Benji Hart talks abolition through queer, Black lenses

By KAAVYA BUTANEY the daily northwestern @kaavya_butaney

Freelance educator Benji Hart spoke about police and imprisonment abolition through a queer lens Wednesday as part of the Women’s Center’s quarterly trans programming and Black History Month.

“Having this type of conversation at Northwestern is something that I’ve always wanted to do, and (I want to) just start getting the ball rolling on some of these conversations,” said melisa stephen, event organizer and Women’s Center program manager.

Hart, an artist and author, is also an educator of Black radicalism, queer liberation and prison abolition.

At the beginning of the workshop, Hart set community guidelines for speaking and told attendees to use “I” statements and respect others’ experiences.

“When we are using the term policing, we are talking about a massive network of systems and structures that is not limited to any one nationstate and targets the same groups of people wherever it is operating,” Hart said.

Hart spoke with participants throughout most of the workshop and asked questions about how, who and why certain people are targeted by the police.

They said the majority of people are targeted by police, including Black and brown people, Indigenous people, unhoused people and nonChristians, which means the institution was never created to protect most people.

“When we talk about abolition, we are not

Four Northwestern professors were named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the University announced Jan. 31. The association, which is the world’s largest general scientific society, honored chemistry Prof. Teri talking about some radical idea,” Hart said. “We are talking about poor and working-class (people) getting the same treatment (that) rich people get. We are talking about Black and brown people getting the same response to their crises as white people get.”

Hart then discussed how police use stop-andfrisk methods and the war on drugs as excuses to imprison marginalized people. They highlighted quality-of-life crimes, which they said criminalize

Odom and Feinberg Profs. Luisa Iruela-Arispe, Murali Prakriya and Linda Teplin (Weinberg M.A. ’72, Doctorate ’75).

Odom is chair of the chemistry department and holds a materials science and engineering professorship in the McCormick School of Engineering. Her research interests include engineering materials at the nanoscale and designing nanofabrication tools.

Iruela-Arispe is the chair of the Feinberg School of Medicine’s cell and developmental biology people for being poor and punish everyone that breaks the peace of middle-class life.

Many participants verbally agreed with the premise that the policing system exists to uphold white supremacy, the patriarchy and the upper class. Women’s Center Associate Director Njoki Kamau said she specifically noticed how those systems continue to stay in power, no matter what people try to do.

“I couldn’t watch the Tyre (Nichols) video,” department. Her lab specializes in vascular biology, having made pioneering discoveries in areas such as blood vessel expansion and genetic defects in vascular cells.

Prakriya is a professor of pharmacology and medicine at Feinberg. He was among the first to identify store-operated Orai channels, a group of calcium ion channels that facilitates signals to the brain and immune system.

Teplin is Feinberg’s vice chair for research in the psychiatry and behavioral sciences department she said. “I feel traumatized by the violence over time … it’s so clear why it’s not changing, it doesn’t matter what we do, and until we defund the police or capitalism collapses.” kaavyabutaney2026@u.northwestern.edu as well as a professor of medicine in infectious diseases. She has led the NU Juvenile Project, a program studying health and psychiatric needs in incarcerated juveniles and adults, for more than 25 years.

After discussing the methodology of overpolicing, Hart introduced a timeline of queer and trans police resistance with an emphasis on Chicago-based efforts. The timeline begins with Mary Jones — the first documented Black trans person arrested for sex work — and ends in 2019.

Hart gave participants Post-its to put new history or personal anecdotes on the timeline, which they have been asking participants to add to since 2019. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many people never had the chance to contribute.

“There’s a lot of things that have been left out of that (mainstream) narrative,” Schnaude Dorizan said. “That includes a lot of the Black and brown queer and trans events … a lot of that has been left out of Black history, and it is Black history.

The timeline, Hart said, shows how while laws can change, the same groups are targeted by police.

After some participants contributed to the timeline, Hart invited them to offer further steps toward police abolition. Participants mentioned relying on their community, mutual aid and reinvesting in social programs and education as potential solutions.

“Folks who have access to these very privileged institutions that are very much a part of maintaining a lot of these systems and structures that we’re talking about … (should) think about how they can leverage their power to raise these demands,” Hart told The Daily.

AAAS’ 2022 fellows class includes more than 500 scientists across two dozen disciplines. The organization will formally commemorate the class in Washington this summer.

Russell Leung