Stanley-Eric-Captive-Genders-Trans-Embodiment-and-Prison-Industrial-Complex

Maroon Abolitionistsabout ending the violence of imprisonment, but also about claiming publicresources and declaring the value of human life over corporate profit.I have chosen to name the political vision of black gender-oppressedanti-prison activists “maroon abolitionism” for two reasons. First, “maroon”serves to identify the tactics of those directly affected by slavery/incarceration. The word “maroon” refers to the communities of runawayslaves, indigenous peoples, and their descendants that formed throughoutthe Americas beginning in the seventeenth century (Price 1996). 17While maroon communities existed outside of the violent social controlof the slave state, they were both under threat by and at war withre-enslaving forces. 18 As maroon abolitionists, black gender-oppressedactivists know that the consequences of failing to achieve abolition arethat they themselves, their family members, and their loved ones willcontinue to be disappeared. Bakari articulated the maroon experience ofconstant threat from the penal/slave system: “We like the free Negroesin Alabama down South. Some of us scared because hell they going tocome and get us too.”Whereas white abolitionists were guided by moral convictions, forex-slaves and their loved ones abolition was the only avenue for liberationfrom the threat of captivity, torture, and social death. Hence, slavesand those who had escaped slavery rejected white abolitionists’ calls forgradual emancipation through indentureship that would keep formerlyenslaved African Americans tied to the land; they demanded nothing lessthan the immediate end of slavery. Popular histories tend to focus onformerly enslaved African Americans who sought to win white supportthrough speeches and slave narratives, while less attention is paid to theslave rebellions, mass escapes, and maroon insurgencies that fundamentallychallenged the viability and hastened the demise/restriction of chattelslavery. Twenty-first-century maroon abolitionism is also rooted in thesurvival imperative, guided by a sense of urgency and informed by anunderstanding of the prison industrial complex as a war on black communities.Samia articulated her vision of abolitionist work as a form ofself-defense:In terms of prisons and the penal system, I think that it’s at the centerof a lot of our oppression. So my options are to live oppressed or tofight this. So I prefer to fight it. I think that as people of color we haveno option but to fight it. It’s a matter of survival. I also think that weare at war, that we are under attack, through different institutions and303