New Frontiers in Antiracist Policy
by Xochitl Chautauqua-Jones
[Editor’s note: This essay, by a promising young public policy researcher and community activist, is the first in a series of cutting-edge policy proposals at The Sophist Magazine entitled Modest Proposals. The views of contributors are not necessarily endorsed by the editors, who present them merely as food for thought, as ideas that productively push the boundaries of what is acceptable in the ongoing national conversation on public policy.]
While America continues to be dominated by white supremacy and systemic racism at every level of government and society, Black and Brown bodies have been given some small reason for hope by liberatory, anti-carceral, and antiracist policies that have gained support after the Black-led protests in the summer of 2020 against the murder of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis policeman.
Attempts to abolish or defund racist and murderous police departments across the country and redistribute funding to communities and social workers have unfortunately met with resistance by reactionary white racists who mobilize a false rhetoric of “public security” to justify the continued murder of Black and Brown bodies at the hands of police. The latest stage of this racist campaign against antiracist justice is an attempt by white racists to mobilize AAPI communities in a racist alliance against Black and Brown Americans by circulating videos of attacks on members of the AAPI community that perpetuate racist anti-Black and anti-Brown stereotypes.
However, attempts to begin to abolish the carceral racism, racist drug enforcement and school-to-prison pipeline have moved forward in some cases. The racist admissions tests at selective high schools, employed to exclude BIPOC children, have been weakened or abolished in San Francisco and New York. Marijuana legalization in New York and the decriminalization of all drugs in Oregon are important steps against legislation that has always been targeted in a racist fashion against Black and Brown communities and employed as an excuse to incarcerate Black and Brown Americans at brutal rates. In Philadelphia, San Francisco and Los Angeles, district attorneys have been elected who have pledged to stop prosecuting some crimes that have traditionally served as a pretext for racist harassment and incarceration of Black and Brown people, such as loitering, trespassing, and drug possession.
This is an important step towards equity and the construction of an anti-racist state, but it has to go much further. Aside from drug legalization, laws prohibiting trespassing and loitering should be struck off the books wherever they are currently on them. This only represents an initial step for an aggressive, progressive agenda of antiracist policy. The campaign for drug legalization and for abortion rights has given us a very important insight: that attempts to incarcerate or punish people for committing crimes never prevents these crimes from being committed, and also that many things considered “crimes” by white opinion are in fact nothing of the sort, the whole idea of “crime” being itself a racist construction.
In light of the reluctance of racist whites to give reparations to the descendants of enslaved members of the Black community, a more decentralized approach to reparations should be combined with decarceral and restorative justice policy. Laws should be passed immediately to exempt BIPOC from property crime laws. It is highly unlikely that theft will increase in the event of such a policy being implemented, as we have learned in other realms, but the introduction of BIPOC exemptions from these racist laws will mean not only a large reduction in prison populations but also a redistribution of wealth, closing the racial gap between whites and BIPOC. There will be no need to set up a state system of reparations — and this would be dangerous, since welfare programs in America have a long history of excluding or otherwise victimizing BIPOC — instead, Black and Brown people will be empowered to simply take what is owed them by force.
It is easy to anticipate complaints about this proposal on the grounds of “equality before the law” and the “right to property.” Both of these are pieces of false racist rhetoric, anti-POC shibboleths, and this can be easily demonstrated. “Equality before the law” is what defenders of admissions tests use to justify systems constructed to privilege whites over BIPOC; it is the favorite slogan of the opponents of equity and racial justice. Where there is racial injustice and inequity, all neutral laws are part of the edifice supporting this injustice. The law must open its eyes to injustice in order to obliterate it. We all know only too well the falsehood and failure — the planned failure — of “colorblindness” as a standard. The racist Founding Fathers extolled the idea that “all men are created equal” in words, while their actions as vicious slaveowners revealed their commitment to the very opposite idea. They created a future for Black and Brown American bodies of terror and oppression. We must do the opposite: enshrine laws that positively acknowledge the fact of racial injustice in order to build a future where there is equality for all.
Partial theft legalization, undertaken on a race-conscious basis, provides the best way to pursue this goal. Defenses of looting as an extralegal political tactic do not go far enough. As for the criticism that this infringes on property rights, consider that these property rights, enjoyed disproportionately by whites, are the direct legacy of the racist order installed by the American founders. Black bodies were property to them. Total protection of individual rights can only be just in a society that is already racially just, that has been set up without systemic oppression of groups within it. Property rights, in the expansive sense which we are, in our racism, accustomed to, should be conceived of as part of a distant dream that belongs to a future we must work towards but are far from reaching.
Again, this policy would not likely result in an increase in crime, but would only decrease incarceration and contribute to equalizing racial wealth gaps. If it did cause a moderate increase in crime, however, it could hardly be called unjust, since it would also accordingly serve to decrease that gap at a faster rate.
Who would be eligible to perform legal theft? All Black and Indigenous people would immediately qualify, while it is sadly likely that government panels composed of BIPOC community leaders and activists would need to be set up to determine eligibility for those in the Latinx and AAPI communities, due to the unfortunate inroads made by white supremacy, under the guise of “model minority” myths, anti-Blackness and anti-communism.
While many will find this proposal controversial, those whose minds are not clouded by racism and white supremacy will perceive easily that it is at once a logical and a radical continuation of the strands of liberatory, anti-carceral and antiracist policy that have emerged in recent decades. A single policy, needing comparatively little regulation, will do more for racial justice than decades of designed-to-fail “race-blind” interventions.
