Recalibrating the Abolitionist Impulse

• In Event: Race, Activism, and Social Movements from the 18th century to the 20th century

Abstract

This essay considers white liberal sympathy as appendage of U.S. white-supremacist capitalist state power and analyzes its effects on the historical formation, circulation, and consumption of black proto-feminist discourses (James 1998) at the turn-of-the-century. The first section of the essay will examine the converging worlds of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1901) and Jane Adamms (1901), focusing on how both women’s intellectual labor unevenly shaped the trajectory of the anti-lynching movement. The essay’s second section will turn to Wells-Barnett’s writing on the convict lease system (1893) and its reception by petite bourgeois whites at the Chicago World Fair. Building on the theoretical and historical context established prior, this second portion of the essay juxtaposes the commentary on Wells-Barnett’s pamphlet with a reading of white-Northern penal reformer Elizabeth Wheaton’s "Prisons and Prayer" (1906) in order to interrogate both the disciplinary function of sympathetic white liberal texts (Hartman 1997) and the constraints that such texts place on the practices of building political movements addressing the immediacies of racialized criminalization and anti-black state violence. By the mid-twentieth century, the black liberation movement had broken prior epistemological closures open; however, it would be the hegemonic institutionality of sympathetic whiteness that would serve to indirectly bolster the legitimacy of state repression and a nascent racial carceral-policing regime (Rodriguez 2006). The stakes of this essay are thus conclusively explored in the paper’s final section: an analysis of representations of Assata Shakur’s escape from prison and the state's capture of her comrade white anti-imperialist activist Marylyn Buck in liberal public discourse.

Author

• Casey Robert Goonan, Northwestern University