Transcription by Alletta Cooper

Krista Tippett: To say that Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a geographer, which she is, is not to convey the vast and varied ways in which she is influencing the makings of the future. I can’t count the number of conversations I’ve had on air and off, just in the last year alone, in which she was invoked as a mentor and teacher on thought and action and humanity to a new generation of social creativity — people like dream hampton and Darnell Moore and adrienne maree brown. Ruth Wilson Gilmore created the field and the language of “carceral geography.” This is a frame to see and map and connect all of the dynamics, spatial to spiritual, that make my country, the United States, one of the most punitive in the world. We can measure this simply by the size of our prison populations. Yet when Ruth Wilson Gilmore speaks of “abolition” — a radical vision of a world without prisons and another word she’s helped popularize — she is working with a long, long view towards making a whole world, starting now, in which prisons and policing as we do them now become unnecessary, unthinkable.

In this sense, abolition is not primarily a matter of what to get rid of, but what to build and to orient around. Being present, for example, to human vulnerability and to the ingredients that make for deep human flourishing. The language of abolition, the matters of policing and prisons, are fraught and polarizing at the public level. But meeting Ruth Wilson Gilmore and drawing out her vision is an exercise in muscular hope and in understanding the passion of a new generation that is shaping what we will collectively become.

[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]

I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is the author of several books. She’s a professor at the City University of New York, and she’s co-founder of several organizations — including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. She grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, where she came by her inclination to activism honestly. Her paternal grandfather was a janitor at Yale who helped organize the first blue-collar union at that university. And as a tool and die maker for the firearm manufacturer, Winchester, her father played a central role in organizing the machinists at that company in the mid-50s. He was known, as Ruth tells it, as a leader organizing for the “well-being of the Black community of New Haven.”

Tippett: So one thing I’m always interested in, whoever I’m speaking with, is the origins of a life and where the passions that end up driving a life are rooted in the background of childhood. And some of the things that I would say I see in you that I would describe as those passions is that you see the wholeness of things, you see in a systems way, you see how all kinds of structures and events interact with others. And you hold all that together with a really fierce care for human beings who are caught on sharp edges of that interacting. And you hold a sense of time to keep working with what is towards what can be. The title of your book you’re working on now is Change Everything. I’m just so curious about how you would trace the origins of these capacities, this way of thinking and being that form and fuel you in your earliest life, in the soil of your childhood.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “In the soil of my childhood.” I like that image. It’s quite beautiful. Well, as I have frequently recounted, I was raised by activists during the long arc of the mid-20th century civil rights movement. I was born right in the middle of the century, the day after the census of 1950. And I was taught as a very young child to be extremely skeptical of whatever I learned in a formal setting, whether the formal setting was television or school or what the bus driver said. Those are all types of formal settings. And to learn to tell myself and others how I think I know what I know. So that’s part of it. My dad used to always say, “How do you know that? How do you know that?” And the answer could never be, “The teacher told me.” And I’m a teacher today. And sometimes I want my students to say, “Because Ruthie says.”

Tippett: “Because I said so.”

Gilmore: “So it must be so.” So that’s part of it. And whether the skepticism that my father especially, but both of my parents instilled in me and my brothers arises from that particular question, I’ll say as well, that as a kid, I didn’t like sleeping. In fact, most of my life I’ve hated to sleep. And people say, “Oh, that makes you a workaholic.” And I said, “No, it just makes me awake.” [laughs] And so as a kid, I would lie in bed at night and I was under orders to have the light off. I never had a flashlight, but when I could read, I read. And I’d lie awake in bed at night, wondering about things.

And having been raised by people who came of age during the Great Depression, and having shared my bedroom with my grandmother who raised her seven kids as a widow in the 1920s and 30s, I was keenly aware of the fact that at some mysterious moment in history, all the money disappeared. And when I was a kid, money was always a real thing. It either folded or it jingled. Credit cards were not in anybody’s consciousness, much less all of the things that people can talk about today. So I would think, late into the night, “Where did it go? Where did all that folding and jingling stuff wind up?” And so I developed a curiosity about these things. So the truth that was presented to me — we were hungry because there was no money — became a question for me. How could it be that there was no money? Where did it go? So that was something I asked myself.

Another question I asked myself quite frequently was, not in a whining way, but in a, “what is my purpose in life” way: why was I born a negro? That was the preferred term when I was a little girl in the 1950s. And I would wonder about that. I think this is meaningful. I just don’t know what it is. It’s not a bad thing, it’s the important thing. What is it?

And then the third thing I started to wonder about as I started elementary school, so this is now the late 50s. And in the context of, on the one hand, Sputnik and Red Scare and all that stuff, civil rights movement got more intense in the wake of Brown v. Board. And at the same time, we were learning in our classrooms at Lyman Willer Beecher Elementary School that the reason that the settlers or the colonists, as we said in New England, took the land and established a new nation was because the previous inhabitants of that land, the Indians had, quote: “failed to exploit the natural resources.”

Tippett: You remember learning that. Those were the words?

Gilmore: Those were the words.

Tippett: Oh my gosh, yeah.

Gilmore: Those words. I’m almost 73 and those words have stuck with me a really long time because those were big words that you can’t understand that explain why it is, that the world is as such.

So all of those things compelled me always to try to figure out: where did the money go? And what do they mean, “exploit the natural resources”? And what’s this negro girl doing thinking about these things in the various configurations in which I came to adulthood? So it included desegregating a school, on my own, and I’m not saying that to whine again, it was a sense of purpose and destiny that —

Tippett: Was that a private school?

Gilmore: It was a private school. A girl’s school in New Haven. They put out a call to the Black churches and basically said, “Send us one.” So I went. [laughs]

Tippett: And you were at the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church.

Gilmore: That’s right. That’s right. The oldest Black Congregational church in the United States was founded I think in 1828. And in fact, the fact of that church, its founding, was part of a systematic program by New Haven elites whose churches surrounded the New Haven Green. So the Methodists and the Episcopalians and the Congregationalists and so forth. The Congregationalists founded Dixwell Church in order to have a place to send “red” and Black and other unwelcome people who would show up at their door for worship on Sunday.

Tippett: Oh gosh.

Gilmore: So they said, “Here, you have your own place.” So that was 1828. And in the 1890s when my grandmother as a girl went from the farm in rural Connecticut where she had grown up — dairy farm — to New Haven to work in service, in order to send remittances home so the family would not lose the farm during that depression, the depression of the 1890s, she found her way to the Methodist Church. Because that was her confession. And the Methodists said, “No, no, no, this is not your church. You go up to the church for you people.” So off she went. And as luck would have it, she wound up meeting the man who’s my grandfather. So it all worked out, I suppose.

Tippett: Gosh, there’s so much there. It’s so vivid and it will flow, it flows into everything I know. There’s one other thing I want to ask you. I saw you someplace call your family a household that was “decidedly Afro-Saxon.” And that’s not a phrase I’d heard before. Tell me what you meant by that.

Gilmore: I probably meant less than the sparkle on the phrase suggests. It’s a characterization of a certain kind of New England Black, and in our case working class. But raised in the Congregational Church, expecting always to work a lot and really hard as part of almost your spiritual duty.

Tippett: Kind of that Puritan determination.

Gilmore: Exactly, exactly, exactly. And getting over Puritanism man, that’s rough. [laughs]

Tippett: Yeah. Okay. Wonderful. So I hear you and have read you really wanting to talk — the language of abolition, if people encounter it in a superficial way as a word in a newspaper or a political fight, it doesn’t have depth and dimensionality. And I really see you out there. First of all, it’s not so much about what one is against as what one is for and working towards. And so I really want to give you a lot of space to talk about that today. In my mind, my interest and the interest of this show is kind of about the human condition, and the human condition and this question of what it means to be human, and also who we will be to each other, as a lens through which we can look at anything.

And it seems to me that your work, that there’s also this deep, deep well of investigating the human condition, of social creativity. This is not only about or resonant for activists or philosophers. And when you’re talking about a radical vision of a world without prisons, it’s an investigation of what kind of world we want to live in and bequeath to all of our children. And you’re in a long game. And I don’t know, let me just stop there and see if you would like to nuance any of that or comment on anything I just said.

Gilmore: Sure. Very long game. I used to be disturbed when I was young that people older than me, we didn’t use the word “elder” so loosely as it’s used today. But people older than me would say, “We are fighting for X. And we do not expect to see it, but we want it to happen in our children’s lifetimes. Or if not our children, their children’s lifetimes.” And I am now three generations from having listened to that, thinking, “I don’t know whose lifetime, but if we don’t continue working really hard toward the world we want, which is in my view, the world we need, we’re doomed.” That’s what I think. So maybe that little bit of Afro-Saxon persists, remains.

So let me say a couple of introductory things and then expand, and then you can interrupt me if I’ve gone off a cliff. For me, abolition is presence. And many people —

Tippett: Presence, right?

Gilmore: Presence, right. P-R-E-S-E-N-C-E. I think I’ve spelled it right, presence. And for many people, the word abolition or abolish verb suggests an erasure, an absence, a lack, a nothing. And of course, people become disoriented, if not downright frightened by the thought that people are agitating for erasure, absence, nothingness. We are not nihilists. Abolitionists are quite the opposite in every imaginable way. So what do I mean presence? Well, I turn to the great W. E. B. Du Bois to flesh this out as an example. And I’ll talk about the example, and that is what’s helped me find examples wherever I use the abolition lens to notice things.

All right. So, in Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois essentially reread and reread and reread and then rewrote many of the standard texts on reconstruction. And what he did was to read, as it were, between the lines of what the standard historians, many of whom were — but not all of whom by any means — were anti-black racist. But he read between the lines to figure out, well, what was really going on during reconstruction. Now Du Bois was trained both as a sociologist and as a historian. And that means that he had a very well-developed understanding of how to use archives, which is to say, not only to find a document in an archive that proves something but also to think very hard about what’s lacking in the archives and how the documents as it were, shape the contours of what’s not there that we can then think about.

So many people complain about silences in archives, but that doesn’t mean they’re actually quiet. [laughs] You’re just like you’re just not listening close enough to what’s there. And I have learned, I will say as an aside, I have learned an enormous amount by listening to contemporary historians, people who are writing now. In particular, but not exclusively, many women historians who are writing fabulous, wonderful books about the slave trade, about the South Atlantic, about the actual experiences and intentions and revolutionary or even just saving themselves conditions that many people who were enslaved who seem to be absent from the archives did for themselves in their communities. They have also, these historians have done a lot of work on the sending regions of West Central and Southern Africa, particularly Angola, and all the way up to the so-called Gold Coast. So —

Tippett: There is interrogation happening of the silences now…

Gilmore: Exactly. It is. And it’s great.

Tippett: …with a new energy.

Gilmore: It is really, really great. And one of the things that’s so great about it, and I’ll get back to Du Bois, is that the work that the scholars are doing is so generative of ways for us to think about our contemporary situation rather than to feel constrained by nothing more than the ability to complain about it. There’s stuff there, there’s stuff here. What can we notice?

All right. So Du Bois set up a conception that Angela Davis and others have developed in more recent years, and the concept was “abolition democracy.” And he contrasted abolition democracy to industrial democracy. So I asked myself, I’ve read Black Reconstruction a number of times and taught it many times: How did Du Bois, how might we, reading carefully with Du Bois, understand what abolition is? Because if industrial is all the things we know industrial to have been, then abolition also has got to be all kinds of presence, all kinds of —

Tippett: It’s, again, not an absence of things, but a presence of things.

Gilmore: Exactly. It means social relations. What are they like? How did they come together? And of course, that book lays out Du Bois’s best approximation of what that could have been. A recent book by the brilliant Tulani Davis called The Emancipation Circuit does astonishing work in reconstructing, as it were, for our reading and contemplation, what kinds of communities and processes and projects people developed in the South. And that work includes not only the nuts and bolts of being no longer enslaved or constrained but also the production of joy and of knowledge and all of those things that make life liveable.

Tippett: Even within given conditions.

Gilmore: Exactly.

Tippett: Even within terrible given conditions.

Gilmore: Exactly.

[music: “Kilkerrin” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett: So something that’s so fascinating to me is that as you have walked through these questions, you went to Rutgers to begin your graduate work at the age of 43, as you’ve said, “As a cranky, middle-aged activist packing a couple of drama degrees and a [headful] of social theory.” [laughs] But the field that you walked into, which becomes your angle in, way of seeing into, all of this, is the field of geography. And let me see, I’ve read you saying this allowed you to examine all kinds of connections to think broadly about how life is organized into competing and cooperating systems. And so I want you to keep talking about this, the path you were on, but I want to ask you about some of the specific things that you say that help us understand this, what you see. So for example, “Each of us is time-space.”

Gilmore: It’s true. [laughs]

Tippett: [laughs] It sounds true to me, but tell me about it.

Gilmore: Oh, boy. One of the exciting things that studying geography made possible for me — and I was, as you just said, somebody who’d been trained in drama, in literature, and criticism. I wasn’t ever trained as an actor, although I loved to act. I wasn’t trained in any of the other practicalities of the theater, although I loved it all for a long time. And after I burned out on the possibility of ever becoming part of the professional theater because I kind of couldn’t stand it — like socially, couldn’t stand it. And I looked around to figure out what kinds of things I could do with my life and always, all along, there was always some kind of political project — organizing, and so forth — that was compelling me to figure out how to do things. Do things with other people, do them better and, we hoped, to win whatever it was we were struggling for. All of these things.

In the context of that period of my life, so let’s say from the late ‘70s all the way through the ‘80s, I was reading and reading and reading and trying to make sense of the world that was changing very rapidly then. The last decade of more-or-less of the Soviet Union and many other changes as well — stagflation, the sudden new freedom of banks in the United States to be truly national and not regional — many things were happening.

Tippett: Also the change in South Africa around the same time.

Gilmore: All of these things. So there was so much happening and I was meeting people and doing work and figuring things out, and I thought, “I really need to study political economy in a rigorous way, really concentrated rigorous way.” I did a lot of reading, reading groups. Lots of us, we’d get together, read things as people do today — it’s one of the most beautiful pastimes there is on Earth, I think, is reading groups. We read and we talk and we debate and argue. And I thought, “Well, I’m going to go to school and I’m going to study this stuff in an extremely deliberate way so that I can understand what I know and then use that knowledge well.”

And what doing that — pursuing geography — opened up for me was a couple of things. One is that the study of geography and the study of drama are actually very similar. They’re both about making worlds. And that drama does make worlds: you make a world, you make it materially but also ideologically, and then people are invited to participate in that world. And it has a beginning and a middle and an end.

Tippett: And that had been part of your life drama.

Gilmore: Exactly. And studying geography and studying therefore, as I like to put it, not “where” is Nebraska, but “why” is Nebraska? We have the same series of questions and problems and excitement, which is that in organizing ourselves with one another, with external materials and the environment, humans make places. And they make them and enhance them and destroy them. And those places have relations to other places; some are antagonistic, some are different. And there are the various forces that we’re trying so hard to come to terms with today. Such as the forces of global capitalism, the forces of racial capitalism, the forces of patriarchy, and so forth, all have a spatial expression — or I should say really a series of spatial expressions that we should, must be mindful of if we want to change that.

Tippett: There’s something else you’ve also said many times that reflects your perspective as a geographer: “Freedom is a place and we make it, and we make it, and we make it.” Freedom is a place.

Gilmore: It’s got to be, and it’s got to be. This takes us back to Du Bois and then out from Du Bois, that if, as Du Bois tried to show, abolition democracy was the result of the deliberate, if in so many different ways constrained and eventually repressed activities, self-emancipating activities of people in the South, then we can generalize from that and think about the self-emancipated activities of people everywhere and understand that what people are making is making a place in which they can be free. So freedom, that condition has got to be place-bound. It’s not something that goes on a piece of paper in your wallet.

Tippett: Yeah, and you’re also talking about it — this is not always expressed, but I do think that the way the word freedom gets tossed around and internalized perhaps in America, is as freedom from. But you are talking about freedom for and the freedom that also includes: what are our expectations of one another?

Gilmore: That’s exactly right. Another way that I have tried to give some very open-ended definition to abolition is to call it “life in rehearsal.” So life in rehearsal, I hope, invokes in a listener or reader some sense or sensibility of how interpersonal abolition must be. That there is so much doing involved in making ourselves free, and most importantly, radical dependency: that it’s not something an individual can do for themself or can embody as one person.

[music: “Surly Bonds” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett: So I have to say, I hope this doesn’t feel like a disrespectful question — do you ever feel like the word abolition is problematic? As you say, it does evoke absence or some kind of hardness. And so I want to just keep asking you to say what you’re saying with that word. Or maybe a good way to go into that is, tell me — well, let’s go into carceral geography, which is really a category of scholarship that you created and that has shaped so many people and continues to shape so many people.

So I want to just read something from the Golden Gulag, which is one of your books. You talked about “the common view that prisons sit on the edge — at the margins of social spaces, economic regions, political territories, and fights for rights. This apparent marginality is a trick of perspective, because, as every geographer knows, edges are also interfaces. For example, even while borders highlight the distinction between places, they also connect places into relationships with each other and [with] non-contiguous places. So too with prisons…”

So for you, talking about this is almost talking about everything. And so maybe a manageable way in is how you begin to answer the question: what is a prison made of? How you answer that question.

Gilmore: Exactly. So this is going to take us away from, I think, your question about abolition being, for some people, problematic. And I think about that all the time, by the way…

Tippett: Well, I bet you do. It’s probably because you have to communicate with it.

Gilmore: Yeah, it’s not a disrespectful question in the least. Although sometimes I do get cranky. But I won’t get cranky with you, and I might explain later why I do get cranky.

Tippett: You do? Okay. Okay.

Gilmore: So all right. So let’s put our heads into prison for a moment and say, “What are they made of?” They’re made of land, they’re made of labor, they’re made of money capital, and they’re made of the state’s capacity to organize land, labor, and money capital that way. That’s what they’re made of. And the labor is both the labor that builds the buildings, the labor that tends the buildings — the disqualified labor that is the prisoners. All of the people who are paid salaries and wages to guard, to clean, to cook, to be nurses, to be social workers, and all of that. All that is the prison. Now then we ask ourselves, “Well, how is it possible for all of these resources, what we will call factors of production, to be organized in that way? How is that possible? Why not organize them into housing projects or dams or roads or highways or ports?”

Tippett: Yeah. I want to also just to really lay out what you end up working on, the breadth of what this becomes, what the geography of prison represents, and everything that is in that complex and it’s so close to life at every level. So I want to read something that you wrote where you just laid out all the different kinds of groups you — just you specifically — end up working with, and then I want to ask you to tell a story that I heard you tell, which is very illuminating. This was something you wrote with James Kilgore in “The Case for Abolition.” I think you were actually, for the Marshall Project. I think you were actually responding to a piece that was reductive about what abolition is. Perhaps that cascade of assumptions that comes from just hearing the word.

You said, “We work with communities sited for prisons to fight expansion, while organizing to secure decent wages and housing in the regional economy. We work with Republican ranchers worried about the water table, and with undocumented agricultural workers vulnerable to pesticides … We work with city managers and residents of prison towns disappointed in lockups touted for economic development that never deliver.” You “write handbooks and advise rural and regional development experts,” and on and on.

And you told a story in that wonderful conversation you had with Chenjerai Kumanyika at the Free Library of Philadelphia about a group of mothers, I think in Fresno. And it’s really a story that illustrates how geographies collide and form around what we’re talking about when we’re actually talking about prisons, as you say, “catchall solutions to social problems.” Would you tell that story about those Mexican mothers in the ‘80s?

Gilmore: Oh, the Mexican-American mothers.

Tippett: Yeah. Mexican-American mothers.

Gilmore: Yes. A group of women who designated themselves Mexican-American. Mexican-American women, mostly housewives who lived in East Los Angeles. They learned that the state of California was planning to put a new prison in their community. And California had not built a prison since the mid-60s. So this would’ve been the first one in more than 20 years. And it was going to be the first of a whole string of prisons that California actually wound up building.

So these mothers got together around one of their kitchen tables and said, “All right, we don’t want this. Let’s get busy.” And they organized themselves and they persisted and they persisted, and eventually, they won.

So the mothers, though, were not satisfied in winning the fight against that building. They wondered why the government of California presumed that children like their kids were going to fill that prison because that was the excuse for putting the prison in their community. “Oh, this is where the prisoners would come from.”

Tippett: You said, what is it about prisons in general that makes it likely that their kids would end up there?

Gilmore: Yes. What is it? So the mothers did some study and they learned about the lifeways of prisoners. And they learned that a lot of the people in prison had very modest educational attainment. And further, they learned that that was because a lot of them missed school. And then they decided to find out, well, why do people miss school? And discovered that one contributing factor is asthma and that a lot of kids miss a lot of school because of asthma.

So they became environmental justice organizers. Really almost before environmental justice was a term of art and term of politics. Trying to fight to reduce the amount of pollution that sweeps across the area of Los Angeles where they live, because it’s very close to freeways, and the freeways are carrying diesel trucks 24/7 with products from the Los Angeles ports into the Inland Empire and then distributed across the United States. So those mothers basically did before we, the abolitionists of the late ‘90s and this century figured things out, they figured out how to think about what prison is made of beyond some term like “crime” or “criminals.” That’s the key thing.

Tippett: So they end up coming at a public health action or solution, as you said in that interview, “not to something called crime, but something that is much more [profound and wide-reaching, which is to say] vulnerability to organized abandonment in general, of which crime is an expression.”

I think that is such a fascinating thing. In terms of maybe simple assumptions people would make you, I hear you in different places resisting the idea that of course, race and racism are implicated and incredibly significant ways, and crime, of course, is in this picture. But this vision of what the world we want to live in, which abolition is working towards, is not in a linear way about racism or about crime. Is that fair, what I just said?

Gilmore: It is fair. It is fair. Even though both racism and crime are always in the picture.

Tippett: Yeah.

Gilmore: They’re always in the picture, but we ask ourselves…

Tippett: Significantly, dramatically in the picture. Right? But…

Gilmore: Exactly. Exactly. And yet, what we do is we ask ourselves, what is it — as the mothers of East LA did — what is it about everyday life that makes people vulnerable? What can we do to address that? Now, we can address that in so many different ways. So asthma is actually something I’ve become a little obsessed about, and I’m working with a graduate student now, we’re going to put together a map that I think is going to be quite astonishing. And I’ve never been, although a geographer, all that keen about making maps, but this one is going to be great. Because it will show an overlay of places in the United States that have been madly expanding their jails — not their prisons, their jails. And how those municipalities are also places where the air quality and water quality control management is extremely lax if present anymore at all. Because we know we’ve been living through these periods of deregulation, and even when deregulation has not happened in the letter of the law, the letter of the law is not followed in spirit. And how do we know that? Because there are no people holding the jobs to do the environmental tests and bring whoever into compliance. So deregulation by disemployment. So I’m working on putting that together just as a kind of “wow” picture to see how these things come together the way they do.

But to go back to other things that people can do. If people’s ability to make sustainable livelihoods is interrupted, then disorder tends to emerge from in the social fabric. So we work with unions — particularly but not exclusively public sector unions and unions that organize people who work in low-wage, high labor-intensive jobs — whether the work is in agriculture or in-home healthcare. Those are both incredibly labor-intensive.

And in fact, one of the great surprises for me in recent years after many years of working, again, especially with public sector unions, but also agricultural unions, has been the fact that National Nurses United, which is a fantastic big and important union in the United States, has reached out to me and others to participate in their political education program because the nurses see on the front lines all these contradictions that I’m talking about. They see the struggle over taxes, gives us some insight into why it is that they have patients who cannot afford adequate healthcare. They see the fact of very distant, either for-profit or even not-for-profit hospital corporations, makes it almost impossible for nurses and other healthcare frontline workers to have decent working conditions with good ratios to patients, good benefits, and so forth.

Tippett: Yeah. One way you always bring this down to earth is — this language of “organized abandonment” is another way of talking about what you’re saying. And I think one thing that it’s very hard to be insensitive or completely unaware of in this world, this society anymore, whoever you are, is this inequity of vulnerability. So would you talk about — and just invoking that, that’s what we’re talking about, human beings, places — this was at some event you did — “where people have played and prayed” become vulnerable. And this language of organized abandonment I find very helpful in terms of shining a different light on what you’re talking about.

Gilmore: Yes. I’m happy to talk about organized abandonment. It’s something that leapt into my consciousness about 30 years ago. And I sort of noodled on it for a while. I got the term from my friend and sometimes mentor David Harvey. And I thought, “Well, let me see what I can do to develop this term.” And it’s just been so incredibly useful because it helps people stop and think about the fact that vulnerability to some kind of harm, to premature death, is, in most cases, in the vast majority of cases, is not a feature or result of an individual’s failure. It’s not that. There are so many things that go together that produce vulnerability.

So an example I like to use is a town in the 1970s or 1980s in the United States deindustrialized. How did that happen? Did somebody just turn off the lights one day? No, that was organized abandonment. The firm decided to close that factory for whatever reasons. The local municipality allowed that factory to be closed. The various banks and other financial institutions and investors that had something to do with that factory also decided that moving certain manufacturing or other capacity from one place to another place made sense for their bottom line. That is organized abandonment of the people left behind. It is. And anybody who says, “Yeah, but the capitalist has to make a profit,” that’s the problem. That’s not the explanation. It’s the problem. [laughs]

Tippett: And isn’t gentrification in this category as well?

Gilmore: Sure, sure.

Tippett: It might be organized banishment, but it’s vulnerability that is created and…

Gilmore: It is absolutely created.

Tippett: …utterly disruptive and utterly inequitable.

Gilmore: Yeah. And we see it everywhere. Recently I was in South Africa, Craig Gilmore and I went for three weeks toward the end of 2022 in November and December. And we traveled around and we met with people who are organizing under conditions of extreme duress in Cape Town, in Johannesburg, and in Durban. And they’re organizing all different kinds of campaigns which have very explicit material expressions. For example, the so-called shack dwellers’ movement. The material expression is, people build a house on some land that they, the people, have occupied. People do it in groups for safety. And then demand resources from the municipality for water, for electricity, and for protection. And these are really, really difficult, difficult struggles. They’re not easy. They’re not automatic. They’re really hard things.

When I was there, I was asked by people who have participated in a reading group in anticipation of my arrival to give a talk about organized abandonment because people who were involved in those campaigns and other campaigns, domestic workers, people doing building occupations, people in rural areas working for a farm system that has not changed much since the end of apartheid. They found organized abandonment so useful for them to think about how they can identify and then try to manipulate believers of power to get what they need.

So when you think about organized abandonment, you think: okay, who are the abandoners? How are they organized? Who says this is okay? Who withdraws resources? Are there ways to raise an impediment to that withdrawal? Are there ways to get it back? Including the struggle of making real estate and other developers pay, not by volunteering to build a little bit of affordable housing somewhere, but pay so that communities can remain intact.

There’s just so many things that organized abandonment opens up. And one of the things that it opens up, that I’ve been talking with all different kinds of people about, is how organized abandonment creates the conditions for so much disorder, because it disorganizes lives that had been somewhat organized. So that then compounds into more disorder, and more disorder.

Tippett: And that’s what our human beings, that’s very, very, very hard on us as creatures. That structure and certainty being stripped away.

Gilmore: Exactly.

Tippett: In addition to vulnerability.

Gilmore: Exactly. Exactly. The devastation completely shifts how people understand themselves in the world, understand themselves in relation to one another. Breaks relationships, creates new ones, and people are constantly trying to figure out how to learn new things to solve new problems, how to renovate old things to be adequate to new problems. And usually some combination of the two.

[music: “Gale” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett: It’s important, I think, in terms of your work and the perspective you have, as you talk, that you have a global perspective. You also live part of the time in Lisbon. Is that right?

Gilmore: That’s right.

Tippett: Yeah. Here’s something you’ve said: “In other parts of the world what one sees is a [very simple] fact: Where life is precious, life is precious.” And this is a phrase of yours that you use a lot, “where life is precious, life is precious”: where different parts of society work together to lift up quality of life, including populations as diverse as the U.S., in places where inequality is deepest, use of punishment and prisons is greatest.

Gilmore: Yes, I was just about to say that. [laughs]

Tippett: Okay. [laughs] So this becomes a place to start to think about, how do you unravel everything that led to this? This is symptomatic of so much else. “Where life is precious, life is precious.” What does that phrase mean to you?

Gilmore: It means that when we notice that in particular cultures and communities, the way that people respond to crisis or vulnerability or even confusion seems to be what we would call in the US, “Oh, look, they have a better quality of life, although they’re maybe not as money rich.” That those ways of being in the world are evidence of a sensibility about life’s preciousness. Being slower in how we do things, not imagining that efficiency is the most important attribute of getting things done, even though urgency is often at the bottom of what we are trying to do. But I coined that deliberate repetition in a conversation I had with some young people many years ago who were very skeptical of this abolition idea.

Tippett: I think I’ve heard you tell this story. Were they in Fresno? I think I said Fresno.

Gilmore: Yeah, they were in Fresno. It was at an environmental justice conference. And they had a youth track, and the youth were youth tracking. And the guy who was the kind of counselor of the youth track told them, “Oh, well, the person is doing the keynote today.” And I was also an organizer, I just want everybody listening to know. “She’s going to keynote and she’s going to talk about this thing abolition.” And they said, “Bring her in here. We are not having any of that.” So I went in and they all sat, all frowny looking at me, arms crossed. And they were all really middle school kids, and they were all dressed to flirt because this was an afternoon activity with other kids their age. It was really quite beautiful. And they said, “Well, what about murder?” And I said, “What about murder? I’ve had that happen in my family. What do you want me to say about murder?”

Tippett: You said that to them?

Gilmore: Yes. Yeah. And they said, “Well, shouldn’t they be sent away forever?” And I said, “Well, how is murdering somebody the response to murder?” What I’ve learned is in places that don’t have, for example, life sentences much less the death penalty, in the event that somebody kills somebody else deliberately, the sentence is short. But people there very infrequently kill somebody else deliberately, which leads me to believe that where life is precious, life is precious. So that’s how we got to that. It was a very long in — I’m shortening it for the sake of our conversation today, but we went around a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. And the crossed arms and the frowny faces started to relax, and then they dismissed me. It’s like, “Okay, enough old lady. Get out of here. We’re going to get back to what we’re doing.”

And then at the end of our daylong conference — panels, talks, blah, blah, blah — the youth come out and they get the stage and they get to have the last word of the conference. And they got up to talk about what they had decided were the three most pressing environmental issues for them today. And what they said was: police, prisons, and pesticides. So they’d heard and thought about their life and thought about their world and come up with that conclusion, which probably most of the people, adults at that conference, would not have come up with if they had to make a list of three. So that the kids told us something.

Tippett: And I think it’s important to note here that first of all, again, the long game is very, very important, right? You know better than anyone that so much has to be put in place for, well, for prisons, police, or pesticides to significantly recede. So just as we just have a few more minutes, what is that world in which these things no longer seem to be inevitable in the way they feel inevitable with the way we have structured society now, especially in the United States of America? What is that world? What is in that world, and how does that world function that shifts this so significantly?

Gilmore: That world functions in the first instance through — let me think, what word should I use? I’ll go back to Du Bois to close this out — through principles of very, very deep democracy, and that is to say, decision making that happens from the ground up in which this principle of life being precious helps people decide what to do and how. Now is this happening in the world? Yes, of course, it is. If we look at what the MST has been doing in Brazil in organizing villages and farm collectives, that’s exactly what they’ve been doing. If we look at how Abahlali, the particular shack dwellers’ movement that I met with quite a bit when I was in South Africa, what they do, they have this deep democracy.

One of my friends from Lisbon, who’s a descendant of Cabo Verdeans, was in Brazil at a conference recently. And she said, “I was sitting around with all these young people and young adults, and they were talking about land, and they were talking about land in which the assumption was, they didn’t have to debate it. They were already there. The assumption was land cannot be alienated, it can never be privatized.” So they were talking about how to create the community that they were building based on that literal foundation of land and ideological or philosophical foundation of land. And my friend Christina said, “I feel like I’m in the future.”

Tippett: You’ve used the phrase “evolution consciousness.” I feel like that’s what you are also pointing at there.

Gilmore: Yes. Yeah. “Evolution consciousness” and…

Tippett: Because this is not change. This is evolution. Right?

Gilmore: It is. And evolution, of course, it is change, but there are these breaks, and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. I used to read Stephen J. Gould’s work all the time, evolutionary paleontologist, who was also really good with social policy questions. And so when we think about evolution, we understand that it’s not magical, and yet there are surprises. So what we do is keep doing things, keep doing things, keep doing things. But what we have is the capacity to imagine things and to realize those imagination, that imagining. And that’s not idealistic. And it’s certainly not idealism, right? But it’s where people coming together in the context of this deep democracy, understanding radical interdependency, create for themselves the subjectivities that make life precious at every round of activity, whether they’re building socialism from the ground up, as the Abahlali people in South Africa are trying to do, or doing other things.

And again, I’ve heard from people all around the planet who hear me on podcasts and they hear me on the radio and I’ll get an email to my work email saying, “Oh, Professor Gilmore, we hope that you’re the person we heard. We are four Muslim women in Singapore, and we have come to embrace abolition because this is what we think.” And by saying that what they’re saying — for those who wonder if abolition is somehow rigorously secular — it’s not. There are all different configurations that people put themselves into because it gives life meaning. So it’s not only for the practicalities but also for meaning. And there is no reason — and reason has its limits — there is no reason that a kind of, as it were, spiritual plurality cannot coexist with the urgency of creating the conditions for lives to flourish everywhere. There’s no reason those things can’t coexist.

Tippett: If I asked you just, this is a vast question, but I’ve asked you just how you would start to answer this question through the life you’ve lived and these things you know and see and are passionate about, the universal human question, the ancient enduring question: what does it mean to be human? I wonder how you start to think that through, and also maybe in terms of how that has evolved in you at this point.

Gilmore: I’d say that over the 72 years plus, plus, plus that I’ve been alive on this planet, the meaning of “human” has most dramatically evolved from a sense of performing Adam’s task — humans are supposed to do this special thing on the planet — to understanding ourselves as part of the entire planetary geography. And some of my colleagues would use the word ecology.

Tippett: But I like that you use the word geography.

Gilmore: I prefer geography. That’s my word. And that if we understand ourselves as space-time, we also understand ourselves as part of the living matter of this planet, which itself in its entirety is living matter, riding a hot and cold rock of formerly living or energetic matter. And if we think about how we combine our energy with the earth, then we can maybe think these big things together. But mostly, I think that what the — speaking self-consciously here for a moment — that the beauty of being able to be self-conscious is lovely. I doubt it is exclusively human. And so my curiosity is to figure out how the preciousness of life extends in every way. So between and among humans, but also with the trees and the grass and the water and all of the things that make life life.

Tippett: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I wish we could have spoken for several hours. [laughs] But this was really wonderful and I’m very grateful for what you do in the world.

Gilmore: Well, thank you for having me. And I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation.

[music: “Eventide” by Gautam Srikishan]

Tippett: Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is also director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She co-founded several organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. She has authored and co-edited several books, including Golden Gulag, Abolition Geography, and the forthcoming Change Everything.

The On Being Project is: Chris Heagle, Laurén Drommerhausen, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Lucas Johnson, Suzette Burley, Zack Rose, Colleen Scheck, Julie Siple, Gretchen Honnold, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Gautam Srikishan, April Adamson, Ashley Her, Amy Chatelaine, Cameron Mussar, Kayla Edwards, and Tiffany Champion.

On Being is an independent nonprofit production of The On Being Project. We are located on Dakota land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. Our closing music was composed by Gautam Srikishan. And the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn.

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