Beyond Carceral Safety: A Case for an Intersectional Black Safety in the Movement for Black Lives.

• Author: Destine, Shaneda

The things we're asking for is plausible. The things that we're asking for are very much so just elementary, if you will. Police officers are out of hand, and the only way to reel them in is to create policies that will hold them accountable, and so that is what we're pushing for, period. That's it. And to extract some of the funding from the police department and put it into what community policing really looks like, which doesn't lie with them, but it lies with organizations like Safe Streets that have a track record in actually decreasing the violence in our communities from community folks leading that effort and having the agency to do so. And so, I mean for some, those do sound like pipedreams, but for us it's just the very elementary plausible things that can affect the community.

--Ella B., Baltimore, Maryland

SCHOLARS HAVE DISCUSSED THE WHITE SUPREMACIST LOGICS OF THE carceral state that utilize the penal system as a racialized space to confine and control the dispossessed (Brown & Schept 2016, Davis 2016, Taylor 2017). However, few scholars have offered or conceptualized the current Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) as a contested space of Black safety--a space to imagine liberation, to be liberated, and to provide a temporal safety net for all Black people (McDowell & Fernandez 2018, Ransby 2018). Thom El-Amin (2019, 6) frames Black safety as Black peoples' need for freedom not just from chattel slavery and disenfranchisement. Instead, it is also their need to experience the most fundamental aspects of humanity: freedom of self-determination, freedom from perpetual fear, freedom to love and be with and in a community that values and promotes their humanity rather than the criminalization of their bodies. The M4BL has served as a space to reimagine what must be done to keep all Black people safe and liberated from death and oppression. Black social movements have always provided this physical space and dream space away from the white gaze. While the civil rights movement provided this space in churches, the Movement for Black Lives is set to do this in homes, meeting spaces, and the Black imagination (Kelley 2003, Movement for Black Lives 2016). However, portent to the present, not all Black people have been centered in past freedom dreams (Collins 2002, hooks 1999).

This paper will outline the importance of Black safety, both literally and figuratively, that is confronted by the necropolitics of the carceral state through surveillance, policing, and gentrification. In offering a genealogy of the Movement for Black Lives, the paper highlights how the creation of these autonomous Black spaces to dream of liberation--and the conditions of what that liberation may look like in local organizations--actually unfolds. Lastly, this paper offers the narratives of activist-centered approaches to reimagine how this space can meet the challenge of providing a haven for all Black people through an intersectional perspective, since freeing the most marginalized of us will necessitate freedom from all the systems that disenfranchise people (Davis 2011).

The Movement for Black Lives Confronts Twenty-First Century Surveillance

Black Lives Matter (BLM) was founded in 2013 during the Obama administration in direct response to the killing of Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager in Sanford, Florida. This organization is this generations response to decades of ongoing racialized policies like the war on drugs, reproductive injustice, redlining, gentrification, and the overall evisceration of the social safety net. The time of BLM's founding is particularly important because it confronts a colorblind ideology publicized during Obama's tenure that promotes the idea of meritocracy and race as obsolete (Alexander 2012, Bonilla-Silva 2017). While Obama's Department of Justice provided local police departments with oversight, his administration also criminalized protests with the Blue Alert Law and ramped up deportation actions like no other president before him. Moreover, a report by Obama's Department of Justice (2015) revealed that the Black community of Ferguson, Missouri--with an average of 3 citations per Black household--had been financially and socially abused by the local police department for its financial gain. This report highlighted how the Ferguson uprising was a response to this historical injustice, proving that Ferguson police were oppressive to Black people in a myriad of ways. However, the state's response was to send the national guard with militarized police, intensified surveillance, and racialized policies (Taylor 2016). These racialized policies were more blatant during Donald Trump's presidency, with even more funding, less federal oversight, and the separation of families in immigration camps. As coalitions of BLM and local organizations collaborated in 2016 to create the M4BL, local organizations were confronted with an even more aggressive campaign to oppress vulnerable Black activists and the larger Black community under Trump.

The Ferguson uprisings of 2014 popularized BLM and laid down the infrastructure for a new iteration of Black struggle for Black safety. These uprisings unfolded in response to officer Darren Wilson's killing of Mike Brown. Later, other uprisings sparked in Charlotte, North Carolina, Baltimore, Maryland, and, more recently, Minneapolis, Minnesota. These uprisings signaled activists from all across the country to release the Vision for the Movement for Black Lives, a vision steeped in the tenets of Black safety--Black self-determination, empowerment, and vision (Movement for Black Lives 2016). The vision outlined the needs of disenfranchised Black communities by offering equitable housing, education, healthcare, and immigration policies for Black people across gender, nationality, sexuality, age, and ability (Akbar 2018, Movement for Black Lives 2016). While the uprisings signified a turning point for Black activism, organizers utilized this momentum to build infrastructures for holistic change to keep Black people safe. These demands outlined the possibilities of freedom or Black safety within society by local organizations that had engaged in the long struggle of liberation prior to the founding of Black Lives Matter in 2013. These long-time organizers and organizations who had challenged the idea that Black liberation was won with the presidency of Barack Obama continued to struggle for Black people under the M4BL.

In 2016 the M4BL found itself in a more overtly oppressive context under Trump. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), prioritizing investigations of so-called Black identity extremism, increased surveillance of M4BL. Consequently, Black safety was particularly threatened for activists (ACLU 2019). Documents leaked in 2019 under Trump's administration revealed a renewed focus on the political mobilizations of young Black activists most affected by the intensification of a racialized carceral state (ACLU 2019). Donald Trump's presidency began with a slew of executive orders that targeted brown immigrants and, with the events of Charlottesville, Virginia, ignited vigor for white power with calls to Make America Great Again (Coates 2017). Like Ronald Reagan's post-civil rights campaign, Trump's campaign incited this base and continued to feed tensions with promises to crack down on predominantly Black uprisings and brown immigration. While Reagan's presidency was filled with tropes of so-called welfare queens that vilified Black women, Trump vilified brown immigrants as criminals and Black Lives Matter activists as terrorists (Collins 2005). This response further oppressed and endangered the lives of activists, disenfranchising them along the way.

BLM highlighted how the need for Black people to be kept safe was antithetical to policing (Carruthers 2018). Moreover, Black people do not just need to be saved from high incidents of police violence, but also provided a space to reimagine freedom that includes welfare and resources that should be guaranteed by a truly democratic state. This generation was responding to decades of a dissipating social safety net and racist policies that stifled Black economic and social advancement (Carruthers 2018, Khan-Cullors and bandele 2018). Activists from across the country rallied together to provide housing, community care, food, and water to protestors engaged in direct action (Davis 2016, Destine 2019, Ransby 2018). Organizers also mobilized to create demands for communities in need (Kelley 2016).

Black Safety Needs to Be Intersectional

Before people can be organized, they have to have basic material needs met--food and housing--and so once people are getting food that is accessible and culturally relevant and nutritionally dense, then they have the power to organize ...

--Joy in Atlanta, Georgia

Intersectional theory, named by Kimberle Crenshaw (1989), gives us a lens for understanding how the approaches of the most marginalized activists are integral to Black safety and Black liberation (Destine 2020). For this reason, my previous work (Destine 2019, 2020) centered Black safety by outlining the need for transformative healing justice: "incorporating restorative and healing praxes for movement participants to subside intra-movement conflict, institute care in these organizations, and provide space for dealing with harm to these communities" (Destine 2019, 8). M4BL must continue to recognize the myriad ways that Black people are confronted with state violence--through food insecurity, housing insecurity, sexual assault, disproportionate sentencing, and death--so that there is a comprehensive struggle for solutions to keep Black people safe. The M4BL is not only a space to struggle for state resources and rights but also a place that should model the world that Black people deserve.

Moreover, we envision Black safety as both a literal and figurative site of Black autonomous space that is not without contention...