The Captive Maternal and Abolitionism

Joy James

TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Volume 43, Summer 2021, pp.
9-23 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/807078

[ Access provided at 18 Mar 2022 16:26 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]

Joy James
Keynote Address, Carceral Cultures Conference
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC
March 3, 2018

The Captive Maternal and Abolitionism

ABSTRACT

This keynote (article) examines political theory and organizing against anti-Blackness
and police violence. It reflects on community, vulnerability and care, and political
agency from the perspective of the “Captive Maternal”—a gender diverse or agen-
der function of caretaking, protesting, movement and maroon-building and war
resistance emanating from communities stalked by anti-Blackness and the legacy
of 500 years of chattel slavery in the Americas.
KEYWORDS: Captive Maternal, abolitionism, police violence, Erica Garner, Eric
Garner, NYPD, social justice, Black women activists, Sally Hemings, Angela

TOPIA 43
Davis

RÉSUMÉ
9
Cet article examine la théorie politique ainsi que l’organisation contre la violence
policière et le racisme anti-Noirs. Il réfléchit à la communauté, à la vulnérabil-
ité et aux soins ainsi qu’à l’agentivité policière d’un point de vue du « Maternel
captif » — une fonction à divers genres ou agenre de soins, de protestation, de créa-
tion de mouvements et de résistance à la guerre, laquelle émane de communautés
poursuivies par le racisme anti-Noirs et l’héritage de 500 ans d’esclavagisme dans
les Amériques.
MOTS-CLÉS : maternels captifs, abolitionnisme, violence policière, Erica Garner,
Eric Garner, NYPD, justice sociale, activistes Noires, Sally Hemings, Angela
Davis

¤
Good evening. Thank you to the steering committee, and to everyone who is here
tonight. Also, I am grateful for the wonderful people contributing on the panel.
I know so much work went into putting this gathering together. “Thank you” to
Davina for talking me down off the ledge so that I could renew my passport and
travel to be with you; and, Davina, I like your therapy dog.

DOI: 10.3138/topia-43-002
 JOY JAMES

Academic-based Abolitionism
I want to share a little bit about how I got to this moment in terms of what my
thinking is. I also want to be honest. I feel that my thinking is somewhat muddled
now. I feel it’s partly muddled by grief, by decades of work, organizing and activism
that anticipated a different destination point than this one. A different POTUS
[Trump] followed Barack Obama and changed disappointment into devastation. I
didn’t expect that it would be this POTUS that we needed to move towards justice
or resolve.
At the same time, I remain motivated by the struggles and sacrifices that people
give daily, especially “anonymous” people. The non-elites who just wake up and do
the work. Do the job. Part of the job is loving, despite grief and suffering. That’s
what brought me to Erica Garner. But preparing to even talk about Erica Garner I
began to realize that this is the twentieth anniversary of my involvement in prison
abolitionism. It’s an anniversary that I think I blotted out because I’m confused by
some of its activism and memories. So in order to gain more clarity in a setting built
on collectivism, I wanted to share that two-decades old activism briefly with you
before I read a paper that will be prefaced by a short video clip on Erica Garner;
it’s a Bernie Sanders ad she did for the 2016 US presidential campaign.
Twenty years ago, I got a call from Angela Davis when I was an assistant prof at
TOPIA 43

the University of Colorado Boulder (CU) in Ethnic Studies. Angela requested that
I organize a prototype for Critical Resistance which was launched in September
1998 as a UC-Berkeley (University of California) conference with 3,500 in attend-
10 ance; months earlier, the March “Unfinished Liberation” conference took place at
CU-Boulder with 2,000 in attendance. A number of things unfolded during the
process of organizing “Unfinished Liberation” that struck me and stuck with me
over the years.
The interesting thing about the university is that it’s a container, right? It believes
in ideas, and it has ideas. But, it’s also a corporation, if it’s a private university. If
it’s a state university, it’s a public corporation. In terms of governance and ethos
and (absent) ethics neither private nor public corporations prioritize the needs of
humans and the natural world. The expectations that the university puts forward in
terms of ideals for justice and democracy—everything we’re fighting for here—are
mitigated by the container itself, by the nature of the walls, the floors, the ceiling.
I found contradictions in organizing in Colorado—largely with unpaid undergrad
student volunteers—a prototype abolitionist endeavour called “Unfinished Lib-
eration” (the title is taken from one of Angela’s lectures at UCLA in 1969 before
she was wrongfully terminated from UCLA by the Regents because she was an
open member of the Communist Party). The pursuit of unfinished liberation was
at its best, in the university’s mind, if it stayed in the container. Part of the conflict
in organizing had to do with local activists—who were mostly from Denver, only

(c) University of Toronto Press 2021

 THE CAPTIVE MATERNAL AND ABOLITIONISM

elites could afford to live in Boulder if they were not students residing on campus.
Chicano, Native American, a few African American, radical whites, envisioned
something else than what we provided as a conference on liberation. Campus
activists made a contribution. The students that I remember best were those with
whom I thought I would have little in common. Superficially, it seemed that their
politics would be diametrically on opposite ends of the spectrum. One group of
student activists was comprised of first generation African American students who
were working-class and from Denver. They commuted to Boulder to attend the
elite public university. The second group of student activists consisted of affluent
white students who lived in Boulder. The first group did not see itself as “militant”
per se but was clear about racism and police and prison abuses, and in their own
way were sick of CU-Boulder. The second group apologetically explained that
they couldn’t turn in their papers on time not just because they were organizing
for the conference, but also because they had meetings with the FBI, because the
FBI wanted to interrogate them about their friends who were in ELF, the Earth
Liberation Front was protecting the environment in ways that were criminal and
criminalized. Seeing the stress of young people still mobilizing for something
greater and larger than whatever our personal sufferings were motivated me, but
the outcome of the conference actually turned out to be problematic. That put me
into another space.

TOPIA 43
From the papers presented at the Unfinished Liberation conference, I compiled
and edited the anthology States of Confinement ( James 2000). I had negotiated
with the publisher to send 50 copies into prisons to the incarcerated. Among those
who received the book was Jalil Muntaquim ( JM), a former member of the Black 11

Panther Party and Black Liberation Army. In 1998, when I “met” JM through
letter writing, he was serving a 25-years-to-life sentence for shooting police in an
attempt to battle the illegal, deadly Cointelpro, or counterintelligence program of
the FBI, and avenge the death of revolutionary abolitionist and theorist George
Jackson ( Jackson was killed in San Quentin in 1971, by prison guards, his death
sparked the New York Attica prison rebellion the following month). (Fujino and
Harmachis 2020). The Black Panther Party had developed breakfast programs
(later adopted by the US Department of Agriculture to feed public school children
nationwide), sickle cell testing, political education and patrols to deter violent
policing. (In May 2020, JM was in his 49th year in prison and had contracted
COVID-19, which state governments largely allowed to devastate incarcerated
peoples.)
Of the dozens of incarcerated intellectuals who received States of Confinement,
only Muntaquim read the anthology and critiqued its editor. His polite response
was to, first, thank me for sending the book, and then write that it had very little
to do with his life and the life of political prisoners who had been incarcerated and
persecuted for decades based on their activism and rebellion against police/prison

DOI: 10.3138/topia-43-002
 JOY JAMES

violence. That correspondence became a turning point for me as I re-examined the

volume to better understand the critique of the academic anthology as discon-
nected from the experiential struggles and political analyses of political prisoners
incarcerated for decades. During the following 8 years, I devoted my time to
organizing opportunities to meet and discuss political prisoners (or “veterans”)
and in the process edited the anthologies The New Abolitionists; Imprisoned Intel-
lectuals and Warfare in the American Homeland in order to highlight the agency of
radicals in movements that sought to revolutionize a predatory, imperial democ-
racy and turn it into an antiracist people’s republic. Their attempts, with ques-
tioned and questionable tactics, sought to turn grief and rage from police agencies
killing and framing activists such as Fred Hampton and Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt
into militant mobilizations for justice.
I see their rebellions as the expressions of Captive Maternals. Captive Maternals are
defined by function and legacy rather than identity. They are gender diverse or agen-
der; their lineage stems from the anti-Blackness intrinsic to US political-economies
and the legacy of chattel enslavement, what some call the “afterlives of slavery.”
Trauma and grief span generations and centuries; so too do mobilizations, organ-
izing and rebellions against repression and genocide. Within the “radical traditions”
of the Captive Maternal, those killed or assassinated while waging international
freedom movements include Patrice Lumumba, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin
TOPIA 43

Luther King, Amilcar Cabral, Dulcie September, Chris Hani and others. Current
US political prisoners incarcerated and tortured because of their activism to free
people include Russell Maroon Shoatz, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Sundiata Acoli, Mutulu
12 Shakur, Leonard Peltier and others. Ancestors died prematurely and violently. Radi-
cal activists who survived assassination only to be imprisonsed often died or disap-
peared soon after their release: depression, cancer, disease, torture and trauma—all
routine aspects of incarceration—accelerated debilitation and the aging process.
Political prisoners—political agents who opposed state repression—differ from
other Captive Maternals who find conformity, compliance or reforms under law
preferable and manageable. There are various stages of the Captive Maternal: con-
flicted/celebratory caretaker; protester; movement mobilizer; maroon organizer;
war resistor (as in resistance to police surveillance as well as police forces and vigi-
lante violence/terrorism). Despite the varied political functions or roles of Captive
Maternals, not all Blacks or people of African descent in a white supremacist/
anti-Black world qualify or function as Captive Maternals functioning to prior-
itize the interests of communities linked to genocide and chattel slavery. Supreme
Court Justice Clarence Thomas—known for reactionary and repressive rulings—is
in eviscerating civil and human rights protections does not qualify as a Captive
Maternal. Secretary of State, Stanford Professor Condoleezza Rice, who spread
disinformation in order to promote the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq that
destabilized the Middle East and led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, is also
not a Captive Maternal. A progressive democrat, and so ideologically different from

(c) University of Toronto Press 2021

 THE CAPTIVE MATERNAL AND ABOLITIONISM

Thomas and Rice, President Barack Obama, the first Black US imperial president
also did not function or wield power as a Captive Maternal. All three of those men-
tioned worked and laboured for racial empire, largely ignoring the devastations of
capitalism and imperialism and white supremacy. None of these three prioritized
the care or fought for the freedom of impoverished, racially oppressed people. No
matter their personal biographies of suffering from racism, racial slights and “over-
coming” discrimination, their labour furthered racial empire and its violences; their
agency worked for predatory capital and its accumulations.
Erica Garner was young, 27, when she transitioned and left a legacy. I want to
own my own inheritance and legacy, with its contradictions and limitations. I met
Davis through organizing with a communist-aligned organization. Thus, in New
York City, Nairobi (Kenya), Montgomery, AL (USA) and in Moscow, I would
bump into Professor Davis and organize with cadres or coalitions for whom she
posed as the titular leader. After refusing to join the Communist Party of the
United States of America (CPUSA) because I thought it unnecessary to do so, I
imagined that I could continue to work in its formations but it turned out that I
was naive in thinking so. Without a permanent political “home,” I turned to focus
on academics and years later reconnected with Professor Davis when I became
a Ford Foundation postdoctoral researcher and requested to work at UC-Santa
Cruz. That fellowship year introduced me to abolitionism based in academia and

TOPIA 43
the lectures and analyses of Professor Davis and other activist academics. I would
eventually identify academia as not a site or source for “revolutionary reforms”(a
phrase I see as problematic). Creating archives and anthologizing non-academics
who worked or functioned as revolutionaries only to be captured as political pris- 13

oners was instructive.

Academia has (academic elites wield) powers to socialize and discipline political
nonconformists. Living in Harlem in 2014, though, I had the opportunity to wit-
ness and briefly participate in marches and protests inspired by radical activists
who were independent of sectors manufacturing consent. With brilliant dissent to
political cooptation, I watched Erica Garner’s spiritual and political response to the
2014 police murders of her father, Eric Garner, on Staten Island, and weeks later
the police murder of teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. I found ­connectors—
despite differences in age, employment, education and class status. Erica Garner
who swayed me to commit to the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders in
2015. Erica Garner led in a brilliantly public fashion that was rooted in bravery. As
a voter, campaign contributor, and minor organizer—I followed her intellect and
analyses. With countless of others—incarcerated and forgotten—we all functioned
as Captive Maternals. When she died at the age of 27, as a mother of two, and a
daughter who fought for justice for her father, I continued to follow her spirit and
for a year, from December 2017 to December 2018 would only give public talks
that referenced this young ancestor. The following reflections on the struggles of
Captive Maternals is inspired by Erica Garner.

DOI: 10.3138/topia-43-002
 JOY JAMES

Captive Maternals in Predatory Democracy

My investigations into the Captive Maternal are based on a developing theory of
the function of community and kin caretaking under adversity and warfare within
a predatory democracy built on centuries of genocide and slavery and their after-
lives. I sketch out a theory of the Captive Maternal in “The Womb of Western
Theory: Trauma, Time Theft, and the Captive Maternal.” Different realms operate
simultaneously within which the Captive Maternal functions. Descriptions of four
such realms that can be viewed as concentric circles, nesting compressors that move
from the most expansive and inclusive to the most restrictive and contained; also
present are linear lines of progression and retreat from confrontations for libera-
tion. First, there exists the “Western Womb” from which grew an American or US
imperial democracy built on supremacy, captivity and consumption of colonized
and enslaved communities and cultures. Second, there is the realm of civil and
human rights movements within the imperial nation, embedded in a Black matrix
of opposition to segregation, exclusionary codes and political disenfranchisement,
the militancy of Black agency has furthered the causes of women/LGBTQ/and
other racial/ethnic groups. From within those justice movements, Maroons his-
torically emerged to carve out autonomous spaces formed in flight from genocide,
terrorism and repression. Maroon sites are creative material resistance to form an
alternative world to the predatory offerings from the Western Womb. The inevi-
TOPIA 43

tability of warfare stems from the dominant aggressor that demands all domains
function under its control, thus in self defense, communities become combatants
as their zones for survival are reduced to zones of occupation, where police can
14 harass and kill with impunity or military forces can bomb or annihilate. In a linear
fashion one can transition from apolitical caretaker to protester who is politicized
into movement mobilizations; resilient to betrayals from the larger society and state,
movements seek to build maroon enclosures and sanctuaries, which then become
seen as threats (due to the projections filtered through anti-Blackness, repressive
ideology, class exploitation, etc.)
The political order is sustained by exploited and abused caretakers who typically
reproduce family and community by instilling conformity to rules and fidelity to
reforms. The conundrum of Captive Maternals within imperial democracy mag-
nify when obedience to political elites —and appeals to their moral sentiment
and outrage over injustice—stabilizes a political-economic order that continuously
refashions confinement and exploitation yet claims to offer leadership for advancing
human rights. Captive Maternals can foster survival skills aligned to obedience and
conformity thus they stabilize political structures that prey upon under-resourced
communities. I have met myriad Captive Maternals in activism and academia. As
organizers and protestors the more elite tend to embrace rather than reject the
limitations of advocacy democracy (as discussed by Marina Sokolova 2006) in order
to build upon civil and human rights. A few radical activists and theorists emerge
as street protesters fighting police/political, social/communal and intimate/family

(c) University of Toronto Press 2021

 THE CAPTIVE MATERNAL AND ABOLITIONISM

violence. Some battle to keep their children healthy; others mourn the deaths of
their children killed by police and battle both police and social violence. Captive
Maternals are not only adults. Younger children take over parental duties, raising
younger siblings, when their parents disappear into apathy and grief, or movements
to stop police and social predators. Although Captive Maternals have existed in
the Americas for centuries, they have failed to achieve full protections let alone a
real democracy for their peoples as citizens. Despite the wars and cooptation levied
against them, Captive Maternals endure and replicate.
The US’s longest wars have been directed at domestic targets—enslaved or cap-
tive Indigenous and Black women and their communities. Studying the battles
of Black women tied to chattel slavery, and its afterlife, is revealing. That war
predates the Commonwealth of Virginia’s 1658 attempts to re-enslave Elizabeth
Key, one of the first Captive Maternals to have her battles enter public record.
In 1619, the English Colony in Jamestown, Virginia marked its impoverished
Africans, Europeans and Native Americans as indentured servants. But it began
to seek the mechanism through law and custom to turn a free indentured person
of colour into a slave. In 1658, Elizabeth Key, a “free woman of color,” not a
“negro/African/slave,” petitioned the Virginia colony to end her captivity. Key
argued that her deceased father had been a member of the Virginia House of
Burgesses, had her baptized, and provided a guardianship under then-indenture

TOPIA 43
before his death. English common law ruled that children inherited the legal
status of their fathers, who must acknowledge and financially support them. Key
successfully proved that based on English ancestry, Christian status and record
of indenture, she was free. Her adjacency to whiteness, Christianity, property- 15

ownership continues to define relationships to captivity and freedom. A century

after her legal victory, chattel slavery was legally codified in anti-Blackness, the
war against people of African descent. Sally Hemings, the captive of the third
president of the United States, would become a historical marker for denial or
reflection on the (im)possibilities of freedom (and love) amid the anti-Black
terrors of US democracy. Theoretically, only freedom (and love) can undo a
predatory womb.
Artists and academics create narratives around Hemings, making Hemings indispen-
sable to understanding anti-Black enslavement and the parameters of abolitionism. A
2017 episode of the public radio podcast On Being (Tippett 2017) discusses Beneath the
Myth of Benevolence, a painting by hip-hop poet Titus Kaphar. Kaphar’s art depicts the
partial image of an anonymous dark-skinned young (enslaved) African woman painted
underneath partially pulled back drapes of Thomas Jefferson’s portrait. The canvas peels
back part of Jefferson’s image to partially reveal her bare dark brown legs, breasts, torso,
her full face staring beneath a headwrap as she sits by a table. In the June 29, 2017
On Being radio interview, as Kaphar dialogues with historian Annette Gordon-Reed,
author of The Hemingses of Monticello (whose work suggests to some that Hemings
was a voluntary lover of Jefferson), Kaphar states that he painted Beneath the Myth of

DOI: 10.3138/topia-43-002
 JOY JAMES

Benevolence after a conversation about Thomas Jefferson with a white woman, a high
school teacher. When the artist referred to Jefferson as a “complex person” because he
was brilliant but he also enslaved humans, the AP history teacher qualified Jefferson’s
violence by saying he was a “benevolent slave owner.” Coupling racial slavery with
sexual assault, Kaphar stated his surprise with a query, asking for clarification from
the female teacher, “A benevolent rapist?” Reflecting: “I’ve never once heard anyone . . .
called a benevolent rapist.” The prolonged silence that followed the teacher’s refusal to
respond to the query prompted Kaphar to leave for his studio and paint Beneath the
Myth of Benevolence. The partial unveiling of Jefferson’s portrait, upon an African/Black
girl/child/woman, depicts the captive beneath the “founding father(s)” and the political
economy of the United States. A young Black queer male maternal who grew up in
poverty, trying to save a younger brother from the streets and police, Kaphar presents a
window into 21st century meanings of “Sally,” after centuries of democracy engineering
a “master race” built upon the bodies and labour of Captive Maternals.
Presidential powers are racial and patriarchal and predatory. Their sovereign
supremacy bends toward accumulation with people and nature positioned as prop-
erty. Law and custom limited the possession that Jefferson wielded over his first and
only wife, Martha, who did not live long enough to perform the duties inherited
by her younger, enslaved, half-sister Sally. One can trace Hemings’ vulnerability to
sexual predation and find a path that rethinks the trajectory of democracy, and the
TOPIA 43

revolutionary war also accurately labelled the war for liberation for white property.
In 1772, a British magistrate granted James Somerset, an enslaved Black man
from the Caribbean his freedom, and condemned chattel slavery. Historian Ger-
16 ald Horne argues that the nation’s founding fathers feared both British abolition
of slavery, as well as Africans’ violent rebellions against enslavement, such as that
typified in Haiti’s overthrow of France in the war that raged from 1791 and 1804.
The role of Sally Hemings—her importance and that of other antebellum Cap-
tive Maternals—is tied to the “Three-fifths” clause of the US constitution creating
a representational democracy and electoral college out of anti-Blackness. When
Thomas Jefferson ran for president in 1800 against John Adams (a northern who
refused to invest in human trafficking of Blacks/Africans), Sally Hemings and the
children that she had by Jefferson, and the hundreds of other enslaved people on
his plantation and plantations throughout the south, “voted” for Jefferson; although
3/5ths of a person they were denied 3/5ths of a vote and hence their value accrued
to white predatory structures. Disproportionately, the United States had southern,
slave-owning plantation oligarchs serving as presidents of the United States. Those
historical slave states are now viewed as conservative, southern “red states” that
decided the presidential victory in 2016 in favour of Donald Trump.
In the 1940s, Monticello trustees, perhaps impelled by unconscious shame and
denial, turned Hemings’ sitting room at Monticello, Jefferson’s plantation, into a
“Whites Only” restroom. In 2017, as if in some revenge-mode against the 2016
presidential election, the media announced that Monticello would conduct a

(c) University of Toronto Press 2021

 THE CAPTIVE MATERNAL AND ABOLITIONISM

multi-million-dollar renovation and restoration project, one that would include

the transformation of a Jim Crow bathroom into a museum-shrine for Hemings.
We don’t know if and how Hemings as a Captive Maternal protested and resisted
predatory presidential power-making. We do know that she disappeared into her
Black family as Jefferson’s white descendants denied his relationship as a captor
and father until DNA gave her visibility. How Hemings fought, and who she
fought, for some modicum of dignity and space for herself and her children largely
disappeared. Jefferson’s eldest daughter, according to Annette Gordon-Reed, burnt
all papers and correspondence about Hemings. As a sanctuary, historical “celeb-
rity,” tragically silenced figure, and precursor to the first Black FLOTUS Michelle
Obama, Hemings’ resistance could entail multiple realms of Captive Maternal
functioning. Her children were emancipated by Jefferson but, by law, would have
had to leave the plantation, essentially banished from their mother. Some passed
as “white”; others lived as “Black.” Jefferson never freed Hemings; he remained her
captor—a more suitable term than “owner”—until his death.
The antithesis of the silenced Hemings, bound by family or kin, manifests centuries
later in the vociferous protests against slave catchers or modern police forces—
Erica Garner.

Militant Captive Maternal—Erica Garner

TOPIA 43
The impressive political advertisement, conceived and designed by Erica Garner,
for the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, is archived in a YouTube video
clip that lasts less than five minutes (Garner 2016, on Democracy Now!). Its bril- 17
liant political narrative is filled with emotional intelligence. It remains a catalyst for
countless tributes to Erica Garner and reflections on antiracist democratic socialism
and political rights not to be terrorized by anti-Blackness and police forces. Such
video clips reflect Erica Garner’s political contributions, activism and caretaking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Syln8IkOIqc (Garner 2016 at 2016 Bernie
Sanders presidential campaign, “It’s Not Over.” YouTube, February 11, 2016)
Two quotes that reflect political interventions to influence the presidential election
in favour of the dispossessed aptly contextualize Erica’s campaign for “Bernie.” The
first quote comes from incarcerated activists striking against the 13th amendment
in the US Constitution and prison slavery in 2016:
This is a call to end slavery in America. This call goes directly to the slaves
themselves. We are not making demands or requests of our captors. We
are calling ourselves to action. To every prisoner in every state and federal
institution across this land, we call on you to stop being a slave, to let the
crops rot in plantation fields, to go on strike, and cease reproducing the
institutions of your confinement. To achieve this goal, we need support from
people on the outside. Mass incarceration, whether in private or state-run
facilities is a scheme where slave catchers patrol our neighborhoods and

DOI: 10.3138/topia-43-002
 JOY JAMES

monitor our lives. It requires mass criminalization. Our tribulations on the

inside are a tool used to control our families and communities on the out-
side. Protests surrounding the deaths of Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra
Bland and so many others have drawn long overdue attention to, but also
under the threat of capture, of being thrown into these plantations, shackled
and forced to work.” (New Inquiry 2016)
The second quote comes from Erica Garner’s close friend and political ally, Reggie
Harris:
Erica was not a born activist. She was a daddy’s girl and she loved hard. She
was a mother, a sister, and a loyal friend. Activism was a tactic she saw as the
best way to seek justice for her father, Eric Garner. In the end, after Erica
put her entire life into this fight, not only for her herself but for everyone
Black, she got no changes. The stresses of fighting for three years became too
much for one person to bear. The fact that her death took place mere weeks
after she took a year off, and a few months after having her child, is not lost.
(Reggie Harris, January 2018)
The evolution of contemporary police and prison abolitionism is shaped by the
political thought and ideology of activists and academics, who are not always ideo-
logically aligned. The incarcerated and the formerly incarcerated bring visibility
to abolitionist endeavours shaped by political platforms, education, advocacy. Yet
TOPIA 43

agency is diminished when identities are compressed into categories such as “the
incarcerated” and the imprisoned become an undifferentiated mass whose voices
18 and stories shift into the speeches and texts of advocates, academics, and attorneys.
It is important to distinguish between those who engaged in risk-taking political
struggles (and disciplined as prisoners with surplus torture)—and those who are
apolitical but victims of state racism and police aggression against civilians; and
finally those who engage in advocacy democracy and function on a managerial level
within non-profit, governmental or academic structures as the “voice” or responsible
leadership of the mass.
Abolitionism leveraged from celebrity stature and abolitionism leveraged from
resistance based in anonymity and rebellion are distinctly different. There is a pos-
sibility of a hybrid or alliance between the two. That would be the abolitionist
activist who refuses the mantle of celebrity, and decorum of the broker in order to
shoulder the chores of a rebel and revolutionary lover. They will become publicly
known but likely more easily forgotten given their lack of alignment with elites
who promote public profiles. Erica Garner personified the hybrid. Thus she became
what I call the “wild card” in political mobilization, theatre and memory. Deemed
too loud, too unruly, and her demands too “impractical,” Garner became one of the
most visible, public non-elites organizing against police murder and state violence.
She was publicly respectful of but not aligned with the formations of other Black
women kin who had lost loved ones to police or white supremacist violence. Organ-
ized formations such as “Say Her Name,” “M4BL” and “Mothers of the Movement”

(c) University of Toronto Press 2021

 THE CAPTIVE MATERNAL AND ABOLITIONISM

all became political surrogates for the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presiden-
tial campaign; they also garnered collectively millions of dollars from (non-)profit
corporate donors. During the 2016 presidential election in which Donald Trump
prevailed by winning the electoral college while losing the popular vote, movement
leaders became surrogates for the standard bearers of the Democratic party. Erica’s
paternal grandmother, Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, joined Mothers of
the Movement, as did the mother of Trayvon Martin. Trayvon’s white vigilante
murderer was acquitted in July 2013; the following July, Eric Garner was killed by
a white NYPD police officer who used chest compression and a chokehold on a
Staten Island street. Eric Garner died by suffocation through chest compression
and legal murder called by New York Police Department (NYPD) as an “unauthor-
ized choke hold” applied by Staten Island police officer Daniel Pantaleo. Garner’s
death is recorded on video as he says “please” and begs “I can’t breathe” eleven times
before he is killed. His younger friend, Ramsey Orta, captured cell phone footage
of the killing and then released it to the public. Orta was subsequently harassed by
the NYPD and incarcerated on Rikers Island for an alleged illegal weapons posses-
sion charge. Activists and Orta saw this as retaliation for him going public with the
imagery of the death, homicide, murder. (Later, Orta was imprisoned on weapons
and drug charges; poisoned by prison guards who taunted that he would contract
Covid; contracted COVID-19 in May 2020; and was released later that year; Orta
also faced allegations of domestic violence.)

TOPIA 43
Erica Garner advocated fiercely for justice following her father’s 2014 death. She
died several years later from poor health and stress at the age of 27, leaving two
young children behind. Advocates for justice, such as Erica Garner, who suffer 19

negative health amplified by the stress of losing a loved one and mobilizing against
an imperial and indifferent or hostile state become even more vulnerable to negative
health outcomes that increase impoverishment and limit resources and mobility.
This transpires internationally, from favelas, townships and urban centres to rural
sites and reservations. Disease and mortality rates among mothers and Captive
Maternals who try and fend and protect or bring dignity to the needs of their slain
children, and family and community members can lead to stroke, heart disease,
hypertension, etcetera.
Caretaking is the priority, even at the expense of one’s own self, which is not a
healthy choice, but for the captive is it a necessity? Western democracy’s origins in
genocide and enslavement engender consumption of the generative powers of the
Captive Maternal, even to sketch democratic ethos or concept for social justice.
On Democracy Now!, shortly before her death, Erica Garner—lacking fame, wealth,
academic or non-profit stature—shared her vulnerability to collapse:
When you deal with grief. When you talk about grief and you talk about
how regular families deal with it, you know, families have problems.
Trouble coping with that. Mental health is very important. . . .Black

DOI: 10.3138/topia-43-002
 JOY JAMES

families that’s on public assistance. . . [can’t get] therapy at 300 dollars an

hour, and I don’t think that’s fair . . . how are we supposed to cope with
this if we don’t have someone to talk to, someone professional to talk to.
I’m constantly reading articles and doing the research on my dad’s case,
but I’m not taking care of me.(Garner 2016, “Anti-Police Brutality Activ-
ist Erica Garner In Her Own Words on Democracy Now!”, December 28,
2017)
On December 30, 2017, Erica Garner entered a medically induced coma after
suffering an asthma attack in which she could not breathe that in turn triggered a
heart attack. Her first heart attacked occurred during, or after the birth of her son,
Eric, earlier in 2017. Stressors included poverty, racism, grief, depression and rage at
political compromises that devalued the life of Eric Garner, and the lives of others
lost to police violence or devastated by incarceration. There is no digital record or
horrific chronicle of Erica Garner’s death, as is the case for her father, and Erica
bitterly complained that she had to watch his murder over and over again on news
footage. Her life though was still violently, prematurely and unnecessarily taken
and filled with suffering. Living in public housing managed by the negligent New
York City Housing Authority—where apartment renters grapple with air pollution,
lead paint, mold, rats—administered to by substandard public hospitals. During
her brief lifetime, Erica saw her father’s killer, Daniel Pantaleo, receive exoneration,
promotion and pay increases at a desk job in a local Staten Island precinct. Mayor
TOPIA 43

Bill De Blasio/NYPD Commissioner only fired Pantaleo on August 19, 2019,

5 years after Eric Garner was killed by Pantaleo and other NYPD officers, and
20 nearly 2 years after Erica herself died.
Although in 2015, the City of New York awarded the two families of Eric Garner
a $5.9 million dollar settlement (Richmond University Medical Center settled for
$1 million with the family); up to a third of the settlements likely went to attor-
neys. Funds were not equally distributed and did not arrive in a timely fashion to
benefit Erica’s health or peace of mind. In fact, peace proved elusive—money is no
equivalent to justice or adequate restitution for murdered kin.
When Erica Garner endorsed Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from
Vermont who self-identified as a democratic socialist, she emphasized his cour-
age and vision. She opposed racism, police violence and capitalism. In a 2016
interview, Garner stated that she supported Sanders given his “record of stand-
ing with Black people.” Erica Garner recognized the despair of working within
conventional politics. Erica registers an ally in radical relationship, a relationship
that she did not experience or share with democratic elites or movement sectors
that supported them. A number of leaders, Blacks included, found her lack of
“decorum” toward officialdom whom they petitioned and supported—mayor,
governor, president—off-putting. Erica sought but found no real support for
the attempt to curb police violence from Mayor De Blasio, Governor Cuomo
or President Obama.

(c) University of Toronto Press 2021

 THE CAPTIVE MATERNAL AND ABOLITIONISM

Conclusion: “Where Do We Go from Here—Chaos or Community?”

So, I end where I began. In reflecting on the practice of steeling ourselves to
obtain a modicum of justice for our communities and families, I see clarity and
contradictions. First, the contradictions. Parenting is a function, not a gender.
Black parents are central in the formation of the Captive Maternal. Black women
have been highlighted as leading figures in struggles against prison/police/
vigilante violence. Their fierce abolitionism is shaped by gender than by revo-
lutionary love: the violent loss of a loved one can politicize the loss of natality
into a rebellion. In 1955, Mamie Till Mobley held an open casket viewed by
thousands in Chicago (images circulated throughout the globe) for her muti-
lated 14-year old son Emmett ( John Edgar Wideman’s Writing to Save a Life:
The Louis Till File, reflects on the possibility that Till’s father was falsely accused
of rape and murder and hanged [or lynched] during WW II in Europe) that
sparked the civil rights movement. Male Captive Maternals are also key. In 1963,
James Baldwin wept for Medgar Evers, 2 years later for Malcolm X, 3 years later
for Martin Luther King—all three assassinated and beloved by a queer Captive
Maternal.
In 1970, Angela Davis stood stoically by George Jackson until his assassination
in 1971. Later that year, freed from prison to await trial, the mobilization around
Davis received the support of international movements and white alliances;

TOPIA 43
exonerated by an all-white jury in 1972, Davis over decades and hard labour
became the iconic figure of abolitionism shaped by academics not imprisoned
revolutionaries. Political trajectories have shaped abolitionists from advocating 21
communism and socialism to campaigning for the DNC. Liberation movements
bring “freedom prizes” and monetary benefits to those best situated to accumu-
late status in a nation that continues to hate, hunt, cripple and kill Blacks. Civil
rights gains are not inherently “Trojan horses” (a phrase that feels too phallic)
but beware of those bringing gifts from a democracy that never fought anti-
Blackness to a standstill. Fundamental betrayals remain embedded in democracy
which disproportionately deny the human rights of Black Indigenous, Black,
Indigenous, the dispossessed, impoverished, “undocumented” labourers and
workers. Not many, if any, of our movements have led to fundamental change.
So, what are relevant strategies (and sacrifices) for political agency, spirituality,
and creating security apparatuses?
Gender and race alone are insufficient without analyses and ideological critiques.
Black women’s caretaking relationships with Black men targeted by lethal prison
and police violence are complicated. Disproportionately Black males are more pub-
licly policed, imprisoned and murdered than Black females. Black women have
emerged as the publicly recognized leadership of prominent (and externally funded,
as compared to Black grassroots activism) abolitionist organizations. Some of these
leaders have specific familial or kinship ties to (male) victims of police violence;
but (non)corporate funders do not. Most of those victimized by police violence and

DOI: 10.3138/topia-43-002
 JOY JAMES

imprisonment are un(der)employed and lack the educational degrees and social
standing of elite advocates seeking reforms in their names. These are contradictions
we grapple with; they do not overshadow the contributions to struggle made by
risk-taking activists.
As Captive Maternals, the enslaved stole themselves when they ran from plan-
tations, work camps, factories, domestic servitude, military camps and sex/rape
camps/human trafficking. They stole their time back from their so-called mas-
ters, bosses, employers, officers, rapists and pimps. They organized for freedoms;
engaged in pleasure for themselves; redefined and repositioned “property” to resist
oppression, predatory capitalism, domestic/state violence, and war. For at least a half
millennium, Captive Maternals practiced political alchemy to transpose exhaus-
tion and exploitation, acquiescent resentfulness, into protests; to organizing mass
movements; slipping away into maroon-like autonomous societies and worlds;
Captive Maternals responded to slavecatchers with battle cries and arms (W. E. B.
DuBois writes in Black Reconstruction that 200,000 Blacks fought in the civil war
and secured military victory for the north). Despite betrayals, as war veterans and
ancestors, they continued to seek freedoms for the collective. Their legacy lives in
Erica Garner. Her passion, intellect and courage, her unruly hope as an ancestor, is
part of the longevity of the enslaved who never quit loving or fighting. Her voice is
clearly heard in the claims made by some of the most vulnerable among the Captive
TOPIA 43

Maternals, whose lack of freedom is shackled to our own precarious mobility as we

move or fall, breathe or are suffocated, while living and caretaking amid hostilities
toward Black life and wellbeing. The incarcerated who bravely struggled during the
22 2016 prison strike offer a manifesto for resistance and restoration of communities:
Our protest against prison slavery is a protest against the school to prison
pipeline, a protest against police terror, a protest against post-release con-
trols. When we abolish slavery, they’ll lose much of their incentive to lock
up our children, they’ll stop building traps to pull back those who they’ve
released. When we remove the economic motive and grease of our forced
labor from the US prison system, the entire structure of courts and police, of
control and slave-catching must shift to accommodate us as humans, rather
than as slaves. (New Inquiry 2016)

Notes on the Contributor

Joy James is the Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams Col-
lege. Her most recent articles on abolitionism include “New Bones Abolition-
ism, Communism and the Captive Maternal” (https://www.versobooks.com/
blogs/5095-new-bones-abolitionism-communism-and-captive-maternals) and

(c) University of Toronto Press 2021

 THE CAPTIVE MATERNAL AND ABOLITIONISM

“Airbrushing Revolution for the Sake of Abolition” (https://www.aaihs.org/

airbrushing-revolution-for-the-sake-of-abolition/).

References
Eligon, John. “They Push. They Protest. And Many Activists, Privately, Suffer as a Result.”
The New York Times, March 26, 2018.
Emba, Christine.“Opinion: A Provocative Last Request for Erica Garner.” Washington
Post, January 5, 2008.
Garner, Erica. 2016. “Anti-Police Brutality Activist Erica Garner In Her Own Words on
Democracy Now!” Democracy Now! New York: WBAI. 28 December 2017. Video 1:47.
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/12/28/erica_garner_in_her_own_words
Garner, Erica. 2016. At 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, “It’s Not
Over.” YouTube, 11 February 2016. Video, 4:51. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Syln8IkOIqc
Gordon-Reed, Annette. 2019.The Hemingses of Monticello. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company.
James, Joy. “Presidential Powers and Captive Maternals: Sally, Michelle, and Deborah.”
Women in Philosophy, APA Blog, May 6, 2020. https://blog.apaonline.org/2020/05/06/
presidential-powers-and-captive-maternals-sally-michelle-and-deborah/
James, Joy. 2016. “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft, and the Captive

TOPIA 43
Maternal.” In Challenging the Punitive Society. Carceral Notebooks Volume 12,
2016, edited by Perry Zurn and Andrew Dilts, 255–96. New York: Publishing Data
Management. http://www.thecarceral.org/cn12/14_Womb_of_Western_Theory.pdf
23
King, Martin Luther. 1968.Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Boston:
Beacon Press.
New Inquiry. 2016. “This is a Call to Action Against Slavery in America.” Reprinted in
Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, 2016 Prison Strike Call to Action. 11
January 2017. https://incarceratedworkers.org/resources/2016-prison-strike-call-action
Sokolova, Marina. “Advocacy Democracy Modes: Benefits and Limitations.”
INFORMACIJOS MOKSLAI. 2006. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download
?doi=10.1.1.496.765&rep=rep1&type=pdf )
Tippett, Krista, host. “Annette Gordon-Reed and Titus Kaphar: Are We Actually
Citizens Here?” National Public Radio, 51 min podcast from On Being with Krista
Tippett. June 29, 2017, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/annette-gordon-
reed-titus-kaphar-are-we-actually-citizens/id150892556?i=1000443616033
Wideman, John Edgar. 2016. Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File. New York:
Scribner.

DOI: 10.3138/topia-43-002