Antiblackness, Refusal, and Abolition

• In Event: Abolitionist Methodologies

Abstract

Stemming from Black and African American studies, abolition is most narrowly defined as the end of slavery. However, abolition is a keyword that raises a complex set of questions about the convergence of personhood to property, and the shifts in relations of power that “constitute freedom’s beginning and captivity’s end” (Haley 2019, p.9). Thus, as a framework, abolition generates theorizations about subjectivity, racial capitalism, social and physical violence, imprisonment and refusal while maintaining at its core an interrogation of the liberal nation-state and vigilance to whether, and when, the enterprise of the plantation actually ended (Haley 2019). As institutions of the state and social transmitters of “democratic values,” school are imperative to the study and practice of abolition.

In this ethnographic paper, I consider the abolitionist practices of Darla– the only black girl and black student in a junior US History class, at a primarily Latinx high school in an agro-industrial city in California. Through an analysis of Darla’s engagement in a Civil Rights history lesson, this paper outlines (1) how the prison industrial complex and punitive practice of control and security animates anti-black racism, and (2) how Darla’s knowledge of the prison industrial system and punitive practices in her school animate a practice of refusal to push against her classmates' antiblack rhetoric. Drawing from the work of Black and Indigenous Women scholars (Reese 2019; Sharpe 2016, 2018; Shange 2019; Simpson 2014), in this work, refusal is not defined as a limitation, but rather as a practice that lets us know when we’ve reached “enough” (Simpson, 2014). Therefore, this paper argues that practices of refusal are central to abolition and demand that researchers stay attuned to the ways communities “refuse to continue on this way” (McGranahan 2016, p. 320). By centering Darla’s story, this paper uncovers the methodological demands of refusal as a practice of abolition and ultimately asks: how does centering refusal as tenant of abolition help recognize abolitionist practices in tight spaces (Lugones 2003) and what are the pedagogical demands of refusal as a means to learn how to see other arrangements of the possible (Hartman 2019, p.302)?

Author

• Andrea Vazquez, University of California - Santa Cruz