Leaving One Epoch and Building The Scaffolding for The Emergence of Another

“The world we live in now in 2021 took at least 500 years to build. What I’m proposing is not something that’s gonna happen overnight.”
– Rinaldo Walcott

Shazlin Rahman Reviews On Property and Interviews Rinaldo Walcott

Rinaldo Walcott is a Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. His research is in the area of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, gender and sexuality.

Rinaldo Walcott. On Property. Biblioasis. $14.95, 112pp., ISBN: 9781771964074

Rinaldo Walcott’s On Property is a little book with a big agenda: advance the 200-year-long project of abolition by dismantling its key components. One of the most enduring legacies of the slavery era is the present-day policing system. Policing in North America has obscure beginnings as slave patrols designed to keep enslaved peoples from escaping, or even venturing too far from their respective plantations. It’s no surprise, then, that the system charged with keeping order and civility disproportionately targets Black people across North America, Europe and wherever their populations number significantly.

In On Property, Walcott untangles another thread that birthed and now necessitates policing: the protection of property. Slave patrols and plantation overseers had the responsibility of keeping the enslaved in and intruders out. Today, we see the legacy of that system where Black people – and often Indigenous and other people of colour – are viewed with suspicion when they venture into neighbourhoods or areas where they supposedly “don’t belong.” The murder of Trayvonn Martin is a stark example. George Zimmerman determined that Martin, a Black teenager in a hoodie, didn’t belong in the gated neighbourhood they were in. Zimmerman proceeded to stalk Martin in his car – a startling parallel to a slave patrol on horseback walking an enslaved person to or from a plantation – and later shot Martin in cold blood.

Walcott argues that the concept of property and its protection by the state are inherently violent and will continue to disproportionately target Black bodies. And if we are to imagine a world where policing is no longer necessary, Walcott proposes that we rethink the concept of property, which necessitates policing.

Shazlin Rahman: Where do you place On Property within the current context of the pandemic and its disproportionate impacts on Black, Indigenous and people of colour?

Rinaldo Walcott: There are a couple of ways to think about that. One is that many of us were isolating at home across North America and other parts of the world when the first images of George Floyd arrived on our various kinds of devices, whether it’s on TV, cellphones, or what-have-you. And of course, in that moment of isolation – for those of us who have homes to isolate in – people were more outraged than usual when they see these kinds of murders take place. And as you know, that led to one of the most significant outpourings of people of all backgrounds taking to the streets in North America. In the midst of that, the cry for defunding the police was one of the  most significant and strongest demands at that time. So for people who have been thinking about abolition of the police and the criminal justice system, and thinking about abolition as a route towards a much more deeply felt and meaningfully lived freedom, I think they were pleasantly surprised that so many more people were using that kind of language. At the same time, we were also still living in this pandemic that’s largely taking the lives of African-American, Latinx, Indigenous people and people of colour in the US  and in Canada. I didn’t write about this in the book: one of the things that’s really interesting about George Floyd is that, if you read through the reports of his murder at the hands of the police, you will come across a couple of reports that suggest that, at some point, he too was exposed to the coronavirus. For me, it’s really interesting how all of these forms of violence converge on Black people’s bodies. Police violence and dying from Covid-19 are part of a continuum. Who are the people who are most exposed to the most violent aspects of our communities? Who are the people who are the most exposed to lack of access to healthcare? Who are the people who are the most exposed to being heavy-handedly policed when they’re walking down the streets? On Property is really meant to intervene into that larger discussion. Of course, if you’re going to talk about abolition, you have to engage with the question of policing and the criminal punishment system. Those are two steps towards something much more possible, something much more utopian, and towards reorganizing how we live together on this earth.

“It’s really interesting how all of these forms of violence converge on Black people’s bodies. Police violence and dying from Covid-19 are part of a continuum.”

SR: How does defunding the police address the health inequities affecting Black and brown bodies? I think what you’re suggesting is to reorganize our priorities away from more funding for the police.

RW: The whole argument in On Property is that if we were to rethink the priorities that currently structure our communities, our provinces, our cities, our nations, and globally – if we were to reorient those priorities, our world would look very different. If those priorities became not policing or surveillance or the military and these kinds of violent institutions, but those priorities became care, housing people who are without housing, making sure that everyone has total access to healthcare, making sure that people have jobs that are not just adequate in terms of providing for the sources that they need, then we would have an entirely different kind of society. The other thing that I suggested in the book is to begin to put into place that kind of orientation to build a different world. The world that we have now is the one that we built, and it’s a pretty harsh, violent, and cruel world. And we can build a different world.

SR: You used the case of George Floyd as the foundational case in this book. What’s happening in the US tends to be more prominent in conversations here in Canada (not that they’re any less important). There seems to be a significant gap in terms of what we know and the data we collect about Black experiences in Canada.

RW: For me, it’s not a fundamental problem for a couple of reasons. One is that, of course in the Canadian context we should be able to much more easily say the names of the people who have died at the hands of the police. But the George Floyd incident – to return to what I said earlier about people being isolated in their homes, looking at their various devices and seeing this man have the life kneed out of him for eight to eleven minutes – I think it was shocking for many people who, in their everyday lives, usually bypass these things. I think in the Canadian context, many Canadians bypass these things when they happen here. In the book I mention Abdirahman Abdi’s murder in Ottawa at the hands of police as well. The fact is that one of the policemen who was charged in that crime used what is “allegedly” an illegal glove in the beating that he administered to Abdirahman Abdi. We need to know what’s happening in our specific national space, city space and so on. What I wanted to do in On Property is to show that these forms of violence reach beyond national boundaries, particularly for Black people. Wherever there are large concentrations of Black people, we have this form of policing that is absolutely violent, that always assumes that Black people are out of place, that always positions Black people as suspicious – even in putatively Black countries. I point to Barbados [in the book] and I even draw on the example of the protest that was happening in Nigeria around their own protest against the Nigerian Special Anti-Robbery Squad as an example that modern policing has built into it this problematic relationship with Black people. [That’s] why so many Black people can then find themselves supporting a logic and a political demand for abolition. 

“Wherever there are large concentrations of Black people, we have this form of policing that is absolutely violent, that always assumes that Black people are out of place, that always positions Black people as suspicious – even in putatively Black countries.”

SR: How do you put out this call for abolition in a majority Black country where the beneficiaries of the policing system are not necessarily, directly or obviously white people or white supremacy?

RW: One of the things that we know is that in former slave-holding societies like the one I was born into in Barbados, while these are majority Black countries, the economies are still largely run through allegiances to Europe or North America. The economies and even the people who are the elites residing in those places whether they’re Black or white, have an allegiance that is much more committed to forms of global whiteness than even the local communities. Policing is the buttress between the elites and the masses. What you see, then, is that modern policing continues to operate in the same role. For instance, there are many places in putatively Black countries like Barbados, Jamaica, the Bahamas – you can go on – where Black people who live on those islands know that they simply don’t go. Those places are reserved for the very wealthy or for white people. And the thing that reserves those places is the function of the police. If the police imagine that you don’t belong in any of those places, the police are there to ask you where you’re going and to eject you. That’s what the late Caribbean poet Derek Walcott called “plantations by the sea.” He was talking about hotels. But it’s not just hotels. There’s still the legacy of the old plantation-holding class of white people and their descendants who live in enclaves in many of these islands where Black people know that they’re not supposed to go unless they’re going to work. Alongside those, there are these newer enclaves where these islands are now sold for condominiums and so on where wealthy North Americans go, that Black people also know they’re not supposed to go unless they’re going to work. These are the contexts within which global policing happens. In the book I also point to the UK, France and other places that have significant Black populations where we see the same kind of policing practices that we see in the US. Police kneeing people to death, police beating Black men and Black women to death and where there’s significant protests and so on. I’m in Canada and in all of my work, I have always centred Canada. For me, centring Canada is about the ethics of writing from where I am but showing that what’s happening in Canada is a part of a global pattern.

SR: Toronto police announced that they were going to start collecting race-based data in 2020. We’re three months into 2021 now. Have you seen anything different?

RW: Definitely not. I’ve been doing quite a lot of writing around the collection of race-based data in some of my scholarly work. In many ways, I'm a critic of race-based data because, often, there’s an assumption that collecting data means that you’re going to have good policy. There’s a big gap between collecting data and policy-making. You can have a whole lot of data about a group of people, a population, a phenomena, and not necessarily have good policy. We can go back to Covid: we know in Ontario that it’s largely Black people, people of colour and women of colour who are working in long-term care homes and grocery stores who have been largely impacted by Covid. But once we knew that isolation centers might help people who are living in cramped conditions, it took Ontario and the city of Toronto something like six months before they picked an isolation centre. So we know who’s been impacted, we know what might help, and it takes six months to [act]. We also know that paid sick leave would be really helpful, but the province has yet to institute paid-sick leave that would help many of these people. We also know that sending kids back to school in many of the neighbourhoods where people are highly impacted by Covid is going to prolong the impact of Covid in those communities, and yet we have policies that are meant to send these kids back to school as opposed to policies that would extend childcare, provide resources and avenues for parents who have to go in to work, to find other ways of making sure that their kids are safe and sound. Right now we know a lot about who’s being impacted by Covid. What we don’t have is good policy to interrupt that impact. In Ontario there’s what I call the significant myth that collecting data means good policy. You collect the data and then people who have the power to create better policies and implement them have to be interested in doing that. So far, that’s not been the case.

“Right now we know a lot about who’s being impacted by Covid. What we don’t have is good policy to interrupt that impact.”

SR: In the book you discussed the changing attitudes towards defunding and abolishing the police. People don’t have as much of a knee-jerk reaction to it as before. Where do you see the trajectory going for this movement?

RW: I’m hoping the trajectory is one that would lead us to the kinds of conversations that you and I are having. Conversations about what it would mean to live collectively better together and what we would have to do to make that possible. The world we live in now in 2021 took at least 500 years to build. What I’m proposing is not something that’s gonna happen overnight. But what I'm proposing is that we engage in conversations, political actions, and political projects that can begin to put in place the kinds of foundation that are necessary for transforming the world we live in right now. The world that we live in was imagined, invented, institutions were established to make it possible and to make it appear legitimate. I think our task now is to engage in a similar kind of project. It’s kind of like leaving one epoch, and building the scaffolding for the emergence of another epoch.

Shazlin Rahman is a Malaysian-born and Toronto-based writer and artist. Her writings can be found in the Toronto Star, Spacing Magazine and the Ethnic Aisle. Her current project Her Sarong is inspired by her late maternal grandmother and uses visual storytelling to explore representations of labour by women of colour. Shazlin is currently the Community Manager and Writer at FRIENDS of Canadian Broadcasting where she's valiantly fighting against the encroaching Silicon Valley monopoly of Canadian democracy.

Follow Shazlin on Twitter @shazlin_r and on Instagram @hersarong