finished reading Golden Gulag 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕
forgot to mark the began reading date but whatevs. i think i began reading it saturday morning. or friday night. this was so dense and i swear there are like 30 pages of citations, but damn its good. its BRIEF. it's like.. fucking ruth wilson gilmore fr. anyway here's a quote (and yes its long but FUCK its good):
"Indeed, the chronicles of revolutions all show how persistent small changes, and altogether unexpected consolidations, added up to enough weight, over time and space, to cause a break with the old order. Certainly, the political forces that hold governmental power in the United States of the early twenty-first century figured this out and persisted for decades until they won. With persistence, practices and theories circulate, enabling people to see problems and their solutions differently—which then creates the possibility of further, sometimes innovative, action.

Such change is not just a shift in ideas or vocabulary or frame-works, but rather in the entire structure of meanings and feelings (the lived ideology, or “taking to heart”) through which we actively understand the world and place our actions in it (Williams 1961). Ideology matters along its entire continuum, from common sense (“where people are at”) to philosophies (where people imagine the coherence of their understanding comes from: Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, Marx, Malcolm X, the market).

The bottom line is this: if the twentieth century was the age of genocide on a planetary scale, then in order to avoid repeating history, we ought to prioritize coming to grips with dehumanization. Dehumanization names the deliberate, as well as the mob-frenzied, ideological displacements central to any group’s ability to annihilate another in the name of territory, wealth, ethnicity, religion.

Dehumanization is also a necessary factor in the acceptance that millions of people (sometimes including oneself) should spend part or all of their lives in cages.

In the contemporary world, racism is the ordinary means through which dehumanization achieves ideological normality, while, at the same time, the practice of dehumanizing people produces racial categories. Old races die, through extermination or assimilation, and new races come into being. The process is not biological, however, but rather the outcome of fatal encounters that ground contemporary political culture.

This culture, in turn, is based in the modern secular state’s dependence on classification, combined with militarism as a means through which classification maintains coherence. A sign of militarism’s ideological embrace is the fact that all kinds of U.S.-based people believe without pause that, in a general way, “the key to safety is aggression” (Bartov 1996; R. W. Gilmore 2002a).

Where classification and militarism collide is in the area of identifying an enemy. “The Japanese are an enemy race” wrote a State Department wonk in 1941, at the height of both Jim Crow and universal military conscription, as prelude to the internment of 120,000 people in concentration camps in the South and the West.

Sadly, even activists committed to antiracist organizing renovate commonsense divisions by objectifying certain kinds of people into a pre-given category that then automatically gets oppressed.

What’s the alternative? To see how the very capacities we struggle to turn to other purposes make races by making some people, and their biological and fictive kin, vulnerable to forces that make premature death likely and in some ways distinctive.

The racialization of Muslims in the current era does double duty in both establishing an enemy whose being can be projected through the allegation of unshakable heritage (fundamentally, what the fiction of race is at best) and renewing the racial order of the U.S. polity as normal, even as it changes.

Given these practices, it should not be all that surprising that hundreds of thousands of white men are also in prison; while they might be, as Pem Buck poignantly describes such people, a “reserve army of whiteness” (Buck 2001; see also Roediger 2002), I wouldn’t count on it—not when the twenty-first century hasn’t quite wrapped up what I call the age of human sacrifice. Such men, and their diverse caged brethren, might alternatively be, as Staughton Lynd’s Lucasville prisoner activists novelly named themselves, the “convict race” (Lynd 2004).

As ever, solidarity in the present is a precondition for any future less bleak than the past quarter century."

SOLIDARITY FOREVER FR