Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Cristina Faiver-Serna, University of New Hampshire

; Nic Ramos, Drexel University

Description:

The 2020 protests and uprisings against ongoing police brutality, and in reaction to police and white vigilante murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbury, and Breonna Taylor, illuminated spatial relationships between race, policing, and segregation long observed by critical race and carceral geographers in regards to uneven development. Anti-racist uprisings alongside the accelerating climate crisis, the outbreak of COVID-19, and their disproportionate impact on Black, Indigenous, and diverse people of color--deemed “essential workers” in popular media--as well as stress on acute health systems suggest investigation on relationships between carceral geography, uneven health access, and racialized health disparities.

We invite scholars to think with us through the relationalities between Du Bois’ (1935) concept of “real estate,” Woods’ (1998) “plantation epistemology,” and Gilmore’s (2007) observations about premature death and surplus labor at the intersection between policing, carcerality, and racialized geographies of health. Du Bois ([1935]1998) describes slavery as a problem of “real estate” in the capture and enclosure of labor for profit that is inextricably tied to stolen land as part of the historical and ongoing U.S. settler state’s investment in white supremacy (Dunbar Ortiz, 2015; Sell, 2021). Woods ([1998]2017) examines plantation epistemology through the geography of the plantation bloc, describing the land monopolies, and violence and terror that evolves into state surveillance, disenfranchisement, and suppression in place over time. Gilmore (2007) observes that the state’s capacity to organize surplus labor, land, and capital enables it to produce the very conditions of racism, or the “extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (28).

Following Du Bois, Woods, and Gilmore, we observe that the U.S. public health “safety net” anchors poverty in time and place (Ramos, 2019), while policing operates to maintain it (Gilmore, 2007). We posit that we cannot account for decisions about health care without other urban policy, and without carceral geographies that recognize and account for the white supremacist logics of a settler-state (Almaguer, 2008; Lipsitz, [1998]2018). We also recognize that carceral geographies are related and driven by the same racial capitalist logics and neoliberal policies that drive racialized health disparities in the wake of environmental racism (see Faiver-Serna, 2021 and Pulido, 2016). Inspired and influenced by Woods’ (1998) blues epistemology, along with other subversive and creative survival, world-building, and life-giving ways of knowing, being, and organizing in community, we recognize that we cannot imagine viable, sustainable, and long-term solutions without abolitionism: abolishing policing and prisons, dismantling racial capitalism, and destroying the white patriarchy.

Bibliography

Almaguer, T. (2008). Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California. University of California Press.

Du Bois, W.E.B. ([1935]1998). Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. The Free Press.

Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (2015). An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. Beacon Press.

Faiver-Serna, C. (2021). Geographies of Environmental Racism: Capitalism, Pollution, and Public Health in Southern California. In Mascarenhas, M. (Ed.), Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More ( pp.147-163). SAGE Publications.

Gilmore, R.W. (2007). Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press.

Lipsitz, G. ([1998]2018). The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Temple University Press.

Pulido, L. (2016). Flint, Environmental Racism, and Racial Capitalism. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 27(3), 1–16.

Ramos, N.J. (2019). Poor Influences and Criminal Locations: Los Angeles’s Skid Row, Multicultural Identities, and Normal Homosexuality. American Quarterly 72(2), 541-567.

Sell, Z. (2021). Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital. University of North Carolina Press.

Woods, C. ([1998]2017). Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. Verso.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda