Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Tabitha Lean in conversation

My opening remarks

I wanted to share the remarks I made at the opening to today’s incredibly rich and multiply layered conversation between Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Tabitha Lean, part of the Radical Antiracism Today seminar series.

I want to start today’s seminar with some words about this time we are all living through. My name is Alana Lentin and I am joining you today from lands stolen from the Gadigal-Wangal people of the Eora nation. I think a lot about what it means to acknowledge country and pay respect to Indigenous people, past and present, as has become perfunctory, without acknowledging that the genocide enacted on the indigenous people of these lands is placed so firmly in the past by the colonial state, and that so much is done to hide the through lines to the present and the enactment and reproduction of colonialism in the every day.

I am thinking about this particularly today as someone who is not only a migrant settler on Gadigal-Wangal lands, but who was born in occupied Palestine. We have been planning today’s seminar for a long time but we didn’t know that it would coincide with a genocide being perpetrated against the Palestinian people by the colonising force of Israel. We didn’t even know then that today’s seminar would coincide with the aftermath of the referendum on the Indigenous voice to parliament held last Saturday which confirmed to First Nations people – although they do not need nor desire such confirmation – that we are living in a state founded on what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls a ‘possessive investment in patriarchal white sovereignty,’ a colony soaked deeply in racism. These two realities are linked by the racial regime of settler colonialism and must be named as such, especially by those who are tricked into believing that they benefit from the maintenance of the status quo in anything other than material terms. As so many abolitionists have taught us, no one is really free unto we are all free.

Although the circumstances are also unimaginably difficult, we are grateful that we have Ruthie Wilson Gilmore and Tabitha Lean with us for the next hour and a half as our guides. 

Ruthie Wilson Gilmore has steered a path for those of us trying to make sense of the impact of state violence on people’s lives for many years. Her description of racism as ‘the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death’ remains one of the most clear-eyed explanations of racism available to us. It helps cut through the noise describing racism as bad attitudes, ignorance, or - in the worst new iteration – unconscious bias. Throughout her work, which is testament to her lifelong organising, Ruthie always points us to answers to the question of what is to be done,’ the title of the second essay in the collection, Abolition Geography, which we will discuss today.

Ruthie’s committed to action for the abolition of the prison industrial complex, for example, as a co-founder of the radical abolitionist organisation, Critical Resistance, meant that it was a no-brainer to have asked her to be in conversation today with Tabitha Lean, who is so key to the abolitionist movement on this continent. 

Before handing over to Tabitha to be our guide for today through what I am sure will be a conversation brimming with the ideas we need to reach beyond reform, into the radical imaginary, to fight for freedom for all ‘precious life,’ let me say a few formal words about each of them.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is 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 is the author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California and of course, Abolition Geography which we are discussing today.

Activist, poet, storyteller, Tabitha Lean is an abolition activist determined to disrupt the colonial project and abolish the prison industrial complex and challenging the colonial carceral state. Having spent almost two years in Adelaide Women’s Prison, 18 months on Home Detention and 3 years on parole, Tabitha uses her lived prison experience to argue that the criminal punishment system is a brutal and too often deadly colonial frontier for her people. She believes that until we abolish the system and redefine community, health, safety and justice; her people will not be safe.