Property and slavery are intimately tied through the carceral state. Only an abolitionist movement and framework can resist the thingification that property allows through the resistance of commodity speak

If one reads James’s account of the Haitian revolution alongside Davis’s account of the abolitionist movement in the Americas, one begins to notice something else that sits as a central conundrum of abolition: the question of property. The Black enslaved were denied the legal status of family; this meant that they “passed on to their children an inherited status as being private property.”6 It was not just that one was enslaved; it was also that one could not “own” one’s self and one’s offspring, and therefore could not lay claim to family. In both theory and practice, this meant that the Black enslaved person literally had no autonomy or control over either their body or biological kin: the child followed the condition of the mother and thereby became at birth the white master’s property. This fact has informed Black people’s relationship to property ever since. Calls for and demands for abolition are built on a memory of slavery not too far removed from the present-day reality for many of us.

The problem of property and bodies, then, is at the foundation of contemporary abolitionist claims, much as it was at the abolition movement’s historic founding. In the context of the Haitian revolution, the enslaved had to conceive of owning themselves both physically and psychically, and it is this kind of ownership that underwrites contemporary calls for abolition. Thus, abolition as a radical politics means to create a different world, a different set of governing relations. It is a transformation of our society as we know it.

Having once been property ourselves, we as Black people perhaps understand more than most the stakes of an abolition politics and the reasons why it is necessary. The African-American cultural critic and MacArthur fellow Fred Moten, in his critique of Karl Marx’s conception of the commodity, writes about “what Marx couldn’t even imagine, the commodity who shrieked.”7 In doing so, he ties together Black bodies, commodities, and property ownership, highlighting the entangled and antagonistic web that ensnares them.8 Moten writes about Aunt Hester’s scream in Frederick Douglass’s autobiographical slave narrative, highlighting her ownership by the slave master alongside evidence that she is an independent sentient being or life form, and one therefore not totally captured by the subordination, or thingification, of her enslavement. It is indeed the gap between the commodified ownership of the slave and the slave’s refusal of this status, and their insistence on being more than their subordination and thingification allows, that gives birth to abolition as a reimagining of what life can be. It is also why abolition as an idea and a practice has taken root in Black communities the world over as an alternative way of organizing themselves and living their lives. Black people, historically and at the present moment, have necessarily become adept at resisting, silently and otherwise, the thingification that has been thrust upon them by others, and it is in this resistance, this refusal, that abolition’s seed has taken root and grown.

Policing is central to all abolitionist claims. As a people who have been “policed” from the plantation straight through to the present moment, Black people have such an intimate understanding of what policing looks like in all its forms that imagining a world without police is only logical, often urgently so. That there was ever a world without police should not surprise anyone, though I also know it will. But there is a beginning to everything, including the police, which is another way of saying that there was a time when things could have been different. In her essay “The Long Blue Line,” Jill Lepore, a columnist for The New Yorker, summarizes the historical emergence of policing in the Americas. Lepore makes a distinction between monarchial policing, such as what happened in pre-discovery England, and what developed in the colonies. In England, constables and watchmen kept peace for the king, thus claiming the kingdom as the king’s home. Lepore explains that maintaining “the king’s peace became the duty of an officer of the court called a constable, aided by his watchmen: every male adult could be called on to take a turn walking a ward at night and, if trouble came, to raise a hue and cry.”9 In the colonies, a different set of relations developed. Lepore points out that the earliest special forces, or police, were created for the express purposes of “policing” enslaved Black people in my birthplace, Barbados, Britain’s first sustained colony in the Caribbean region. Lepore calls this first instance not the rule of law but the rule of the police. By the rule of police we mean that posse-like bands of white men were endowed by landowners with the power to claim the land as the landowners’ home. This posse-like police force could also insist on governing all aspects of a slave’s life, especially with regard to movement. The Barbados model was later exported to and adopted in colonial Virginia, and spread from there across colonial and pre-revolutionary America, meaning that most of the earliest police forces in what became the United States existed almost exclusively to police—and in this instance “terrorize” might make a suitable synonym—Black people. Every European colony in the Americas eventually adopted similar systems and laws. The initial laws established in the Virginia colony listed things slaves could not do, like arm themselves; carry a club, gun, or sword; or leave the plantation without a master’s certificate. Nor could a slave legally lie, hide, or injure anyone. For each of these transgressions a recalcitrant slave could be apprehended by a constable and a range of punishments inflicted on them, up to and including death. Lepore further notes that in places like colonial New York, Black people—whether enslaved or freed—were required to carry a lantern if out after sunset and were prohibited, among other things, from gathering in groups, all of it aimed at regulating how they moved around. The ghosts of these policies, as we will see, still exist throughout North America today.