Why I am Learning to Become an Abolitionist

By: Lwazi Bululu

Violence always returns.

Although I did not know it then, my embrace of abolition was inspired by the revolutionary student protests in universities across South Africa from 2015 to 2016. The protests began at the University of Cape Town, where students dissented against a statue of Cecil John Rhodes, a known colonizer. Soon, this movement quickly transformed into nationwide demonstrations denouncing hyperin ated tuition and antiblack pedagogy. The fact was, even in post-Apartheid South Africa, prevalent systems constrained Black students in their pursuit of well-being and education.

Then came the incredibly harsh response. Universities dispatched campus security forces and called riot police; they exercised brutal force, tear-gassing peaceful crowds and shooting rubber bullets without orders. Judging from this reaction, you would think these students were insurrectionists, and this was a scene from 1976 Soweto; the only difference in the response between then and now was that the people who called the police were Black. The Black university administrators, who once struggled to end Apartheid, had assimilated into institutions built for the colonial project and swore to protect and preserve those very institutions. In this instance, they mobilized the great weapon of oppression: securitization. Securitization is not only the instinct to call the police at any feeling of discomfort-- and the use of extraordinary force in ordinary situations by police -- but also the obsession to prevent all institutions from change.

To me, abolition is the opposite of securitization. Abolition is a critique of the violence both produced by securitization and perpetuated by the uninterrupted functioning of modern systems. It is an attitude that asserts the same institutions cannot remedy the violence they perpetuate. It is not about reforming this world but creating new worlds that allow multiple ways of being. The consequence of untransformed institutions is disproportionate harm to Black and Brown bodies. These same institutions recirculate the violence of colonialism, slavery, and segregation, like a system of veins and arteries in our body, politics that circulate blood. The institutions of today, which are inherited and not made by us, operate by forcibly displacing people who the system has failed. Prison is inhumane. Healthcare systems allow Black and Brown folk to die. School pipelines Black folk to prison. I've outlined the grand sweep of the harm and dispossession of People of Color. Show me a Person of Color suffering, and I will show you how a "race-neutral" system or policy causes that harm. Combating this requires applying abolitionist thinking to all contexts. This thought process brings me back to the university protests in South Africa. Today I recognize that the students were advocating for a type of abolition: abolition pedagogy. Abolition pedagogy is "a refusal of the long-standing relationship between education and violence, and a creative experiment in critical processes of antiviolence." This intimate relationship between education and violence surrounds us as UNC students. Every day, we study, rest, eat, and socialize in and among spaces where salve labor built the foundation—our libraries contain written records of that injustice. We are inundated with the narrative that we need to work and grind because it is the only way; if you struggle, you feel there is no support, and you are left asking what is wrong with you. How many of us feel free in the classroom or at school?

I conceived this essay as a way to reckon with my desire to tear it all down. In a month where we observe the beauty and boldness, struggles and achievements, of the Black Nation in the US -- borderless, tribeless, and in nitely whole -- I wanted to write about something that could give me hope that there was a way out of the cycle of deprivation I witness. Because, in reality, it is far too easy to become numb to the pain. Acknowledging the pain is terrifying. And equally fearsome is believing in the process of abolition. It is frightening because it lets all the suppressed tension rise to the surface. It is also fearsome because we ask great questions, and the truth is that we can only provide tentative answers. What is the solution to the harm our campus perpetuates? There are things I do not know. But that is ok. Because the mistakes and the uncertainty are the soil from which better critiques and better solutions can emerge. Let us de ne and re ne our idea of a better future together. Let us practice forgiveness. Better we stumble to a place where all life is precious than we remain, because of ambivalence, in a place where some lives are disregarded.