The aff’s call for debate to be centered around the predictable stasis shows the way property logics of protecting and retaining civility deputize seemingly liberal people through pathological images of blackness

Black people, once owned as property and now the main (if not the exclusive) target of mass criminalization and incarceration and all the notso-deadly and deadly actions of modern policing and its extensions, understand that property remains a central roadblock in our collective quest to figure out how to both live differently and better together. In the following pages I will not only be suggesting that the abolition of policing and incarceration are necessary for Black people to have their full lives and their full breaths acknowledged, I will be arguing that the abolition of property is also central to this endeavour. It is precisely because of Black peoples’ intimate relationship to property as both an idea and an actual practice as a result of having been property ourselves, that we understand that the entire carceral network and the innumerable problems that afflict it are intimately bound up with modern conceptions of property, because in many ways we are the foundation of the idea itself. I am not making a case for Black people’s exceptional experience as an oppressed group. History, recent and ancient, has already made this exceptionality abundantly clear. I am suggesting that our long history of thingification, and how we have resisted it, stands as a political and intellectual blueprint for how we can transform all of human life. We know that some of the ghastliest experiments in the history of the last five hundred years or more have been enacted on Black people and we further know that to recover from those experiments something more radical than reform is necessary.

One of plantation slavery’s most important and still living legacies is the diffusion of the ideas that came along with it and how these ideas influence policing in both its broadest and most restricted forms. Given that modern policing in the Americas, as we have discussed, was created to police the property that was Black flesh, it should not be surprising that policing continues to remain hostile and brutal to Blacks in the Americas; and, one can confidently say, beyond the Americas too. Policing is central to how Black people experience life even when they are not having encounters with the actual police, because white people remain, as Frank Wilderson III, a co-founder of the Afropessimism school, put it, “deputized” all the time.18 This is just one of the ways that the plantation persists, shaping actions, attitudes, and behaviours. White deputization works to police Black people in all manner of ways, especially in the West—from modes of speech, dress, and attitudes to suspicion, threat and assumed danger. The archetypal figure of the big, threatening Black man is an important element of this dynamic, alongside the belligerent, angry Black woman. Long embedded and cemented stereotypes of Black people are often experienced and understood to be threats to white people and their ideas of what is appropriate and even safe; threats that therefore must be subdued or policed. Of course, this form of banal, everyday policing can and often does result in more official state policing too.