Reform, Retrenchment, and Racial Politics: Criminal Justice Activism in the Bay Area

• In Event: 41014 - Cop Cities and Abolition: Law and Order Backlash Politics and Urban Resistance

Abstract

Over the past decade, progressive activists across the United States have worked to dismantle systemic racism in the criminal legal system, reduce reliance on punishment, and address the root causes of crime. But more recently, countermovements have sought to roll back these gains by advancing tough-on-crime policies which would likely exacerbate racial inequality. During the pandemic, some law-and-order groups also took up the mantle of racial justice, aligning with segments of the Asian American community to call for harsher punishment of anti-Asian violence. While there is a rich body of scholarship on contemporary progressive criminal justice activism, there has been less attention to this emergent law-and-order movement. In line with research on the tough-on-crime backlash to the Civil Rights Movement, there is a need for empirical study and theorization of how the contemporary racial political context (post-George Floyd, Stop Asian Hate) shapes movement struggles around criminal justice. In this paper, I bridge scholarship on punishment, social movements, and racial politics to explore this shifting political landscape of criminal and racial justice activism. I do so through an ethnographic study of activists in Oakland and San Francisco, two cities that have become battlegrounds for competing visions of public safety. Specifically, I explore the rise of a moderate political machine advocating for a return to law-and-order, the efforts of anti-carceral activists to resist these changes, and the racial politics that shape these movements. I use the case of Bay Area criminal justice activism to shed light on two broader phenomena: the ongoing dynamics of reform and retrenchment in US politics, and the role of political articulation in this process. By revealing the flexibility of political ideology, group formation, and action, this paper deepens sociological understandings of social movements and countermovements in an era of political retrenchment.

Author

• Cathy Hu, University of California-Berkeley