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‘To Walk Down the Street Without Fear’: Fighting Criminalization, Creating Transformation

Sat, November 19, 10:00 to 11:45am, HYATT REGENCY AT COLORADO CONVENTION CTR, Centennial A

Abstract

After the flooding and abandonment of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, national attention turned to the city’s long-contested criminal legal system. This period of heightened scrutiny, and eventual federal intervention, provided an opening for a new wave of community organizing against the brutality and systematic violence of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) and city jail. Within this context emerged BreakOUT! a grassroots membership-based organization formed to fight against the criminalization of LGBTQ youth, particularly young Black transwomen. While originally founded in 2011 to push the Department of Justice to include in their investigation of the NOPD the police practice of profiling and sexually harassing queer and trans youth, their work quickly spiraled outward to the multiple issues that are created through producing young Black LGBTQ New Orleanians as criminal. In this paper, I argue that BreakOUT!’s decision to center their activism on ending broad-based criminalization offers an expansive frame for conceptualizing abolitionist reforms. Too often abolition is framed as a utopian project, delinked from the material needs and concerns of communities targeted for imprisonment. In contrast, the case of BreakOUT! clarifies how policing impacts and shapes their membership’s conditions of survival in the realms of work, education, healthcare, and housing; and through focusing on this, they have deepened their conceptualization of justice and freedom. Drawing on the political traditions of Black radicalism and queer liberation, BreakOUT! combines grassroots campaigns with cultural organizing, political education, coalition-building, healing justice, and service provision to combat the everyday material and affective impacts of criminalization in concert with shifting power and attaining meaningful policing reforms. In doing so they have both built up their members’ collective capacities to survive and thrive and developed a nuanced analysis of how their experiences of policing are situated within the post-Katrina tourist economy and redevelopment landscape which has created space for strategic alliances with other criminalized populations, namely undocumented workers. Through such organizing, BreakOUT! reminds us of the imperative of undoing the effects of criminalization as a key piece of the work of building a world where no one is criminalized. And through these efforts, they (against those who have sought to make New Orleans a place for tourism) they have struggled to remake New Orleans as a place to be home.

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