply another “settler move to innocence” in an attempt to rescue a sense of future.15
With this in mind, we can recognize that to envision a future without hunger requires a complete reorientation of society, with equity, justice, and solidarity at its core.
Current social programs meant to help people in poverty discriminate because they rely on the separation of people into deserving and undeserving, and are founded on systems developed through exploitation. When there is separation, especially based on false concepts of deserving and undeserving, some people are always left out, and the boundaries between people can become contentious, stigmatizing, and damaging.16 This is why it is essential to stop “targeting” people and instead include people by creating universal programs.
Everyone benefits from government assistance—the poorest among the poor and the wealthiest. People who own a home receive a mortgage interest deduction. Wealthy people receive reduced taxes on their investment dividends and capital gains, they can deduct taxes on their yachts and claim gambling loss deductions, and their Social Security calculations are capped, allowing them to pay a smaller proportion of their income to Social Security than people who have lower incomes. Rather than being portrayed as welfare recipients, they are praised and rewarded for building up debt and having a mortgage on their home. On the other hand, people who are exploited through low wages and the long history of discrimination, redlining, exclusion, and disbelonging need to prove they are “worthy” of support. To be worthy means you must be poor and stay poor. It’s time to end that nonsense.
Poverty costs the United States at least $1.03 trillion a year. For every dollar spent on reducing childhood poverty, the country would save at least $7 in government spending to address the health and social problems that arise from poverty.17 These costs are calculated in terms of the need for social programs, increases in medical care costs, and, yes, you guessed it, imprisoning people and taking away people’s kids to place them in foster care. To fix this, we need to spend more money to help people avoid poverty; we need to fix the tax code, wage structures, and many other policies that exclude and exploit people who are poor so the wealthy will stop profiting off them. As I demonstrated in part II, government assistance programs facilitate corporate profit, stigmatize people who are poor, and rely on separating and isolating people. Universal programs are rational and can ensure a healthy future for all people, regardless of who they are and the circumstances into which they were born.
Universal basic income (UBI) is a type of social security that guarantees a set amount of money to every person. It does not require any specific means test, nor does it require any specific behavior or other requirement such as work. Those who are wealthy will receive it, but then have to give it back at tax time. The program could be paid for by taxing the ultrawealthy. Over time, it could also replace SNAP, TANF, and unemployment. Guaranteed income is a similar concept but is more limited. It is a continuous financial payout based on eligibility criteria such as having a child, like the Child Tax Credit during the COVID-19 pandemic, or it can be a means-tested program.
Research on UBI demonstration projects around the world shows that, compared to similar people who do not receive UBI payments, those who do receive them report major improvements in physical and mental health, school performance of their children, improved life expectancy, and increased entrepreneurship. UBI also has little impact on whether people work. Evidence on the labor market during UBI programs showed that many people who can and will work for others are actively looking for work, or are already working. Many of us might even prefer to simply work for ourselves, create art, be our own bosses, or be a job creator. UBI helps this along.18
Experts insist that UBI is the best way to address the onslaught of automation. As more low-wage jobs are being turned over to automated processes, people without relevant marketable skills may not be able to find work.19 UBI can help support them while they get new training or find other ways to support themselves. Many others promote it because it is more just, egalitarian, and supportive, especially for Black women.20 Concepts of universal income are not new. Paying attention to the impacts of automation is just a new spin on what many people have been proposing for hundreds of years.
Throughout the ages, many recognized UBI would increase freedom, creativity, and financial generativity. Thomas Moore and Johannes Ludovicus Vives were promoting these ideas in the 1500s. Moore’s blunt justification was this: if people had a baseline income, they would not have to steal; then they would not be criminalized and brutalized by the state. Punishing people for being poor and desperate, Moore insisted, simply increases the state-supported murder rate.21 Up into the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. and others insisted that UBI could be the most effective way to prevent poverty, and would reduce the ineffective patchwork of social services and public assistance. Milton Freedman, renowned free market economist, and many others convinced President Richard Nixon to propose a guaranteed income in the early 1970s. But due to political sabotage on the Left and Right as well as Nixon’s rightful demise and the failed bid for the presidency of George McGovern, who also proposed a basic income in 1972, enthusiasm for UBI fizzled.
After the onset of COVID-19, UBI returned to the national dialogue due to economic devastation caused by shutting down businesses and schools without immediate public financial support. All around the world, including in the United States, people needed income to pay for housing and food. Canada responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by providing $2,000 a month to all adults. The United States, on the other hand, offered minimally improved processes for accessing unemployment benefits and SNAP; then Congress provided a few sporadic payments of $1,200, $600, and $1,400 for people making less than $75,000 a year. A year later, Congress passed a one-year Child Tax Credit, which it then allowed to expire in January 2022, at the same time that President Biden came to Philabundance to pack up carrots and other pounds of food. Predictably, Children’s Healthwatch found that after the Child Tax Credit expired, household food insecurity increased by 25 percent.22 Guaranteed income and UBI are not pie in the sky ideas. Rather, they offer tangible support that helps people stay healthy and whole.
Guaranteed income pilots are springing up everywhere across the country. Of special note, with support from Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, many cities are following the lead of former Stockton, California, mayor Michael Tubbs, who launched a guaranteed income pilot at $500 per month. The Magnolia Mother’s Trust in Jackson, Mississippi, has been providing a small group of Black mothers $1,000 per month. Participants report improved health and well-being for themselves and their children.23 These efforts are still means tested, however. Which means that not only are they limited in scale but they only reach a certain type of person too. This can start to get mistaken for who is worthy of support and who is not.
UBI can replace means-tested programs that simply exacerbate and even justify stigma against people who are poor. Since it is universal, what happens to some people happens to all. There is no separation nor means test. Witnesses members Tianna Gaines-Turner and Joanna Simmons and I published an article on how SNAP also falls into the trap of excluding many people who could benefit while creating greater stigma. We insist that SNAP could and should be converted into a UBI program to eliminate stigma and ensure that people could spend money how they choose.24 Moreover, it would cut the problematic ties that millions of people experiencing poverty have through SNAP with C&S Wholesale Grocers Association and the American Beverage Association.
Universal health care has been a topic of decades-long debates in the United States. The failure of our systems to support people in meeting their basic needs such as covering the cost of food, housing, and education makes people sick and costs our health system billions of dollars every year. So not only does being poor make people’s health worse but health care costs associated with a serious illness is the primary reason that people who are not originally poor say they fall into poverty.25 Establishing a ground of economic security for everyone will drive down the need for medical care and reduce health care expenditures. On the flip side, universal health care will ensure that no one becomes poor because they got sick or were disabled. It will also ensure that no one suffers the indignity of starting a GoFundMe page to beg friends and strangers to help them pay their exorbitant medical bills.
Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, and all countries that provide universal health care spend far less per capita than does the United States. Though the United States spends exorbitant amounts on health care, people in the United States are in worse health and have the lowest life expectancy among all wealthy countries. Differences in optimal health within the United States tells an even more sordid truth: Black and Indigenous people have a far lower life expectancy than white people, and life expectancy varies by region, county, and zip code.26 In Philadelphia, differences by zip code showed inequities greater than fourteen years along the fault lines of racial and ethnic housing segregation. Predominantly Black neighborhoods showed a life expectancy of around seventy-three years whereas in white neighborhoods, the life expectancy was eighty-eight years.27
Though heterogeneous, Indigenous life expectancy has consistently been the lowest in the United States. This is a direct reflection of the effects of ongoing genocide, colonization, and land theft. The pandemic caused the highest death rates among Indigenous people. Their overall life expectancy reduced from seventy-two years in 2019 to sixty-five years in 2021. Access to health care is not the only endeavor that will solve health problems; the underlying determinants of health—access to fresh water, safe housing, and clean air—have much to do with overall health. The fact that we spend so much in health care but allow life to be cut short for millions of people should make us wonder if our health systems are death dealing too.
Health care in the United States is also primarily tied to full-time employment. Connecting health care to employment can force people to stay at their jobs despite dissatisfaction or feeling overworked. People in the United States work the longest hours in the world, without any demonstrated increase in productivity or pay. Decision-makers in the federal government know this. The Congressional Budget Office reported that for-profit, employer-based health care is destroying the health of Americans and stymieing economic growth. It calculated major cost savings in health care expenditures and improvements in population health if the US government were to adopt Medicare for All, another form of universal health care that includes both public and private companies. In turn, this would generate more wealth for people, who would then put that money toward their well-being, educational, and entrepreneurial activities.28
Universal single-payer health care, paid for with public money without private insurance involvement, would abolish the need for health insurance companies along with the stress people face trying to navigate insurance claims, copays, and exorbitant out-of-pocket expenses, including those for mental health care. Universal health care provides health promotion, disease prevention, access to high-quality as well as culturally appropriate and effective treatment, and rehabilitation and palliation services without causing financial hardship.
Finally, much of the burden of poverty in the United States falls on families with children. This is why universal school meals and universal child care would immediately relieve financial hardship on families and the health care system alike. Compared to all families across the United States, those with young children reported the highest rates of food insecurity, costing the US government $1.2 billion a year in health care, special education, and lost work productivity.29
As I explained in the nutrition assistance chapter, school meal participation promotes child health, improves test scores, and promotes a healthier diet. Many researchers agree that free school meals helps reduce the burden of household food insecurity. Making school meals universally free for all would vastly improve child health and reduce meal administrative costs. This would also vastly reduce health care spending and put an end to lunch shaming.30
Families with young children among the members of the Building Wealth and Health Network explained to us they participate in TANF not for the paltry sum they receive, nor for the poor advice the state provides to build their résumés. Rather, they do it so they can access affordable childcare. They need childcare to earn income. But they enter a system that disciplines them to low wages, and they can’t afford childcare with such low wages they earn on their own. One of the worst scenarios I heard about was from a long-standing advocate with Witnesses named Tina. She is a slight Black Muslim woman who often wore a khimar, a head covering for the hair, neck, and shoulders. She lost her mother to cancer when she was eight and became responsible for her younger siblings. To her, this meant she lost most of her own childhood. Tina applied for TANF, like most women I met, in order to get subsidized childcare for her children so she could look for work. Where did her TANF caseworker make Tina start working? Making nine dollars an hour at a local childcare center so she could take care of other people’s children, most of whom had mothers who were TANF participants. TANF is a primary example of the many ways our labor laws, public assistance programs, and societal disrespect for women and children keep them trapped in poverty.
A study of childcare workers in Washington State and Texas found that 42 percent of people working in childcare reported food insecurity, and 20 percent reported very low food security.31 More abysmal than the formal childcare workforce is the situation for domestic workers—people who work in private homes. The vast majority of people who do childcare, eldercare, and cleaning are women. They primarily do so in ways that are informal, where the employers still do not pay Social Security or sick leave. There is a long history of discrimination against domestic workers. After enslavement, Black women frequently had no choice but to work for free (often with their former enslavers). In the 1930s, they and agricultural workers were intentionally excluded from receiving Social Security and forming unions; they were also excluded from the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act, which would ensure their right to safety on the job. In the words of Ai-jen Poo, founder of Domestic Workers United, domestic workers “do the work that makes all other work possible,” yet they make seventy-four cents on the dollar compared to their peers, like Tina, in the formal sector.32 Consider how this compounds over the life course: women who worked all of their lives will have less for retirement and Social Security than men. So elderly women will always be in a state of precariousness and poor health without adequate Social Security income.
Universal childcare will solve many problems and bolster the economic power of women across the life course. Universal childcare could boost women’s earnings almost $100,000 over their lifetime, for a total of $130 billion for women in the United States. With universal childcare, full-time work for women would increase by 17 percent, and the employment rates for those without an advanced degree would increase by over 30 percent. This would reduce poverty most especially for women of color by helping them to earn more money, have financial freedom, and save more for retirement.33
Providing childcare to help women become more financially secure would also help to reduce the rates of imprisonment. The population of women in prison has grown at twice the rate of men in recent decades. The majority of women in prison, 80 percent, are caregivers of children.34
Having an incarcerated parent is an adverse childhood experience. When kids have a parent in prison, they are more likely to report depression, poor school performance, and behavioral challenges.35 A 2015 report showed that five million children have or have had a parent in prison. That is one in fourteen children. But for Black families, one in nine children have or have had a parent in jail or prison.36 Headley’s bogus arrest fits this pattern.
Many women in prison have not yet been convicted of a crime, but they are stuck in prison simply because they cannot pay bail. Our bail systems are simply another form of debtors’ prison that was banned by federal law in 1833.37 Up through today, we still see its vestiges, despite a Supreme Court decision in 1983 that being jailed for being unable to pay a debt was found to be unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clauses. Today, many states still have bail systems that penalize those in poverty, destroying people’s lives for months and years at a time.
This was the case in Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was shot and killed and then left in the street for four hours. An external review of the Ferguson police department found that Black people were regularly jailed if they could not pay court fees for routine traffic stops such as rolling through a stop sign. If you go to jail, you risk losing your job; you lose income, and it stains your record. When and if you can get out the other side, you are restricted from receiving housing support and, in many states, your record follows you all the way to the job application, making it extremely difficult to reenter society and pay for your own basic needs. This is the prison system working as designed.
After the abolition of slavery in 1865, prisons became a powerful institution harnessed by states and the federal government to cage Black and Brown people to extract their labor and lands. To control people, white lawmakers created a vast array of crimes to easily imprison or reenslave Black people. In some southern states, Black people had to prove that they were working or they’d be taken to prison; they were not allowed to have certain jobs, children were often taken and forced into apprenticeships, and interracial marriage was illegal. Despite attempts by civil rights activists and the federal government to improve such legal conditions, Jim Crow laws made it a crime to sit in the front of the bus or at a soda fountain counter, and so on. Such ridiculous “crimes” make it easier to keep Black people down or, better yet, disappear them. The “war on drugs” made it especially easy to police Black and Brown people, and the disparate sentencing laws for crack cocaine was another conduit to imprison Black and Brown people. The growth in the prison system has been exponential from the 1980s up through today, as Gilmore, Davis, Kaba, and so many others have pointed out; it is not only founded on racism but is the blunt instrument used to deal with society’s socioeconomic struggles and lack of adequate mental health care.38 The US justice and political systems collude to destroy the lives and humanity of Black and Indigenous people. Gilmore explains that the growth of prisons and of incapacitating large swaths of people in America is a form of “organized abandonment,” making Black and Brown communities more fragile and precarious while states pursue profit and economic stability.39
The prison-industrial complex (PIC) is a term that characterizes the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, imprisonment, racial control, and makeshift solutions to economic, social, and political problems.40 The PIC relies on racism, especially anti-Blackness, and desire for property and wealth through harnessing police, prisons, probation services, the courts, and the private companies that profit from transporting, feeding, and exploiting prisoners and people on parole. Even publicly funded prisons have for-profit companies set up to make money from phone calls, video calls, and commissaries.41
Through racial profiling and ultramilitarization, police ensnare people into the system. In the words of Phillip Atiba Goff, cofounder and president of the Center for Policing Equity at CUNY, cops are “personal racism concierges.”42 Couple this with the ongoing militarization of the police with surplus military equipment from the Department of Defense, and one can see how dangerous these supposed “peacekeepers” really are.
The US government and our school systems insist that the country’s political structure is a democracy. But with the largest prison population in the world, prison becomes a way to destroy people’s right to participate in society and their right to vote. Even though prisoners are ineligible to vote, some states allow county population rates to include the prison population. This allows legislators to rely on gerrymandering, primarily in favor of a more conservative voting block because in many states, the prison population counts toward the population needing representation. Since prisoners cannot vote from prison, this process silences entire Black and Brown communities.43 This is not justice. Nor is it inclusive democracy.
Those who are abolitionists seek alternatives to instilling justice. Restorative justice is an attempt to set up meaningful infrastructure where, with a team of support, the perpetrator works with the victim and affected communities to repair and redress the damage done. Restorative justice is a community-based process that seeks reparative justice and moralizing social control. These practices could prevent crime more effectively and create a more meaningful justice experience for victims of crime that could support healing from the trauma of victimization while creating genuine accountability for offenders. Transformative justice, on the other hand, is a growing movement among sexual assault and childhood sexual abuse survivors who recognize the current US justice system is wholly inadequate to address the traumas associated with sexual abuse and assault. The group Generation Five has engaged in transformative justice processes with an eye toward collective liberation to achieve personal, community, and social transformation as interdependent parts of a larger struggle to build a more loving and respectful society. This includes engagement with the perpetrator(s) to address the challenges that led them to commit the act, and consideration of ways to change those conditions. Note that these layers of involvement do not include “the state.” Generation Five, in its Ending Child Sexual Abuse: A Transformative Justice Handbook, explains that state-supported systems of oppression in the areas of age, class, race, ethnicity, religion, dis/ability, sexual orientation, and nationality or immigration status demand that transformative justice not involve state actors but rather keep power within neighborhoods and affected communities.44 The reason to exclude state actors in the process is because the state will most likely harness police and prison as its primary enforcement mechanism. A transformative justice approach focuses on changing the conditions that perpetuate abuse. This takes work to ensure safety, connection, and dignity for all, where every individual can exercise agency. Such efforts to shift from “power over” to “power together” help promote safety, accountability, and collective action.
Effective collective action demands that we get in right relation to each other and work together to create justice without reliance on “the state,” without perpetuating violence, and instead promote healing, accountability, resilience, and safety. To do this work demands a certain level of emotional and spiritual maturity; it requires deep internal work and work in community with others.45
Prison abolition would allow the funds originally invested in controlling, abandoning, and disappearing Black and Brown people to be redirected toward promoting community safety, beautification, and behavioral health and improving access to affordable housing and healthy food. To achieve community improvements where people can flourish in all aspects of their lives, we should recognize that prison abolition requires making police, those concierges to mass incarceration, obsolete.
Many people have a hard time making sense of police abolition, and can sometimes confuse it with defunding or reforming the police. To reform police means to provide them with training in antiracist, trauma-informed policy approaches and conflict resolution. But scholars have found that police reform only expands police budgets and their reach.46 Defunding the police means restricting police budgets to reduce the size and reach of police. This helps to get police out of work they should not be doing and for which they are not trained, such as social services work like responding to mental health crises or loose dogs in the street. This approach, many argue, leaves more money for investing in social services, mental health supports, and neighborhood infrastructure and green spaces. Both approaches may mitigate some harm caused by police, but they do not fundamentally alter the structure of policing.
Policing in the United States follows the model of slave patrols. During times of enslavement, all white people, including children, were required under slave codes to surveil and punish Black people who were not on the plantations of their enslavers. Slave codes were laws that restricted Black people from being off their plantation without papers proving they were given permission, restricted their ability to gather in groups without a white person present, prohibited Black people from learning to read and write, and even to defend themselves if they were attacked by a white person. During this time, men would be hired to do slave patrols, where they were paid to search out people escaping plantations. They were given license to cage and return people to their enslavers and, in other cases, to shoot them dead. After the Civil War, the slave codes turned to Black codes, which created even broader reach to criminalize Black people for not working or not accepting an offer to work at extremely low wages. So white people hired men to enforce the Black codes, thus landing Black people in prison, where the loophole in the US Constitution allowed the enslavement of people in prison. This led to convict leasing, an enormously profitable business that is still in operation today with active support from voters.47 This institution of policing was made to protect private property and control labor, bully and prevent people from becoming unionized, and ensure the ongoing domination of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people.48
The possibilities of abolition are becoming more apparent due to the widespread protests after the murder of George Floyd and the growing political acumen of the Black Lives Matter movement.49 The popularization of defunding the police and the mainstreaming of abolitionist ideas emerged from many generations of abolitionist work, especially by queer Black women. The most recent endeavors are those such as Critical Resistance, founded by Davis and Gilmore, Project Nia, founded by Kaba, and Interrupting Criminalization, run by Kaba, Ritchie, and many others.50 These organizations provide resources and many opportunities for people to engage in contemporary abolitionist movements.
Currently, the Breathe Act supported by several members of Congress and made possible by the activism of the Black Lives Matter movement is a bill in the US House of Representatives that proposes to get police or “resource officers” out of schools.51 Police should be taken out of county assistance offices too. After all, families going to the county assistance office are just trying to get some support to take care of themselves and stay healthy. But as it stands, if you go to the welfare office to try to get childcare or SNAP benefits, there is some likelihood that, like Headley, you could land at Rikers.
Abolition is about dismantling the PIC and simultaneously working toward a world grounded in community care and accountability, mutuality, reciprocity, and kindness—where people would have no need to break the law. Those who do would participate in community processes of accountability circles. These processes require community commitment and solidarity. While they can be difficult to establish, they signify a future worth building.
But abolition should not only be restricted to envisioning a society without police and prison. Abolition is also about reenvisioning a society with systems in place that promote flourishing and well-being for all people, especially those who are discriminated against.52 UBI, which would replace TANF and SNAP, and other programs such as all-inclusive childcare and health care, make universal programs a part of that abolitionist stance.
Headley’s arrest at a county assistance office when she was trying to get access to subsidized childcare makes it crystal clear that state-supported social services are entangled with the carceral system. Here’s another example. When women are released from prison in California, they are required to find work in order to receive benefits and to demonstrate they are earning money formally to get custody of their children again. If they cannot prove they are working, they are likely to be sent back to prison or never get their children back.53 As a result, their children may end up being sent into or stay in the child welfare system. The trauma to the children, then, may simply continue.
In her new book Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, Dorothy Roberts maintains that the child welfare system is long past resuscitation or reform. She insists on its abolition. Just as prison destroys communities, so does the child welfare system. The system stems from the long tradition of the US government and white elite separating Indigenous and Black children from their parents. Indigenous children were forced into boarding schools while Black children were stolen, separated, and sold off during enslavement, and afterward, children were forced into unpaid “apprenticeships” picking cotton for white landowners. The same patterns of separating children from Black, Brown, and Indigenous families are playing out today. When one sees the inequities by race and ethnicity, where greater percentages of Black, Brown, and Indigenous families have children taken away than children taken from white homes, it becomes clear that the child welfare system is not a form of “government benevolence” as it is portrayed. Rather, it is by design a form of “state terror.”54
The threat of taking children away especially forces Black and Indigenous mothers into compliance. I hope you have noted this throughout this book: the constant fear mothers and other caregivers have that if they admit their child is food insecure, the state will swipe away their children. According to Roberts, “Child welfare agencies aim to keep Black mothers submissive by weaponizing their children, while denying the existence of loving ties between them.”55
The child welfare system, Roberts explains, is supported and helped by police and prisons, exposing how the child welfare system is just one more aspect of America’s “carceral web.” What distinguishes the child welfare system from policing and prisons is that there is unwarranted surveillance and removal of children without legal oversight. This makes it a useful stealth arm of the “carceral state.” Child welfare intervention also asserts itself in response to intimate partner violence. As Roberts points out, caseworkers have far more freedom to extract children in situations where the mother is being abused, while simultaneously, police make it hard to discipline the violent partners. This results in fewer women willing to report intimate partner violence in the home because they know they will be more likely to lose their children.56
In some states, imprisonment is statutory grounds for the termination of parental rights. When children are pushed into foster care, they most often become worse off than they were before, with their spirit and well-being crushed. As Roberts asserts, foster care funnels children into the PIC, which is designed to “foreclose their chances for the future.”57
Adding greater insult, foster caretakers receive higher stipends than families receive through regular TANF. Foster caretakers get these higher stipends without work requirements.
We need a new and different system, suggests Roberts, with structures that are not rooted in cruelty, punishment, and destroying Black and Brown families. In a transformed society, there are robust programs that make our society more equal—with equal access to economic security, access to food and housing, and meaningful jobs. When most people who get snagged up in the child welfare system are deeply poor, it is clear that helping people with housing, food, and other basic needs would be far more conducive to families being able to take care of each other and their communities.
Consider that when children were not in school during the shelter-in-place policies during COVID-19, and when there were less caseworkers in New York City, the number of child removals sharply declined, and there were no increases in reports of child abuse. Roberts and others referred to this as a lesson in abolition. In addition to mutual aid societies, stimulus money such as the Child Tax Credit and pandemic EBT helped to financially support families in ways that would not have happened before.
During the COVID-19 shelter-in-place and economic slowdown, so many new ways of offering programs and support were made possible. Pandemic EBT, universal free breakfasts and lunches, meaningful unemployment benefits, and the Child Tax Credit were investments made without control and domination.
If we had universal programs and publicly funded health care, who would profit? Everyone. That would make new, fertile ground on which we could shift and equalize power.
When people cannot think beyond the way capitalism works, it shows a lack of imagination, lack of awareness, and lack of drive to struggle for life-giving systems. There are so many alternatives, and many are being utilized today. Solidarity economies have been working alongside capitalism since its inception. In contrast to capitalism, which isolates, separates, and exploits based on hierarchy, a solidarity economy relies on cooperation to create infrastructure for sharing resources based on principles of mutuality and interdependence. A solidarity economy serves as an umbrella term for many types of sharing and mutual aid processes that help people earn a living, share resources, and stay connected. There is no exploitation of humans in sharing economies that have the common good in mind and simultaneous solidarity among workers who can ensure they reap the benefits of their labor.
In the United States, there is a growing movement to make our economy less exploitative. The US Solidarity Economy Network provides support and networking for alternative businesses and cooperatives across the United States.58 Its principles involve solidarity and cooperation, participatory democracy, sustainability, pluralism, and equity in all dimensions (race, ethnicity, nationality, class, gender, and ability), demonstrating there are multiple ways of creating businesses and other entrepreneurial entities. Well-known collective endeavors are cooperatives. There are three types: consumer owned (like your local food co-op), producer owned (such as agricultural or craft cooperatives), and worker owned (by providing stable employment and profit sharing among workers).
Jessica Gordon Nembhard describes the long history of collective and cooperative practices by African Americans since the earliest days of enslavement.59 People who were enslaved helped each other through mutual support to survive. These practices continued up through the Reconstruction era, survived in spite of the violence of the Jim Crow era, and continue today in the face of police brutality and mass incarceration. People shared resources from secret gardens and created mutual aid societies that helped to care for the sick. As runaway (maroon) communities started to form, many other types of cooperative venues emerged such as cooperative insurance companies and shared savings to cover burial costs. Gordon Nembhard underscores how cooperatives are defined as much by an interest in collectivism as by oppression. When Black people wanted to start banks and businesses after slavery, they were boxed out, and in the case of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” hundreds of people were brutalized, murdered, and lynched in the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. Despite these terrifying setbacks, Black people’s entrepreneurial spirit prevails. Keeping cooperatives and mutual aid within Black communities and hidden from view was often the only course of action for survival. Picking up on this history, Du Bois suggested that cooperatives were not simply about survival but were also meant to build wealth and dismantle structural racism. As an example, in 1918, the great labor organizer A. Philip Randolph founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union. This organizing led to the Fair Employment Act banning employment discrimination in 1941.
Carried forward throughout the century, cooperative structures exist not only in worker-owned cooperatives among people who are Black, Brown, and Indigenous but in political activist circles too. The Black Panthers had cooperative housing, cooperative bakeries, and of course their free breakfast programs to grow economic independence and power.
Another important endeavor was Freedom Farm founded by Fannie Lou Hamer in 1969.
“I know what the pain of hunger is about,” Hamer told a crowd during a speech in Madison, Wisconsin. “My family was some of the poorest people that was in the state of Mississippi. We were sharecroppers.” Hamer had to start work when she was just six years old picking cotton, while her family was trapped in predatory debt created by white landowners. When her parents eked out just enough to purchase livestock when she was thirteen years old, “a white man came onto our property and killed our mules and cows,” she said; “they killed everything that we had.”60 The Freedom Farm Cooperative was an effort to resist that kind of predation and exploitation. At its height, the Freedom Farm Cooperative had ten thousand members. The members planted soybeans and cotton as cash crops to pay taxes and administrative expenses. With the cost of membership at one dollar a month, co-op members sowed the rest of the land with cucumbers, peas, beans, squash, and collard greens, all of which was distributed back to those who worked on the co-op. It did not last long, however, as they could not get federal backing nor earn enough revenue to keep going. This did not stop many like-minded people from trying over and again to create cooperative farms, grocery stores, and catering services.61
Many more efforts are active today through a resurgence of young people interested in gardening, farming, and food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is a general term to describe collective efforts to keep a food system under local control where growers, workers, distributers, and people who eat the food are engaged in ensuring the food system is responsible to local community needs and desires. It has become mainstream, especially through La Via Campesina, which is an international organization of farmers and other workers who utilize the food sovereignty framework to assert their rights to a healthful standard of living, just food system, and healthy, sustainable, regenerative ecosystem.62 There is some alignment with Indigenous sovereignty, though the people involved in food sovereignty do not always connect with Indigenous people, nor do they always engage in efforts to decolonize.
Groups such as the national Young Farmers Coalition, Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, Sankofa Farms in North Carolina, and Leah Penniman and friends of Soul Fire Farm provide training as well as opportunities for people to engage in sustainable agriculture, share technical expertise, and establish food sovereignty and community self-determination.63 This is only a small sample of a burgeoning movement.
There are also many cooperative buyers’ clubs. You may even belong to one. For instance, many people of means are choosing to engage in community-supported agriculture (CSA). This is when communities surrounding a farm sign up and pay for produce and other goods such as eggs, bread, and cheese from a local farm. When communities pay up front, it reduces the time farmers might spend on marketing while spreading the financial risk of farming to community members. This promotes community resilience and social cohesion. There are over 12,500 CSAs across the country. Each of these ensures that food is fresher and stays local. They reduce their carbon footprint and support the local ecosystem by keeping food and animal waste local too. As well, phosphorous is conserved and can be recycled back into the local soil, thereby reducing greenhouse gases. It also keeps economic activity local and strengthens the resilience of the community against both climate catastrophes that could interrupt the global food industry and mass market fluctuations. Young people are drawn to the worker-owned farms because they can define the ethos and share resources. In the end, cooperative farms are more likely to carry out thoughtful land stewardship, conservation, and restoration, which in turn can contribute to reducing harm to the climate.
Finally, I will touch on the stepchild of capitalism: charity. Charity is predicated on a power dynamic where the wealthy bestow kindness and goodness to people who are exploited by the same system that makes people wealthy.64 In chapter 8, I explained that charity fluffs up the giver and humiliates the receiver, rendering them powerless. There is a common saying in social movements: solidarity not charity. Solidarity characterizes the actions and feelings of collective power to create societal and local community structures that support the group. It means joining with all kinds of people with a sense of unity, mutuality, reciprocity, democracy, shared values, and shared power. These ideas are not new. Indeed, in most original societies, gift giving was a way of establishing social cohesion, reciprocity, and mutuality. The largess with which the wealthy are celebrated for giving to charity violates elementary principles of solidarity and merely reifies and celebrates inequality.65 By extension, it celebrates hunger as a gift to the wealthy.
Food banks and food pantries can adopt a cooperative approach grounded in solidarity that promotes belonging, dignity, and freedom. Imagine if Feeding America, one of the largest charities in the country, and its entire member network became a giant food cooperative committed to food sovereignty, sustainability, and reciprocity. Feeding America and the other large corporate food banks clearly have the funds and business acumen to create such strategies. That would be powerful and transformative. This way, if a person were a member of the Feeding America food cooperative, pride would begin at the doorway.
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8. William A. Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Roy L. Brooks, Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for Black Reparations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).
9. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 152.
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12. Quoted in Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 225, https://www.overdrive.com/search?q=1FBB4766-1309-4A31-B387-A8A1C9C8A662.
13. The Red Nation, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth (Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2021).
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19. Annie Lowrey, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World (New York: Crown, 2018); Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth about America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future (New York: Hachette Books, 2018).
20. Laura Dwyer-Lindgren et al., “Life Expectancy by County, Race, and Ethnicity in the USA, 2000–19: A Systematic Analysis of Health Disparities,” Lancet 400, no. 10345 (July 2, 2022): 25–38, https://
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22. Allison Bovell-Ammon et al., “Association of the Expiration of Child Tax Credit Advance Payments with Food Insufficiency in US Households,” JAMA Network Open 5, no. 10 (October 21, 2022): e2234438, https://
23. “The Magnolia Mother’s Trust,” Springboard to Opportunities, 2020, http://
24. Gaines-Turner, Simmons, and Chilton, “Recommendations from SNAP Participants to Improve Wages and End Stigma.”
25. Lorie Konish, “This Is the Real Reason Most Americans File for Bankruptcy,” CNBC, February 11, 2019, https://
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27. “The $1.2 Billion Child Health Dividend,” Children’s HealthWatch, Policy Action Brief, May 2016, https://
28. Jaeger Nelson, “Economic Effects of Five Illustrative Single-Payer Health Care Systems” (working paper, Congressional Budget Office, Washington, DC, February 23, 2022), https://
29. Jennifer J. Otten et al., “The Culture of Health in Early Care and Education: Workers’ Wages, Health, and Job Characteristics,” Health Affairs 38, no. 5 (May 1, 2019): 709–720, https://
30. Janet Poppendieck, Free for All: Fixing School Food in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Sarah Martinelli et al., “The Case for Universal Free Meals for All: A Permanent Solution,” Health Affairs Forefront, accessed October 19, 2022, https://
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34. Aleks Kajstura and Wendy Sawyer, “Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2023,” Prison Policy Initiative, accessed April 27, 2023, https://
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36. “What Happens When Moms Go to Prison,” ChildTrends, October 28, 2015, https://
37. Eli Hager, “Debtors’ Prisons, Then and Now: FAQ,” Marshall Project, February 24, 2015, https://
38. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Andrea Ritchie and Angela Y. Davis, Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color, rep. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017); Mariame Kaba, Tamara K. Nopper, and Naomi Murakawa, We Do This ’til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021); Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003); Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977),” statement, April 1977, https://
39. Chenjari Kumanyika, “Ruth Wilson Gilmore Makes the Case for Abolition,” Intercepted (podcast), June 10, 2020, https://
40. Gerry Johnstone and Daniel W. Van Ness, eds., Handbook of Restorative Justice (Portland, OR: Willan, 2007).
41. Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy, “Following the Money of Mass Incarceration,” Prison Policy Initiative, accessed October 19, 2022, https://
42. Quoted in Janell Ross, “Segregation Now: #LivingWhileBlack Experiences Are the New Version of ‘Whites Only’ Signs,” NBC News, May 31, 2019, https://
43. “The Problem,” Prison Gerrymandering Project, accessed February 28, 2022, https://
44. Generation Five, Ending Child Sexual Abuse: A Transformative Justice Handbook, n.d., http://
45. Shawn Ginwright, The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2022).
46. Gilmore, Golden Gulag.
47. Gillian Brockell, “La. Voters Keep ‘Slavery’ at Angola Prison, Once and Still a Plantation,” Washington Post, November 10, 2022, https://
48. Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Chenjerai Kumanyika, “The Origins of Policing in America | Perspective,” Washington Post, September 24, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBvo2OE5kqM.
49. Kaba, Nopper, and Murakawa, We Do This ’til We Free Us.
50. Critical Resistance, accessed November 5, 2023, http://
51. “The Breathe Act,” M4BL, accessed October 14, 2022, https://
52. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, 20th anniversary ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2022).
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54. Dorothy E. Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (New York: Basic Books, 2022), 88.
55. Roberts, Torn Apart, 93.
56. Kathryn Joyce, “She Said Her Husband Hit Her. She Lost Custody of Their Kids,” Marshall Project, July 8, 2020, https://
57. Roberts, Torn Apart, 223.
58. US Solidarity Economy Network, accessed October 23, 2022, https://
59. Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014).
60. Fannie Lou Hamer, “Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either” (speech at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, January 1971).
61. Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage.
62. La Via Campesina, accessed October 23, 2022, https://
63. Leah Penniman and Karen Washington, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018).
64. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, ed., The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
65. Gift giving, charity, and solidarity are broad and deep topics. To learn more by starting with a classic anthropology text, see Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000).