Fascism at the Door, Neighbors in the Street: Abolition in Practice
“I think a lot of us could level up our skills,” says researcher Tamara Nopper.
"We’re very aware that things are awful … That means that we’re alive, and that we want something different. That’s a really important starting point, is just to even have that kind of repulsion and to have that awful feeling about things,” says Tamara Nopper. “So, I want more of that energy, but I want more of that energy to be connected to some more skills.” In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Tamara and I discuss the urgency of political education in our current fascist climate, what people are learning in the streets, and the importance of counter-recruiting for movements against policing and deportations.
Music by Son Monarcas & Daniel Fridell
TRANSCRIPT:
Note: This transcript was originally published in Truthout. It is shared here with permission.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we’re going to talk about abolition in practice — how people learn through engagement with state violence, what gets in the way of developing shared analysis, and why abolitionists need to take recruitment and counter-recruitment seriously. We’ll be hearing from Tamara K. Nopper. Tamara is a sociologist, writer, educator, and editor. She is the editor of Mariame Kaba’s bestselling book We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, and a researcher and writer of several data stories for Colin Kaepernick’s Abolition for the People series. Tamara has also created and produced political education lectures on crime data in collaboration with organizations such as the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Haymarket Books, and Interrupting Criminalization.
I wanted to take this opportunity to talk with Tamara about political education, and the work of challenging our existing ideas — even as we are showing up, exhausted and imperfect, alongside other exhausted and imperfect people — because the violence of our enemies can often outpace our collective understanding, and it’s important to ask questions and deepen our analysis.
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[musical interlude]
KH: Tamara Nopper, welcome to “Movement Memos.”
Tamara Nopper: Hi, thanks so much for having me, Kelly.
KH: How are you doing today?
TN: I’m exhausted, and everybody’s getting on my fucking nerves, but I’m good. Thank you for asking.
KH: We love an honest answer on this show, and I’m sure a lot of people can relate.
I am sure some of our audience will be familiar with your work, but for the unacquainted, can you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do?
TN: Sure. I am a researcher, writer, editor, and educator. I’m a sociologist by training. I do a lot of work regarding issues around policing and abolition. I also think a lot about the themes of money, and punishment, and financialization, and a lot about data literacy. So, a lot of my, what I guess you call, public-facing work has to do with thinking about data literacy for organizing, and for kind of political activism. I’m also involved in different labor activism right now, so especially thinking about the impact of everything that’s going on politically on higher ed workers, in which I am one of them.
KH: I appreciate the way you’ve pushed our understanding of data literacy. Our movements need that kind of rigor.
You wrote something recently on Bluesky about political education that I wanted to explore, because political education is one of my favorite subjects. You said, “Part of the problem of claiming we’re politically doing things to enlighten or organize ‘the people’ is we can forget that we’re part of the people and also need political ed and to be organized.” What kind of political education do you think the left needs most, right now, and how do we need to be organized?
TN: A couple of things. So, thank you for asking me about that. As a professional educator, in terms of being a college professor, but also as somebody who just, I kind of think about things as an educator a lot, whether I’m writing or kind of presenting. And I’ve done a lot of, as you’ve mentioned, workshops on data literacy for activists, and anybody who really wants to kind of learn. I often think that there’s this kind of discourse about what it means to be “intellectual” or “a voice” or some type of expert.
And I believe in expertise, in the sense of I like people who really study something, and really understand something, and really know it well. But I find that a lot of times the idea is that the “role of the intellectual” or the “role of the researcher” or even the “role of the activist” is this idea that they’re there to help enlighten others and organize others. But sometimes, a lot of us really need to also deepen our own understanding of different issues, whether it’s issues we talk about, or just the issues that are impacting us. And I think a lot of us also need to know how to actually organize ourselves.
So, I’ve just been thinking about this a lot, particularly, as I mentioned, thinking about the political moment, what’s happening to people who work in higher ed. And a lot of us are kind of used to being the experts on certain topics. And we’ve done a lot of research, and we might have studied a lot. And I think that work is important as a contribution. But a lot of us don’t always know how to organize around our own kind of conditions.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about, you see these kind of essays or these statements about the role of the “intellectual.” And I believe in intellectualism, I believe in public intellectualism. But I think some of those pieces are written as if the intellectual just floats above, or is extracted from, the material conditions of everybody else. So, it often becomes this idea of, like, the intellectual has to take certain kinds of risk and be in solidarity with “the community.” But intellectuals are also part of the community. They’re dealing with exorbitant real estate prices, and high rents, and predatory companies, and extremely expensive utility bills, and environmental dangers, in terms of climate change and the quality of the environment. And they’re dealing with policing and political repression.
And so, I’ve become interested in this question about like, why is the intellectual often depicted as this kind of person removed from these material conditions? And why is the intellectual often depicted as somebody who does things in solidarity with others, but not as part of, and with, others as an impacted person? And I think that this political moment has exposed the limits of thinking about the intellectual that way, because as I’m trying to get involved more in terms of the labor activism regarding my own work conditions, I’ve just met and encountered many other researchers and faculty members who are accustomed to being the experts on a topic. And they often, sometimes, think that their role as an expert is to kind of be that intellectual, to help others understand the situation. But we’re not often equipped to actually organize around our own conditions.
So, if you ask me, what is some of the kind of political ed that I think people who fancy ourselves as leftist radicals, enlightened people, and intellectuals, activists, whatever we call ourselves, right? I think a lot of us, one could get a better handle on the conditions themselves. I think there’s various ways to do that. So, I don’t think it’s only about studying and reading books, but I do think there’s a lot about our own literacy regarding conditions that could be useful.
So, I’ll give you an example. I think a lot of us have really good critiques of the system, but we’re not always that familiar with some of the mechanics or how it’s actually organized. I actually think sometimes liberals and reformists are better equipped with just knowing some of the kind of institutional dynamic systems, sometimes because they work within them in a particular way. Maybe it’s even because they have faith about them in a particular way.
But I’ve actually encountered more people that have what I might consider more boring, or milquetoast, politics, who actually have a better handle on kind of how an institution actually operates. And I think that that is important to be able to combine the political critique that I value, and that I think is a hard fought political critique of institutions and structural violence, but to match it with a clear understanding of how these institutions are actually set up, organized, who makes decisions, who pushes the button, right? Because I think it just helps us sometimes with our forms of resistance and our attempts to politically organize against these conditions and to change them.
I also think that a lot of us just need more literacy around actual skill building. I think that a lot of us have really useful critiques. We’re very aware that things are awful, even if we don’t totally know why they’re awful, or the extent to which they’re awful. That’s a really important starting point, is just to even have that kind of repulsion and to have that awful feeling about things, right? That means that we’re alive, and that we want something different. So, I want more of that energy, but I want more of that energy to be connected to some more skills.
So, part of why a lot of times my data literacy lectures have been set up like actual educational lectures, and not necessarily like panels, and this is not to take away from panels, panels are useful, is because I want to be able to really dig deep into unpacking a lot of the mechanics and a lot of the kind of aspects of something like data. And if you look at a lot of the educational material that’s available on things like YouTube and TikTok, frankly, it’s people with bad politics. But they’re the ones who are sometimes taking the time to do educational videos, but they got terrible politics, and they have misinformation, sometimes, and disinformation, right?
And so, I think there’s more room for, like, just breaking down certain kinds of material for a broader audience, in a very organized fashion, that’s needed. But I also think a lot of us just need more skill building. What do we do with our anger, our rage, our fear, our commitment, our love? What do we do with all these emotions? And what do we do with our understanding of things? But what is the form that we take, right? How do we actually enact that? And I think that requires certain skill building regarding organizing skills.
So, I personally am also trying to brush up on some of that for myself. And I think that that’s something I see a lot of other similarly politically minded people also needing when I’m in these spaces with them. I think a lot of us could level up our skills.
KH: This is definitely a moment when all of us need to level up. And I really appreciate what you’re saying about how sometimes liberals actually have a better grasp of how certain systems function, in part due to their investment in those systems. I’ve found that to be true as well, and this is really a time to identify and bridge the gaps in our strategic knowledge.
I’ve been really heartened by the political education efforts that have been underway here in Chicago. I remember one weekend, I was putting on a big base-building training, and I expected a low turnout, because there was another important training that I knew hundreds of people were going to attend that day, but the room actually wound up being so crowded that we needed to bring in more chairs. And when it comes to ICE watch, Know Your Rights, and community defense trainings, we’ve routinely seen hundreds of people showing up in-person, and a thousand or more at a time showing up virtually, every time there’s a training. It’s been incredible, and I am really encouraged by that participation, because it indicates that people are feeling the urgency of the moment and responding by seeking knowledge, and that’s so crucial.
And we’re really fortunate here to be the beneficiaries of the long-term labor some people and groups have put into the strategies and analysis that are being shared with us. Groups like the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and Organized Communities Against Deportation, which have gamed out what it means to resist ICE through engagement with the municipal system, and what state laws are in play, and how all of that affects how we move on the ground, and what our options are. I’ve been really grateful for the scope and scale of the work that’s been happening.
It’s also making me feel very awake to new possibilities, in terms of what mass participation in political education can look like in this political moment.
TN: That’s wonderful. I’m so glad to hear that. And I think that that is such an important contribution to the political struggle. So, yeah, I’m really happy to hear that that’s happening in Chicago.
KH: And speaking of what we’re going through here in Chicago, as you know, over the past couple of months, we have experienced a massive surge in arrests and violence perpetrated by ICE, and other federal agents operating under the banner of “Operation Midway Blitz.” You’ve characterized these actions as “a form of a federal government takeover of cities for the purpose of policing.” Can you say more about the sprawling presence of ICE as a form of authoritarian policing?
TN: Okay. So, a couple of things I want to kind of… Thank you for asking that. And I want to kind of take a step back before I get right to that question, but it’s connected to it. The reason why I think it’s really important to talk about, one, it’s a federal takeover, but to be more specific about what that federal takeover is doing, is because in some cases, federal takeovers are good. And I think that that’s getting lost in this moment in some ways.
So I’ve seen people sometimes say, “This is a form of the Civil War,” and use that as a way to kind of challenge what’s happening with President Trump and the federal takeover. I actually think that’s kind of a dangerous framing. I had actually posted that, and I thought about it, and I was like, “Bitch, why are you posting this?” And I deleted my post. And the reason why is because we actually needed a Civil War, because the Civil War was about, even with all the fuckery of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and his racism, it was an effort to stop the spread of slavery in different states.
If you think about things like reconstruction, that was a federal takeover. The majority of times where the military has been involved in urban areas is usually for racist, fucked-up things like repressing urban rebellions. The historian Elizabeth Hinton has talked about this in her work.
So, there’s all these awful things that the federal government has done. But in many cases, we actually need a federal government takeover because of how racist, how segregationist, and how reactionary a lot of the politics have been at different states, and not just at the government level of states, but at the public level of racist residents. So, if you think about it, in some cases, the federal government sent in the National Guard to escort people to segregated schools because white people just didn’t even want black students going to the school.
And I think the reason I bring this up is, it’s important in this moment, I think, to sort out the difference between when has the federal government intervened and taken over in ways that were necessary, because of how racist, and segregationist, and discriminatory state governments or its residents were. And if we think about certain decisions of the Supreme Court, like gay marriage and so forth, right, interracial marriage, those could be seen as examples of the federal government kind of imposing itself. We need things like that sometimes, right?
But in this case, what is the function of the federal government? So, I think the question becomes, when a federal government decides to take over, and encroach on the jurisdiction of a state, what is the function of that? What is the purpose?
The purpose now is authoritarianism. It’s a way of maintaining power and control. It’s a way of making people have deference to the current administration. It’s a way of flexing muscle. It’s a way of enacting just fear and terror. It’s a way of maintaining a white supremacist state. It’s a way of extracting time, labor, resources, energy away from what could be more positive activities towards just self-defense or community defense.
And so, clearly, we need to condemn this federal government takeover for all those things. But I think we need to be very specific about what is happening with that, because what’s happened is some people just see it as kind of a state’s rights discussion. And, a lot of times, that’s an assumption that the states inherently are good, or equal, about equality, or that they have an agenda that serves people. And it doesn’t always do that, right? So, there’s that.
But I think, in that case, we have to think about things like ICE. ICE is a part of the Department of Homeland Security, which is a federal government agency that was created after 9/11. ICE is something that took over kind of the functions of, let’s say, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. So, a lot of people of certain generations don’t even have never even heard of the term INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service]. So, you hear people say, “Oh, ICE is kind of fairly new, get rid of it.” I get the point, and I do think we should abolish ICE. But it’s not just abolishing ICE, because it’s only a couple decades old. It’s whatever iteration before and after ICE that needs to be abolished. It’s the function that needs to be abolished.
And I think that’s part of it, but that is part of the federal government takeovers. You’re using federal government workers, which ICE is, to basically take over states, and to enact terror and violence, and kidnapping people, and really just doing just terrible things.
KH: I appreciate what you’re raising about the argument that ICE is a relatively new entity. That framing has always landed awkwardly with me, because when I was growing up, immigrant communities were terrorized by INS agents — and the INS was eventually dismantled, but it was dismantled to facilitate the creation of a less “bureaucratic,” more “national security” focused apparatus. And before INS was created in 1933, immigrant communities were being targeted by federal immigration agents under the Bureau of Immigration and by the U.S. Border Patrol, which was founded in 1924 and immediately became a racialized purveyor of extreme violence. And of course, immigrants have long been terrorized by local police — and we know that the control of immigrant populations drove the evolution of policing in some parts of the United States. So, when we get very restrictive in our analysis, around department names, or what’s only been going on for two or three decades, we don’t really have the analysis we need to ask the right questions or make the right demands.
Which reminds me of the hyper focus on whether or not Trump will deploy troops in particular cities, including mine. There was a moment when the national media was very focused on the question of whether Trump would deploy troops here, in Chicago, and when it became clear that wasn’t happening right away, the national media dropped the story — and a lot of people declared that J.B. Pritzker and the state of Illinois had won. Meanwhile, we had hundreds of federal agents unleashed on our city, neighborhoods across the city tear-gassed, and the federal government claiming to have abducted more than 3,000 immigrants. We’ve seen some of our local economies devastated, and communities utterly terrorized — and yet one form of militarized action holds a place in the popular political imagination that the other does not, as though some red line hasn’t been crossed yet, when in my opinion, it well and truly has.
TN: Yeah, and I think that was some of the dangers of the discourse regarding Washington, D.C. So, on one hand, and I remember being on the Women’s March panel with you, where you were trying to emphasize that, just focusing on military being deployed, or military personnel being deployed, loses sometimes the plot. And I think that that’s part of what’s important, is that I think it’s about trying to understand different levels of specificity.
So, what we’re seeing is, we’re seeing kind of different levels of people who work on behalf of the government, whether it’s federal, local, who play different roles. And some of them are having political battles with each other over jurisdiction. So, there’s debates about federalism and what’s the federal government’s kind of role. Sometimes, there’s conflicts between local law enforcement and ICE. Sometimes, there’s cooperation. Some of that cooperation has been institutionalized through things like 287(g) Programs, or it’s been supposedly kind of separated in terms of certain distinctions with things like sanctuary cities, right? These are all formal kind of government programs.
So, this debate about what is the jurisdiction, what is not, that’s important to an extent, but that debate can also lose the plot too. So, what happens is, people can get caught up in saying, “We just don’t need the military in the city.” You saw a lot of people, for example, some of them who are Chicago folks, saying that, “We don’t need the military in this city,” or, “We don’t need certain types of police in the city,” but they’re very pro-policing.
And so, if your only critique is that we just don’t need these entities in the city to do policing, but you’re not anti-policing, you’re losing the plot. It means that you aren’t really dealing with what is happening, is you have people who work for the government, are seen as enforcing “the law,” even though we should interrogate what that is, and it’s ever-changing kind of use and targeting, but they see themselves as enforcing the law in some ways. And in doing so, they’re ripping families apart. They’re causing just tremendous pain and suffering and fear. And they’re just changing life on such a large scale and at such a rapid pace these days.
So, we can say, “Get the military out of here,” but that doesn’t deal with the fact that the ICE is not the military. Or you have local law enforcement who might say, “We’re not going to cooperate with ICE,” but that doesn’t mean local law enforcement isn’t going to still… They could still be racially profiling, and targeting, and stopping, and frisking, and beating, and abusing, and killing people too.
And so, we have to think about the difference between understanding that there can be a shared goal among these government entities. And that, sometimes, what they’re fighting over is jurisdiction over who has dominion, right? Who has dominion to be able to do these things?
So, just very quickly, Ida B. Wells-Barnett spent a large portion of her, unfortunately, very short life in Chicago. And she’s been honored by different people in Chicago, and her legacy is very much part of Chicago. And one of the things that she really helped me understand, when I was reading her, was that she would talk about lynching as extrajudicial violence outside of the criminal legal system. But she also understood that extrajudicial lynching, it was a battle over dominion a lot of times. It was who’s going to be allowed to basically enact the death penalty against somebody. Will it be the legal system, or will it be a bunch of vigilant entities in the mob, right?
So, they didn’t have, always, opposing goals. They just fought over who had dominion. And I think that’s what’s happening right now, is you have a lot of different legal entities, government entities, they’re involved in the captive… What are their jobs? It’s to capture people. It’s to put them into custody. And it’s to put them into some type of custody that, basically, they’re held against their will as punishment. And they’re vulnerable to other forms of violence in the process, and other forms of violence that often get legally permitted, or socially permitted, or both.
And I think that it’s really a battle over dominion and thinking that it’s just a problem of, “Oh, this entity is here versus that entity.” It’s not a competition between the entities, per se. And if we start to think about it as such, we lose the plot.
KH: What you’re saying makes me think about the connection between stop and frisk and the so-called “Kavanaugh stops” of immigrants that we are seeing, that are wholly based on profiling, and how you really can’t separate the evolution of what the violence of policing looks like into convenient categories. What we allow one group to experience will always be further operationalized and deployed according to the interests of those in power.
But people get confused by notions of who they perceive to be guilty or innocent, or what they believe will apply to them, or who they think is on their side. That’s something we’ve encountered here in Chicago, with so many newly activated folks in the streets. It’s incredibly heartening, and it is absolutely necessary, but the number of people who are joining ICE patrol and rapid response in this moment — the sheer volume means that we have a lot of people who haven’t spent a lot of time analyzing the nature and harms of policing working alongside people who have. And it means we wind up hearing people ask why we can’t call the police when ICE is doing this or that, or insisting that the police are on our side, because the cops here are usually abiding by state law and not openly assisting ICE.
I mean, we really have people here who believe that the Chicago police are part of some moral alliance against ICE, which is just absurd. The work we’re actually doing, ICE watch, as it exists in Chicago, evolved out of cop watching. It is built on that lineage, the legacy and the lessons of cop watching, which comes from the Black Panthers and the Black liberation movement. So, I am hoping we can work toward an evolving understanding of the fundamental threats our neighbors face, from all forms of policing, and really bring this culture of vigilance full circle.
TN: Yeah, I’ll be honest. One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is, on one hand, I’m just extremely inspired by the level of opposition to what ICE is doing, whether it’s people showing up for these trainings, whether they’re veteran activists, or people who are kind of newly activated. I mean, it’s just really breathtaking to see the level of disgust, the level of risk that people are willing to take, these confrontations they’re having with ICE agents, the whistles, the kind of coming out of their houses, the things they’re trying to organize to kind of warn people. And so, from highly organized to kind of newly organized and newly activated, it’s just really breathtaking, and it’s really inspiring.
At the same time, I’ve been wondering what it means for abolition. And I don’t know if it’s actually taking a step back. I’ve been thinking about this, because there’s a lot of ways where part of what was happening in the immigrant rights movement was an effort to kind of challenge the idea of the good immigrant versus bad immigrant, is about trying to make inroads to the immigrant rights movement regarding a lack of consideration about abolition, in terms of people have been targeted through the criminal justice system. These were hard-fought kind of battles.
I mean, I was in immigrant rights spaces, where you had these separations, and you still do, where people would say, “Well, these immigrants didn’t commit crimes. These are innocent immigrants.” And wanting to kind of debate the difference between an immigration offense versus a crime that would get you a felony conviction. And those were hard-fought battles, and they are still going on in immigrant rights spaces.
And there’s even been questions about have immigrant rights activists kind of co-opted some of the aspects of abolition. So, you also see the discourse of crimmigration in the legal scholarship, and in some of the activism, where people are saying how are immigrants getting criminalized, or so forth. And on one hand, there’s a needed usefulness to the flexibility regarding the language of criminalization, right? It can be something that gets a lot of people to oppose certain things. It can be a basis of getting more people to try to rescue and save people from the jaws of this bullshit, and the structural violence. These are all things we need, right? We need more people activated to kind of think about those things.
But at the same time, and I don’t have the answers for it right now, we’re still very much relying on kind of discourses of innocence. We’re still very much relying on kind of going to make sure that “good,” or “innocent,” or “hardworking” people can also be rounded up. And it’s true, everybody can be rounded up, right? So, there are variations in terms of people’s kind of stuff going on, right?
But there’s ways where I’ve wondered, on one hand, we need self-defense right now. We need people activated. We need kind of just freeing people by any means necessary, frankly, with what’s going on, and the level of aggression, chaos, and ramping up, and just a number of incidents that are happening right now against people. So, we need all of this activation.
But I do wonder what will happen. And I think there’s going to be a lot of recovery work that the abolitionist movement is going to have to do, because in our attempts to rightly defend people, particularly immigrants right now, we’re relying on a lot of these discourses of innocence, and about exceptionalism, and so forth. And we’re kind of losing which direction to look from.
I’ve been thinking a lot about like, we often use these frameworks of like, “Okay, it happened to this group, it can happen to you,” and usually talk about like a so-called “respectable group,” and say, “If it can happen to a citizen, it can happen to you.” But really, it’s, if it can happen to somebody at the bottom, it can always move upward. The target can always expand, right?
If you have a concept of a criminal, you can just keep expanding what is a crime. And it can always move upward. But we haven’t been really encouraged to think about it that way, a lot of times, in our discourses, or even if we have been encouraged to think about it, the way, in real time, we try to get attention and support for people. And we should try to get attention and support for people and try to defend them. But the way we often do it in real time is to kind of start from the respectable, and say, “Oh…” And we actually re-entrenched the concept of “the criminal.”
And there are just a lot of people who, unfortunately, are rightly outraged at what ICE is doing, but they’re partly outraged at what ICE is doing, because they see the people being targeted by ICE as distinct from the so-called criminals, and frankly, a lot of times from Black people, even though obviously ICE is targeting Black people too, right? And it always has been, and is definitely doing so now.
But there’s a way where being able to kind of separate out, or say, “These people are different from these people.” There’s always a specter of anti-Blackness. There’s always a specter of criminality. And because we aren’t really challenging, sometimes, just criminalization and the criminal punishment system and law enforcement, it means that sometimes we look at all these things as exceptions. And then, we also exceptionalize kind of people are being targeted that we do need to rescue. And we forget about both the existing logic that made these targets kind of possible now in this moment. But we also forget the people who’ve been targeted, and who are engaged, or who are still going through hell.
KH: As an abolitionist, I see a lot of opportunity in what’s happening. Thousands and thousands of people across Chicago have attended ICE Watch and rapid response trainings. And embedded in all of those trainings is the rule that we don’t call the police. People are being taught to respond to emergencies without calling the cops, because the cops aren’t going to help, and bringing them to the scene introduces another threat to vulnerable people.
Now, that’s foreign to a lot of these newly activated people, especially folks who show up in the heat of the moment, without having attended a training, but even to some of the people who’ve been trained, it’s a jarring deviation from something that’s reflexive for them. But they are showing up, and they aren’t calling the cops, and they’re working in concert with their neighbors on the ground to create as much safety and justice as they can, at the community level. That is the work of abolition, regardless of whether people have a fully formed analysis, or what they call it — it’s the work of building other ways of living and doing, in real time. I am so heartened by that, and I see so much potential in it. And I am honestly more heartened by people showing up to do that kind of work, even if they don’t call themselves abolitionists, than I am by people who speak the language of abolition fluently, but aren’t doing anything to rehearse the values they’re talking about — and I think we’ve all seen a lot of that.
I also think a lot of people learn through engagement with these systems. Like the people who’ve been getting brutalized by the state police at the Broadview ICE facility. For a while, it was federal agents brutalizing and gassing us outside that facility. For weeks now, it’s been the state police, who Governor J.B. Pritzker insisted were being deployed there to protect protesters. He still says that. And yet, people are seeing and experiencing the brutality of those police on the ground. Most of the major movement moments I’ve been a part of have included some white people who came in seeing the police one way, and learned, through experience, that the police aren’t what they thought they were, and I don’t believe this moment is going to be an exception in that way. For me, the ongoing question is how we are going to meet people in those moments and what kind of analysis, understanding, and invitations we’re going to extend.
People are taking radical actions that they’ve never taken before — in some cases, doing things they never imagined they would do. I’ve had people tell me this, that they never imagined they would do these things. They’re doing those things to protect people from law enforcement — and they’re helping each other, and learning from each other while they do it. When people are willing to fracture their relationship with the status quo to this degree, I think there’s a lot that’s up for grabs. People are willing to learn, think, act, and strategize in ways they haven’t before. That’s a huge opportunity. And I think it’s incumbent upon us to seize that opportunity, and see what we can make of it.
I think there’s a lot of work to do. Like when someone says, we can’t call these kidnappings “arrests,” because arrest implies that someone did something wrong and that they are going to receive due process, when being arrested in the United States by your local police doesn’t imply either of those things. Often, it just means that you were Black in the eye line of a cop when a particular impulse struck him. And even when we are “guilty” of a thing, we need to trouble a lot of notions of what kind of violence that justifies and who it empowers — which is why I tend to use the words “arrest” and “kidnapping” interchangeably when I talk about what ICE is doing. I think what you’re raising is important, and I am definitely seizing opportunities to have those conversations right now, because I think those opportunities are deeply important.
And on the subject of opportunities, and figuring out how to meet the moment, the recent escalations we’re seeing from ICE are occurring in a moment of mass expansion, amid a major recruiting boom for the agency. Notably, there hasn’t been a major leftist counter recruiting campaign organized around this. You’ve noted that, unlike the anti-war movement, prison and police abolitionists have failed to prioritize counter recruitment. What do you think abolitionists can learn from the anti-war movement in this regard?
TN: So, I used to volunteer for years for the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, which was an anti-war, peace organization that existed for about 60 years, and they folded in the 2000s. And they came out of organizing, regarding the draft, in trying to help people with draft resistance.
But it’s in 1973 that President Nixon gets rid of the draft. And so, it becomes what is known as the all-volunteer force. And this is something where you start to see, one, just some changes in kind of like what would be considered military benefit. So, if you look at it, it turns into all-volunteer force. It gets rid of a draft. On one hand, that’s a good thing, right? People aren’t forced to be in the military in the same way. But what it does is, it also kind of plays, it challenges some of the resistance strategies, because there was a certain amount of opposition to the draft, and organized resistance to the draft, and organized resistance that came with a lot of penalties.
There’s more scholarship being done about how different anti-colonial organizations, civil rights groups — a lot of people of color went to prison, because they refused to serve in the military during the draft. And so, there’s just a lot of really important work that still needs to be done to bring more of that history to the surface.
But when it turned into all-volunteer force, it basically becomes kind of a job program. And one of the things that, when we think about it, being a service member is a government job. The Department of Defense, which houses the military, is [one of] the largest employer[s] in the world. I mean, in the world. And so, a good portion of just people who are employed in the United States, but who also are government workers, or public workers, work for the military.
And if you look at the military, the starting wages aren’t that great. And I’m not necessarily advocating that they should get better wages. But they often get a lot of what we might consider benefits, but these are kind of employee benefits. One of the things I didn’t mention when I introduced myself is some of my research is kind of increasingly about employee benefits, and thinking about the role of employee benefits as a form of labor control. Employers kind of give more and more benefits. Some of them that are not even legally required for them to do. But what is the function of giving employees more and more benefits?
It kind of takes the function of government, instead of having social services and programs just be freely available from the government, which they should be. They sometimes are offered through different ways, through kind of an employer-sponsored benefit, but also becomes a way of sometimes maintaining certain control. So, what you see is, you see this transition to all-volunteer force. You also see just kind of a ratcheting up of a military benefit.
So, the historian Jennifer Mittelstadt, and I hope I’m pronouncing their name correctly, has written about the military welfare state, and just like how large it is, and how much funding it goes into. But it creates this kind of major welfare state, not just only for service members, but also for their families in a particular way. And that’s kind of some of the ways that it also becomes a recruitment tool. And so, when you turn to the all-volunteer force, you got to try to recruit people. And you often recruit them by talking about the job and job benefits. But you also use discourses about like honor, status, service, and so forth.
These are some of the same ways that people try to recruit people into ICE. And so, if you look at ICE’s website and some of the recruitment, it’s about like, “Here’s what you can start with. Here’s the starting salary. Here’s the benefits and the bonuses that you can get.” So, it’s all this kind of job recruitment stuff. But also, part of the way that they kind of market things like ICE, or law enforcement, or the military, is about honor and status.
And there’s also a particular racial history to a lot of this stuff. So, for example, the military has been marketed as a way for, like President Lyndon Johnson, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the infamous Department of Labor Secretary who wrote the Moynihan Report, right? They would promote military service as a way for Black communities to become “disciplined” socially. So, it was seen as like both like a way to kind of get Black people to stop protesting so much. But it was also very much this fucked up racist discourse about like, “Oh, if Black people get in the military, they’ll stop being so kind of culturally deviant in their behavior. It will get better.” And that will supposedly lead to better community outcomes.
So, there’s also particular ways that these jobs get marketed by the military law enforcement, including ICE, towards particular communities, as kind of basically like, “Oh, you’re a minority community, and this will help you get your shit together, and help you bring honor to your community.” And, in a racist society, where you’re constantly being told you’re pathological, deviant, have bad behavior, and racistly being blamed for your own social outcomes as a group, that shit is really appealing to some people. And you do have people that see a lot of honor in serving in some of these jobs.
But I think what we need to understand as abolitionists is these are marketed as jobs. And it’s not the only way in which these positions have appeal to some people, but they are marketed as jobs with salaries, employee benefits, and so forth. And if you think about the fact that this economy is even worse in the toilet, and just the cost of living, that is often seen. And student debt is really high. All these things, right? Those are often very useful things for job recruiters who are trying to recruit more people into certain jobs.
KH: Some leftists argue that police and soldiers are agents of class repression, and are not workers. You’ve argued that this characterization romanticizes work, and ignores the fact that many jobs are bound up in carcerality and war. How can viewing police, and members of the military, as workers, help us form a more strategic analysis?
TN: Yeah, I’ve been saying for a couple of years now that I think more abolitionists and critics of policing need to deal with the fact that police are workers. And I have gotten this resistance to that from a lot of different people, actually, who will say what you’re saying, “Well, they’re not workers because their job is to protect capital, or to cause harm to the labor movement.” Or I’ve had people say, “Well, we don’t want them in unions. And I don’t consider them a union sibling,” and so forth. And I get all of those critiques.
But part of it is, the main way in which a lot of people are being recruited to do this work is as a job, and also more specifically government workers. And I keep stressing that they’re government workers, because I’m somebody who believes in needing a government. I think that we need to have an apparatus that provides public goods and services, and that also has certain policies for the public good.
So, I might be different than somebody else who might say, “We don’t need government,” or who assumes that the state can only be about violence. I don’t assume that the state’s only function can be violence. I understand that, unfortunately, a large portion of the state’s function, as well as what it puts its funding and policies towards, is towards violence. So, what I would like is a government where government work has to be reimagined to be work that serves the public welfare, and the health, and the well-being of people. It also means, then, having to reimagine things like public safety, and so forth, right?
And so, one of the things is, the reason why I think more leftist and abolitionists need to deal with this is because if we just say, “We’re going to ignore you as workers,” we’re missing a big part of how people actually end up in those positions in the first place. They are heavily recruited. There’s a lot of money.
When I used to work, or volunteer, for CCCO, we would talk about just the sheer amount of money and kind of cultural efforts into recruitment. There was just so much recruitment. And I volunteered with one of the programs at CCCO, it was the counter-military recruitment. And it was about how do you actually try to encourage people not to take the job of a service member, right? Well, that means we have to think about why would that job be appealing? And we used to talk about the concept of a poverty draft. Who does the military tend to recruit?
We were a little off base sometimes, because the military also recruits a lot of other people who are not in poverty, per se, like people to be officers, and so forth, right? But we’re trying to get at the point that, a lot of times, the military is selling you the promise of a job. What that means is, a lot of us who want to think about counter-recruitment, right, we have to kind of first think about what’s attracting you to that position.
Some of it is not only a job. There are people who are attracted, unfortunately, to certain work, because they get off on being violent, or they get off on the idea of being able to capture people, or because they’re racist, right? So, there’s a lot of things that attract people to certain types of work that you also have to politically work against. But a big function of how they even get into those positions is because they’re hired to be employees.
So, I think just on a very logistical level, there’s that. I think that this assumption that all workers are kind of good people, or that work is inherently good, I think we need to challenge that. So, there’s this idea that you’re speaking against the sanctity of work, or labor, if you call police workers. I don’t assume that work and labor is sacred, right? I think that there’s work that needs to be valued. I think that there’s work that’s exploited. I think that there’s work that also needs to be questioned.
And so, this idea of… That’s a labor… No shade. I believe in Labor Day. I understand the whole history of it getting kind of sanitized, right? I understand why people celebrate Labor Day, and I understand why people celebrate workers and unions, right? But there’s a certain discourse of Labor Day that plays out with how we talk about police and law enforcement as workers. It’s this idea that Labor Day has a kind of discourse of like, all laborer is sacred, and that’s just meaningful, and that work is inherently good, and workers are good.
That’s not true. There is a lot of what is considered violence work, and I’m using the phrase by Micol Seigel, and I hope I’m pronouncing their name correctly, but they have a book called Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police, and their definition of violence workers are people whose work rests on the premise and promise of violence. And the reality is a lot of the economy is built on violence work.
So, if we think about the concept of prison-industrial complex, there’s competing definitions that people provided. But one of the things that I really appreciate about Ruth Wilson Gilmore, she was asked by Daniel Denver about her definition of the prison-industrial complex. And she gave a very detailed one, but she was talking about different labor and work that’s done. And one of the things that she and her partner, and co-author, Craig Gilmore, talked about is, they said one of the problems of how people of conceptualized prison-industrial complex is they associate industrial with profit, and that we miss all of the different kind of socio-economic processes that actually play out that lead to profit, but we also miss the role of the state in all of this, and how it’s connected to the economy.
And so, when we start to understand that a lot of these people working in law enforcement and the military are government workers, it means we bring into focus more how the economy is actually organized, and what role the state plays in its organization, and what are big functions of government jobs. So, again, I believe in government, I just think that the work of government needs to lean less towards violence work, and less towards carcerality and militarization, and more towards things that speak to the humanity of people, try to enrich and kind of lengthen people’s lives, to increase the quality of life, instead of threatening the quality of life and inflicting violence.
And I think that what happens is this assumption that all workers need to be unionized, I think we need to question that. I see people say, I posted this myself, but I don’t know if I totally believe it, things like, if you have a boss, you need a union. I don’t know if that’s true. Do we want all workers, paid workers, to be well organized, to become a political force? Well, the only way you can say that is if you think all the work is good.
But if you start to think about some of the workers, and what does their job actually help do in the world, right, what is the work that their work does, you have to start saying like, some of these workers might not be the ones we want well organized. And so, it means also having to challenge our kind of association with labor unions with work. I believe in labor unions. I’m a member of a labor union. I’m active with my labor union, right? But I believe that we have to rethink everybody being unionized, because do you want all paid workers to be organized? The only way you could come to that conclusion is if you think all paid workers are doing good work in the world, right? And I think we have to question that.
The other thing is, you can support capital and still be a paid worker. This idea that you’re a paid worker, and that you have inherently good politics as an individual, or the job you’re doing really misses, again, how the economy is organized and how a lot of it is organized around carceral work, right? If you think about just the sheer number of people who work for the Department of Homeland Security, which houses ICE, the Department of Homeland Security has over 260,000 employees, right? Carceral industries are some of the most unionized, and I’m including people who are correctional officers, law enforcement, right?
And I’ll just say this, this idea of the police not being members of labor unions, one of the things that I think we also need to think about about challenging police officers as workers, and why it’s useful, are abolitionists. Abolitionists talk a lot about budgets, and what we actually like spending to go towards. That doesn’t mean we’re always as versed in how budgeting works. I do think a lot more abolitionists, including myself, need to become more familiar with things like collective bargaining, and contract negotiations, and city planning, and budgets, because that’s a big part of what determines what type of public services we’re going to have, and where it tilts, in terms of like the type of work that government work and services offers us, right? And a large portion that goes to law enforcement right now.
Well, one of the things is that police officers are highly organized as a political force. We often think about those police officers being organized through things like the fraternal order of police, but we don’t always focus as much on, like, the units that are involved in collective bargaining. And so, Fraternal Order of Police is a powerful institution, but they aren’t involved in the collective bargaining in the way that, let’s say, a local union chapter is. And it was after the urban rebellions that like, you start seeing more and more police officers kind of getting into collective bargaining. And that is a big part of how city budgets are swallowed up by law enforcement, is through the collective bargaining, right?
I would just recommend, for example, one author, is Ayesha Bell Hardaway. Professor Bell Hardaway is a law professor, and she wrote an article called the “Rise of Police Unions on the Back of the Black Liberation Movement.” And so, I highly recommend Ayesha Bell Hardaway’s work, because she maps out how, in opposition to the Black liberation movement, you have the rise of police labor organizing. And that’s been a pretty well-covered topic. But she really gets into some of the stuff regarding the collective bargaining units that emerge out of that.
And so, that’s another reason why I think we need to kind of deal with the fact that police are workers, is part of the way that they organize and take up a large part of the budget is through unionization and collective bargaining. And they do that as workers, right?
So, just to recap, I don’t think police and law enforcement, I’m not saying to unionize them, I’m not saying to lose the plot about what their function is politically in society, in terms of their function being to protect capital and white supremacy. I’m not saying to lose any of that insight, but it is to say, if you want to try to kind of target them as a force, you got to deal with part of the ways in which they’re able to kind of do that. And that’s as workers and as an organized workforce.
It also means, how do you get people to try to resist policing? While part of resisting policing is also encouraging people to, what does it mean to kind of see policing as a job? It’s a very attractive job for some people, right? It’s also something that there’s more and more work to get policing professionalized. So, if you look at the history of police academies, if you look at the history of the development of criminal justice studies programs, if you look at the history of certain policing reforms, if you look at the history of crime data, if you look at the history of accreditation of policing, right? All of these are forms of police professionalization that is also part of the carceral economy. People make money professionalizing the police.
So, you have many people participating in the economy, some of them who are not in law enforcement, who are going to be pro-police as workers, partly because that’s also part of how they make money and become kind of an institutional force. So, there’s many layers of how to kind of dismantle this. And one angle is not the only angle, is to deal with the fact that they’re workers, and that’s how people end up a lot of times in the position of it.
And what would it mean to have a counter recruitment kind of process, or activism, towards law enforcement, the way that peace and justice groups had towards the military, in terms of counter military recruitment? Well, the first step would be just to recognize that police are workers. If you just say, “Well, I don’t even think of them as workers,” you’re probably not going to do much to try to counter recruit them from becoming police officers.
KH: I am really interested in this argument. I’m someone who’s previously accepted and subscribed to the argument that police aren’t workers, but I was also eager to interrogate it when I saw you speaking to the subject on social media. And I do find your arguments compelling.
We know that not all workers produce surplus value with their work, some facilitate the process of value becoming profit, and some maintain the conditions that make production, distribution and profit possible. We know that elements of the working class can be reactionary or counter revolutionary. I can see how stripping them of the status of worker might obscure a contradiction that needs to be explored.
I will say that I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone I’m in community with argue that being a worker imbues people with good politics, but I know some people believe that there is political potential and the basis for solidarity in and among people who share the status of worker. But I would agree that there are workers, well outside law enforcement, whose work is geared toward the control, abuse and exploitation of other people, in ways that I don’t think can be redeemed. So, are there simply workers with whom we shouldn’t be in solidarity, who we shouldn’t want in unions? And are police among those workers? That’s something I am going to continue to think about, and I would love to dig deeper, but unfortunately, we are running out of time.
So, as we’re winding things down, Tamara, is there anything else you would like to share with, or ask of the audience today?
TN: I would just end with saying, I think that, as we’re kind of experimenting, which I love, I love that people are doing the things that you’re talking about. I think that some of these experiments are also based in people who’ve been organizing for a long time, where it’s an opportunity for them to think through some of these things.
So, when you were talking about with some of these anti-ICE trainings, and part of it being like, “We don’t call the police,” right? That comes out of a lot of hard work, a lot of hard work in terms of analysis, a lot of hard work in terms of experimentation, a lot of hard work in terms of conversations, and kind of thinking through these things. And a lot of hard work of activists, and organizers, and organizations that some of them are no longer with us, that helped plant those seeds in the work they were doing, and that we might have learned about, or participate in.
And so, I think it’s really exciting that that’s happening. I think along with that happening, I think that we need to always balance experimentation with deep study, and with just getting clearer in what we’re dealing with, and to figure out what to do with that clarity, right? We don’t want to all turn into a bunch of consultants, or where we think that, “Oh, now we have like the research and the clarity, and now we’re going to kind of use that to try to forestall political imagination and experiment.” So, I think it’s a really delicate balance. I haven’t totally figured that out yet, but I do think there’s always room for us to have a better, deeper understanding of what we’re dealing with, to not see study and political analysis as contradictory to the experimentation, to organizing, and to activation.
I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks that. So, I don’t want to say it’s an original thought, but I would say that that’s kind of the stuff I’m trying to balance in the world. And I have a feeling maybe some other people are trying to as well.
KH: I appreciate the shout out to people whose hard work has helped frame this moment of mass activation and experimentation. In Chicago, organizers with groups like the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and Organized Communities Against Deportations, who have worked for years to limit ICE’s reach in Illinois and Chicago — which has included fighting for protections for criminalized immigrants — these folks always acknowledge the lineages of Black struggle and the many decades of immigrant rights work that inform their efforts. And building upon that organizing, neighborhood groups like Protect Rogers Park, which started creating its community infrastructure back in 2017, have become touchstones for community defense projects that have sprung up over the last couple of months. And now, in a moment whenICE is scaling down its efforts in Chicago, over the winter, and attacking people in warmer cities, I hope we will take Tamara’s advice and use this time to deepen our analysis and sharpen our skills. Of course, there will still be ICE attacks in Chicago. That violence was occurring before Operation Midway Blitz, and it will continue to occur. But as the constant alerts die down, we may have a moment on our hands to take a breath, regroup, learn together, and prepare together for what’s ahead.
In our next episode, we’ll talk a bit about what we’ve learned so far, from what’s happened in Chicago, over the last couple of months, in the hopes that our experiences here might be useful to people who are now being flung into the same situation – or soon will be.
Tamara, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate the opportunity to hear your perspective. And I think people are just going to learn so much from it.
TN: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
KH: I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
Show Notes
- Counting Crime: A Lecture on the Politics of Crime Data and Its Uses
- Anti-Asian Violence and Black-Asian Solidarity Today with Tamara K. Nopper
- Punishing Immigrants: U.S. Immigration Enforcement and the Prison Industrial Complex
- Military Service as Liberal Policing: A Brief Racial History of Project 100,000 by Tamara K. Nopper
