Sexual Harm Beyond Policing

Spring 2020’s resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests crystallized longstanding organizing against policing and punishment. While these uprisings were neither new nor novel, throughout 2020 calls to defund the police gained greater political traction. Ongoing co-resistance organized across movements for Indigenous and Black lives and against settler nation borders contested the legitimacy of the U.S. as a colonial and racial state, while more mainstream media began to ask if carceral “abolition” could be a desirable, if not entirely practical, goal. While the resultant partial counter-hegemonies were viewed somewhat skeptically by those in existing abolitionist work, many also saw potential in the widening circulation of “abolition” as a concept. Activists and scholars seeking to dismantle often taken-for-granted systems of criminalization and punishment have drawn on W.E.B. Du Bois’s framing of “abolition democracy” in Black Reconstruction in America to connect struggles against racialized chattel slavery and its unreconstructed aftermath to later twentieth and early twenty-first century struggles against the “prison industrial complex” or “carceral state.” Even if curiosity, or skepticism, fueled some purchasers of Mariame Kaba’sWe Do This ‘Til We Free Us, its status as a New York Times bestseller held out hope that actual readers of the volume—along with other books soon to be published by influential abolitionists— might grapple seriously with calls to radically reconstruct existing systems toward a more just and equitable world.