← On Being with Krista Tippett
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- [00:00]
Krista Tippett
Support for On Being with Krista Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer supports a movement of organizations that are applying spiritual solutions to society's toughest problems. Learn more@fetzer.org to say that Ruth Wilson.
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Narrator/Producer
Gilmour 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 Gilmour speaks of abolition, a radical vision of a world without prisons, in another word she's helped popularize. She is working with a 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 mass 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. 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.
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Krista Tippett
So one thing I'm always interested in, whoever I'm speaking with, is the Origins.
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Narrator/Producer
Of a life and where the passions.
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Krista Tippett
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 know, you hold a sense of time to keep working towards what can be, working with what is, towards what can be. I mean, the title of your book you're working on now is Change Everything. So 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, like in the soil of your childhood.
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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, because I.
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Krista Tippett
Said so, so it must be so.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
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. 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. 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 jingled. There was, you know, 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 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, you know, Sputnik and Red Scare and all that stuff, Civil rights movement got more intense in the wake of Brown v. Board. At the same time, we were learning in our classrooms at Lyman Wheeler 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.
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Krista Tippett
You remember, learn that those were the words.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Those were the words.
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Krista Tippett
Oh, my gosh. Yeah, those words.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
I'm almost. 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.
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Krista Tippett
That was a private. Was that a private school?
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
It was a private school. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Girls school in New Haven. They. They put out a call to the black churches and basically said, send us one So I went.
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Krista Tippett
And you were at the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church.
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Ruth Wilson 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. 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. And 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, 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 Methodist said, no, no, no, this is not your church. You go up the street to the church for you people. So off she went. And, I mean, as luck would have it, she wound up meeting the man who's my grandfather. So it all worked out, I suppose.
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Krista 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.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Oh, it probably meant less than the sparkle on the phrase suggests, but it's a sort of characterization of a certain kind of New England black, in our case, working class. But, you know, raised in the Congregational Church, expecting always to work a lot and really hard as part of almost.
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Krista Tippett
Your spiritual duty, kind of that Puritan determination.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, you know, getting over Puritanism, man, that's. That's rough. Yeah.
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Krista Tippett
Okay, wonderful. So, yeah, 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. 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.
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Narrator/Producer
To all of our children.
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Krista Tippett
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.
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Ruth Wilson 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 persistence 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.
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Krista Tippett
Presence.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Many people. Presence. Right. P, R, E, S, E, N, C. I think I've spelled it right. Presence. And for many people, the word abolition or abolish, the 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 kind of 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.
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Krista Tippett
Yeah.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
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. 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 what was really going on during Reconstruction. Now, Du Bois was trained both as a sociologist and as, 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 and archives, but that doesn't mean they're actually quiet, just like 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 and 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.
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Krista Tippett
So there is an interrogation happening of the silences now.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Exactly. And it's great.
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Krista Tippett
With a new energy.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Yeah, it is really, really great. And it's one of the things that's so great about it, and I'll get back to Du Bois, is that the work that these 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 have 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, presence, all kinds.
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Krista Tippett
It's not an, again, not an absence of things, but a presence of things.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Exactly. It means social relations. What are they like? How did they come together? And of Course, that book lays out Du Bois best approximation of what that could have been. A recent book by the brilliant Thulani Davis called the Emancipation Circuit, does astonishing work in sort of 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 livable.
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Krista Tippett
Even within given conditions.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Exactly.
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Krista Tippett
Even within terrible given conditions.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Exactly.
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Krista Tippett
So something that's so fascinating to me is that you, as you have walked through these questions, I mean, you went to Rutgers to begin your graduate work at the age of 43, as you said, as a cranky middle aged activist packing a couple of drama degrees and a handful of social theory. 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 you know, I read you saying that 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.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
It's true.
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Krista Tippett
It sounds true to me, but tell me about it.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Oh boy. One of the exciting things that studying geography made possible for me, and I was, as you just said, somebody who had 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 kind of 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. I mean, many things were happening.
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Krista Tippett
Also the change in South Africa, all of these.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Yeah. 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 would get together, read things as people do today. It's one of the most beautiful pastimes there is on earth. I think, as 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 that. 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, you know, materially, but also ideologically. And then people are invited to participate in that world. And it has, you know, beginning in the middle.
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Krista Tippett
And that is also part of your. That had been part of your life drama.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
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Krista Tippett
Yeah.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
So and studying geography and studying, therefore, as. As I like to put it, not where is Nebraska, but why is Nebraska? Yeah, we have the same, you know, 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 must be mindful of if we want to change that.
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Krista Tippett
I mean, 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.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
It's gotta be. It's gotta be. I mean, 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 emancipating 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 placebo. It's not like it's not something that goes on your. On a piece of paper in your wallet.
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Krista Tippett
Yeah. And you're also talking about it. There's. This is not always expressed, but I.
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Narrator/Producer
Do think that the way the word freedom gets tossed around and internalized perhaps.
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Krista Tippett
In America is as freedom from. Right, Freedom from. But you're talking about freedom for and the freedom that also includes what are our expectations of one another.
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Ruth Wilson 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.
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Krista Tippett
Yeah.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
So this is 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 themselves or can embody as one person.
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Krista Tippett
On Being with Krista Tippett is supported in part by the John Templeton foundation funding research and catalyzing conversations that inspire people with awe and wonder. Discover the latest findings on neuroscience, cosmology and the origins of life@templeton.org.
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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? Because 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 relationship with each other and the non contiguous places. So too with prisons. So for you, talking about this is almost talking about everything. And so maybe one way and just a manageable way and is how you begin to answer the question, what is a prison made of? How you answer that question.
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Ruth Wilson 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.
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Krista Tippett
Well, I bet you do. It's probably because for you. Because you have to communicate with it, right?
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Ruth Wilson 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. Okay, 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. That's all of that is the prison. Now then we ask ourselves, well, how is it possible for all of this, all of these resources, what we will call factors of production, to be organized in that way? Like, how is that possible? Why not organize them into housing projects or dams or roads or highways or ports?
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Krista Tippett
Yeah, I want to just to also, just to really lay out what you end up working on, you know, the breadth of what this becomes, you know, what that the geography of prison represents and everything that's in its. That is in that complex. And it's so close to life at every level. So I just. I want to read something that you wrote where you just kind of 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. So this was something you wrote with James Kilgore and the King. 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 come from just hearing the word you said. We work with communities cited 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 in 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 Echenjerai Kumanyika at the Free Library of Philadelphia about a group of mothers, I think, in Fresno. And it's really a story that kind of illustrates how geographies collide and form about what we're doing around what we're talking about when we're actually talking about prisms. Prisons, as you say, catch all solutions to social problems. Would you tell that story about those Mexican mothers in the 80s?
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Oh, Mexican American mothers, yeah.
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Krista Tippett
Mexican American mothers, yes.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
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 have been the first one in more than 20 years. And it was going to be the first of the 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 were 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, you.
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Krista Tippett
Said, what is it about prisons in general that makes it likely that their kids would end up there?
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
What is it? So the mothers did some study, and they learned about the lifeways of people 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. 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. I mean, really, almost before environmental justice was a term of art and term of politics, trying to fight to reduce the amount of pollution that kind of sweeps across the area of Los Angeles where they live, because it's very close to freeways, and the freeways are carrying diesel trucks 247 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.
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Krista Tippett
Right, right, right.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
That's the key thing.
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Krista 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 profoundly far reaching, that is vulnerability to organized abandonment in general, of which crime is an expression. I think that is such a fascinating.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Thing.
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Krista Tippett
In terms of maybe simple assumptions people would make. I hear you in different places resisting the idea that of course, race and racism are implicated in 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?
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
It is fair. It is fair. Even though both racism and crime are always in the picture. Yeah, right. Yeah, they're always in the picture.
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Krista Tippett
But we ask them significantly, dramatically in the picture. Right?
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Exactly, exactly. And yet what we do is we ask ourselves, what is it as. As the mothers of East LA did, What is it about everyday life that makes people vulnerable? Yeah. 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.
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Krista Tippett
Okay.
- [39:53]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
And I'm working with a graduate student now. We're going to put together a map that I think is going to be great, 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. Right. 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 that the work is in agriculture or in home health care. Those are both incredibly labor intensive. 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 health care. 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.
- [42:53]
Krista Tippett
Yeah, one way you always bring this down to earth is, you know, 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. And so, yeah, would you talk about and just invoking that, that's what we're talking about, human beings, places, some event you did where people have played and prayed, become vulnerable. And this language of organized abandonment.
- [43:47]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
I.
- [43:48]
Krista Tippett
Find very helpful in terms of shining a different light on what you're talking about.
- [43:54]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Yes, I'm happy to talk about organized abandonment. 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, 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 vulnerabilities. So an example I like to use is a town in the 1970s or 1980s in the United States de industrialized. 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.
- [45:51]
Krista Tippett
And I mean, isn't gentrification in this, in this category as well?
- [45:55]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Sure, sure.
- [45:56]
Krista Tippett
I mean, it might be organized banishment, but it's. Yeah, it's vulnerability that is created.
- [46:05]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
It is absolutely created.
- [46:07]
Krista Tippett
Utterly disruptive and utterly inequitable.
- [46:10]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Yeah, yeah. And we see it everywhere. Recently I was in South Africa. Craig Gilmore and I went for three weeks toward the end of the of 2022, in November and December, and we, 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, you know, water, for electricity and for protection. And these are really, really difficult, difficult struggles. They're not, they're not easy, they're not automatic. They're really hard things. When I was there, I was asked by people who had 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 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 the levers 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.
- [49:09]
Krista Tippett
Yeah, Right.
- [49:10]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
So that then compounds into more disorder.
- [49:12]
Krista Tippett
More disorder. And that's what our human beings. That's very, very, very hard on us as creatures. Right. That's structure and certainty being stripped away.
- [49:20]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Exactly.
- [49:21]
Krista Tippett
In addition to vulnerability.
- [49:23]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Yeah, 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, you know, some combination of the two.
- [50:14]
Krista Tippett
It's important, I think, in terms of your work and the perspective you have as you. You're talking, that you have a global perspective. You also live part of the time in Lisbon. Is that right? That's right, Yeah. I mean, here's something you've said. In other parts of the world, what one sees is a fact. Where life is precious, Life is precious. And this is something. 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 US in places where inequality is deepest, use of punishment, and prisons is greatest.
- [50:54]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Yes, I was just about to say that.
- [50:57]
Krista Tippett
Okay, 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.
- [51:12]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Yeah.
- [51:14]
Krista Tippett
Where life is precious. Life is precious. What does that phrase mean to you?
- [51:18]
Ruth Wilson 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 U.S. 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.
- [52:35]
Krista Tippett
I think I've heard you tell this story. Were they in Fresno? I think I said Fresno.
- [52:39]
Ruth Wilson 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're not having any of that. So I went in and they all sat all frowny looking at me, arms crossed. And they were all like, really, you know, middle school kids. And they were all dressed to flirt because this was like an afternoon activity with other kids their age. It was really quite beautiful. And they said, well, you know, what about murder? And I said, what about murder? You know, I've had that happen in my family. What do you want me to say about murder?
- [53:30]
Krista Tippett
You said that to them?
- [53:31]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Yes.
- [53:32]
Krista Tippett
Yeah, yeah.
- [53:32]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
And they said, well, shouldn't they be sent away forever? And I said, well, how is murdering somebody the response to murder? Like, 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. And so that's how we got to that. I mean, it was a very long. 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 kind of 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 day long 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.
- [55:13]
Krista Tippett
Yeah.
- [55:14]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
So the kids told us something.
- [55:17]
Krista 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 wealth, for prisons, police or pesticides to significantly recede. So just as we just have a few more minutes, you know, 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?
- [56:06]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
That world functions in the first instance, through. Let me think. What. What words should I use? Through. I'll go back to Du Bois to close this out through. 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 Upper Shelley, the particular Shek Dwellers movement that I met with quite a bit when I was in South Africa, what they do, they have this deep democracy. And 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, like literal foundation of land and ideological or philosophical foundation of land. And my friend Christina said, I feel like I'm in the future.
- [57:53]
Krista Tippett
Yeah, you've used the phrase evolution consciousness. I feel like that's what you are also pointing at there.
- [58:03]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Yes, yeah. Evolution consciousness.
- [58:06]
Krista Tippett
Because this is not change. This is evolution. Right?
- [58:10]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
It is. And evolution. I mean, and evolution, of course it is change. But there are these breaks, and that's a good thing, not a bad thing. You know, the. Yeah. I used to read Stephen Jay Gould's work all the time, you know, 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. Yeah, right. So what we do is kind of keep doing things, to 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 not. 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, you know, at every round of activity, whether they're building socialism from the ground up, as The Upishali 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.
- [60:40]
Krista Tippett
If I asked you just this is a vast question, but if I 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, you know, 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.
- [61:04]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Point, I'd say that over the 72 years 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.
- [61:44]
Krista Tippett
Yeah, but I like that you use the word geography.
- [61:48]
Ruth Wilson 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, and the grass and the water and all of the things that make life. Life.
- [62:57]
Krista Tippett
Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I wish we could have spoken for several hours, but this was really wonderful and I'm very grateful for what you do in the world.
- [63:08]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Well, thank you for having me and I thoroughly enjoyed our convers.
- [63:35]
Narrator/Producer
Ruth Wilson Gilmour is a professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and American Studies at the Graduate center of the City University of New York, where she's 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.
- [64:22]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Loren Drummerhausen, Eddie Gonzalez, Lillian Vo, Lucas Johnson, Suzette Burley, Zach Rose, Colleen Scheck, Julie Seiple, Gretchen Honnold, Padre Gautulma, Gautam.
- [64:33]
Krista Tippett
Srikishan, April Adamson, Ashley Herr, Amy Chatelaine, Cameron Moussar, Kayla Edwards, and Tiffany Champion.
- [64:42]
Narrator/Producer
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 Zoe Keating. Our closing music was composed by Gautam Srikishan and the last voice you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn. Our funding partners include the Hearthland foundation, helping to build a more just, equitable and connected America one creative act at a time. The Fetzer Institute Supporting a movement of organizations applying spiritual solutions to society's toughest problems. Find them@fetzer.org Kaliapea foundation dedicated to reconnecting ecology, culture and spirituality. Supporting organizations and environment initiatives that uphold a sacred relationship with life on Earth. Learn more@kaliopeia.org the Osprey Foundation A catalyst for empowered, healthy and fulfilled lives and the Lilly Endowment, an Indianapolis based private family foundation dedicated to its founders interests in religion, community development and education.
- [65:57]
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
On Being is produced by On Being Studios in Minneapolis, Minnesota.