Beyond Racialized Carceral Safety: Toward a Conceptualization of Black Safety.

• Author: Amin, Enkeshi Thom El-

IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE GEORGE FLOYD AND BREONNA TAYLOR uprisings in the summer of2020, public safety has achieved a new kind of popular attention in the United States and across the planet; however, much of this discourse still resists a deep interrogation of the violence of coloniality, imperialism, racism, surveillance, and the policing and caging of Black people. The call for safety in the United States routinely insists upon the singular expansion of carceral and police power in the criminal legal system and across all major institutions, from family (Roberts 2022), education (Shange 2019), and health (Ben-Moshe 2020, Destine 2019) to social services (Richie & Martensen 2020) and beyond. Even as the spectacle of racist state violence in the middle of a global pandemic ignited one of the largest Black-led and multiracial protest movements in recent history and across the world, most police and jail budgets expanded in the aftermath as revanchist politics took hold (Akinnibi et al. 2021). In this special issue, we emphasize another mode of safety, sociality, and being that has arisen against the long history of state violence and white racialized carceral safety: Black safety.

The Problem with Safety

Literature in the fields of radical feminism and critical race, abolitionist, anti-colonial, and queer studies points to how our collective understanding of safety is distorted by this global carceral landscape as well as the logic of white supremacy upon which it and capitalism were built (Ignatiev 2022, Olson 2004). Across Jim Crow, South African apartheid, urban ghettoization, suburban white flight, and mass incarceration, safety operates as a white-dominated, one-dimensional construction defined mainly through white logics of crime, whereby harm is only understood to be criminal acts and safety requires the ongoing absence/absencing of those acts and people--largely racialized--who commit them. Tenorio (2022, 517) offers further insight into this kind of safety as a place-making production of "white carceral geographies," those "(re)iterative spatial practices of racial division that produce and maintain the delineation of the criminal and the innocent under conditions of liberal democracy where whiteness serves as the basis for protection from harm, promotion of life, and the exercise of freedom and where blackness measures criminality." As we see across this issue, these racialized spatializing practices extend into the current moment through the inevitable forms of criminalization that follow gentrification, gender violence, protest and organizing, and, quite simply, being Black.

In the same way that this construction of safety has become common sense, so too has the idea that policing and incarceration are solutions to fear and unsafety (Jackson ocMeiners 2011, Seigel 2018). This aligns with McDowells (2019, 45-46) concept of carceral safety, which is defined by "the use of state-organized banishment, mass criminalization, and law enforcement as the only legitimate forms of protection from and solution to harm and violence in the United States." In this world-building practice, violence work provides a useful way of rethinking the function of law enforcement and criminal justice, not as work in service of safety but as fundamentally any "work that relies upon violence or the threat thereof" (Seigel 2018, 26). This theorization of the carceral state insists, whether potential, suspended, or actual, that racialized violence is the labor that the criminal legal system rests upon, the preeminent institution that makes fearfully real the core power of the state (see, for example, Camp & Heatherton 2016, Correia &, Wall 2018, LeBron 2019, McQuade 2019, Schrader 2019, Vitale 2017). With deep historical connections to property, slavery, and the attendant conflation of race and dangerousness, police, in particular, have occupied a mystifying intersection of social infrastructure as an assumed public good framed as protection, safety, and service that, in reality, is a key site for the production of racial violence, differential vulnerability, and premature death (Gilmore 2007).

Such configurations increasingly produce popular demands for a radical reconfiguration of law, justice, and safety (Akbar 2018, Akbar et al. 2021). Invoking abolitionist principles, we offer that any challenge to the legitimacy of state violence requires a refusal of the commonsense and superficial understandings of police and prisons, for instance, as having a legitimate monopoly on safety and protection. Furthermore, we emphasize not simply a need for analyses of the ways in which the carceral state structures and amplifies violence but also attention to experiences, ways of being, and epistemologies that point to a world beyond safety. As Mariame Kaba (2022) stated in a recent online webinar, abolitionists increasingly know how to shut down prisons and provide security but are deeply challenged when it comes to thinking about violence in our own communities, accountability from abusers, or ways of providing safety that do not make us cops. We, as editors, find safety to be so deeply embedded in the foundations of state violence and white supremacy that we ourselves are operating without a clear lexicon but with a vision for something more akin to the freedom and emancipatory infrastructure of Black life, joy, safety, and agency. We look to the longstanding feats of survival and the potentialities of Black sociality against the terrors of violence and criminalization.

Black Safety

El-Amins research in this issue, building from her 2019 dissertation and community work, offers Black safety as a reimagining that centers Black peoples, places, and experiences:

Black safety is a framing that recognizes the perpetual weight of racial injustice that stifles the fullest expression of Black life and wellbeing in America. It affirms Black peoples'need for freedom not just from the more blatant of these injustices like chattel slavery and disenfranchisement but also freedom from the most minute and fundamental threats to our humanity. Black Safety predicates on Black people's freedom: freedom to 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. Black safety is the creation of temporal spaces and places where Black people experience or approximate the experience of this type of freedom in the face of violent systemic inequalities. In pursuit of this type of freedom, Black safety denounces mass incarceration and the policing of Black bodies. Furthermore, it radically necessitates the destruction and disappearance of whiteness, white supremacy, and the institutions upon which they stand. Black safety recognizes that it is nearly impossible in the current iteration of American society for Black people to experience true freedom, but the endemic insurgency or fugitivity of Black safety is still ever present.

Emergent work, like El-Amin's, points us to the long history of Black safety, bringing into relief the ways that Black people have survived under the tyranny of colonialism, imperialism, and its many manifestations for centuries, from subtle survival acts to radical opposition, across space and time, as perennial forms of resistance (Taylor 2016, 2017). Similar to current movements, Black Power era organizations like the Black Panther Party (BPP) argued that doing away with racist police violence and prisons was central to Black liberation. Starting as a community defense project against police violence and brutality, the BPP argued that Black poverty was an outcome of state neglect and abandonment, with police as the only state investment in Black neighborhoods there to surveil and criminalize Black communities. With the launch of the breakfast programs in 1969, the BPP made mutual aid in the face of such abandonment and neglect a central plank of its program. Similarly, Black and Latina womens anti-violence work across the 1970s and into the 1990s argued against criminal justice-centered approaches to gender violence that moved energy out of movements and into social services and law and order forms. As Emily Thuma (2019) notes, scholars have overlooked how intensely questions about the role of police and prisons in responding to gender violence were debated at that moment in regional and national...