Cultivating Abolition: A NONYU Zine

Introduction 2-4 4 5-9 10-12 13

What is NONYU? Mission Statement Land Acknowledgment Values, Principles and Practices Reflection Questions

Fall 2020 Disorientation 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 19 20-21 22-26 27 28 29

Event Overview NYU: Cultivating Racism since 1831 Gentrification and Displacement at NYU NYU's Investment and Labor Practices Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Will Not Get Us Free!

Policing at NYU Disorientation Resources Reflection Questions "Abolition Is" Poem

Abolition in Culture Glossary Coloring Pages Artist's Comments Connect With Us

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As a coalition that refuses police, prisons—and other facets of the prison industrial complex that produce and reproduce structures of violence—as methods of safety, we call ourselves students of abolition. This means that as we reject carceral systems and their promises of so-called security, we are also envisioning networks of care, love, and safety. We are students specifically because we do not claim to be authorities on what abolition entails. We do, however, commit ourselves to conduct work grounded in an abolitionist ideology as well as to a constant process of learning and critique that it entails. Our name, NONYU, stands for "NYPD Out of NYU."

who we are & how we came to be NONYU is a coalition of undergraduate student organizations and individuals working to end all forms of policing on campus. During the summer of 2020—in the wake of police violence against Black people—the Black Student Union (BSU), the Incarceration to Education Coalition (IEC), the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM), and the Graduate Student Organizing Coalition (GSOC) joined to address NYU’s cooperation with the New York Police Department and to demand that NYU cut ties with the NYPD.

We recognized amidst this socio-political moment, calls for the abolition of police are essential to imagining a more safe and just future.

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Black Student Union The Black Student Union (BSU) is an organization dedicated to advancing Black liberation, building community, and advocating for students whose identities are linked to the experiences of the African Diaspora.

Student Labor Action Movement The NYU Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) is grounded in solidarity with Incarceration to Education internationalist, feminist Coalition labor organizing led by The Incarceration to Education garment workers of the Coalition (IEC) is an abolitionist Global South and in group of students working to economic justice movements end NYU’s investment in the for campus and student prison industrial complex workers. through political education, campaigns, and solidarity with organizations throughout the country.

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Graduate Student Organizing Coalition The Graduate Student Organizing Coalition (GSOC) is “a labor union that represents the graduate students and teaching assistants at NYU.” They invited members from BSU, IEC, and SLAM to coalesce into NONYU in order to pressure the university to divest their relationship with the NYPD. Due to multiple instances of anti-Blackness, both within and outside of NONYU, BSU, IEC and SLAM severed their connection with GSOC in winter of 2020.

Our mission as NONYU is to abolish cops and all forms of policing from NYU’s main campus, international sites, and all spaces occupied by the institution through education and the reimagination of our relationships with ourselves, each other and the capitalist institution called New York University. We seek to imagine new ways of living and coexisting which will uphold love and care as opposed to harm and trauma.

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As an abolitionist collective, we firmly commit to organizing that is grounded in deep solidarity with the Indigenous peoples whose unceded occupied lands NYU stands on and that we imagine and practice freedom from. This zine is written with the utmost respect, care, and an ongoing desire to understand what transformative solidarity with the Lenape and Canarsie people, past, present, and future looks like.

The land that NYU claims as its main campus was Minetta Brook connected to the Lenape Village named Sapokanikan (Greenwich Village). Upon stealing this land from Lenape people, the Dutch created fraudulent, conditional land grants to three Black farmers who achieved freedom after being stolen from their homes and brought to the so-called United States. When the English became the new colonial government, they stole the farmlands of the free Black farmers to use as a mass grave and as a place for public executions. Fifty years after the formation of the new colonial "American" government, the stolen land was then repurposed into a military parade field and residential park, renamed "Washington Square Park." Shortly after the founding of NYU in 1831, Washington Square Park witnessed its first public demonstration where stonecutters protested NYU’s use of prison labor in the construction of their building.

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This is how deeply NYU has been entangled in the violence of settler colonialism in this part of Lenapehoking alone.

However, NYU’s imperialism extends far beyond Lenapehoking and encompasses the violent land seizure and labor practices at NYU’s 14 “global sites and campuses.” This specific history shows us that NYU from the start is not just situated in the colonization of Lenapehoking, but also carries out this colonization through prisons, policing, and labor exploitation.

We hold each other accountable to be life-long learners and co-conspirators with movements against displacement, the struggle for Land Back, and a total undoing of the US settler colonial state. We will never accept empty and performative demonstrations of solidarity from NYU and its administration, whose only motives are constant imperialist, colonial expansion and the continuous perpetration of anti-Indigenous, anti-Black violence. Our namesake, NONYU, is as much literal as it is an acronym: we fight for the total abolition of this university and tangible, recurring reparations to the Lenape and Canarsie peoples whose lands it has violently occupied, and to every single community that has experienced harm and violence in the name of NYU’s continued existence.

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We also reckon with our own, often deeply fraught, relationships with land as individuals and as students of NYU. We understand that as students of this university, we are also implicated in the violence that it enacts against Indigenous peoples. NYU is currently the city’s second largest private landlord after Columbia University, and as abolitionists often tell us, police protect capital and property - two of the key interests of NYU as a global imperialist university that contributes to the increase of police violence and surveillance of students, workers, and faculty on every campus.

Our coalition membership represents several different and unique relationships to the Lenapehoking land and beyond. As a coalition of majority Black and Brown students, we recognize the ways that the settler colony of the so-called United States has extended its empire through genocide, chattel slavery, and imperialism across the globe and how this history informs our presence on Indigenous lands. However, as transplants from various states in the U.S. onto Lenape land, we recognize that our educational experience and organizing within NYU—a violent institution that displaces marginalized poor, Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples—is predicated on and benefits from continued exploitation. We work to further our understanding of the implications and complexities of these relationships based on our own individual histories.

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Our coalition also includes white and economically/class privileged students. As white students, we acknowledge our unique and direct complicity in settler colonialism as colonizers in Lenapehoking and in the broader so-called United States. We acknowledge that the institutions of policing and prisons are born of and maintain white supremacy and act with to protect our “safety” and our hoarded wealth & capital. We are committed to leveraging our privilege in service of material reparations and land back for our fellow Black, Brown, and Indigenous students and community members. We are committed to acting as accomplices in the fight for Black liberation and freedom for all people. This includes, but is not limited to, participating in the Resource Reallocation Caucus with the mission of redistributing our personal/generational and institutional resources, holding each other accountable to our political line, and taking on administrative work from Black and Brown organizers.

As we struggle towards true decolonization, we hold the words of Frantz Fanon close to our hearts: “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”

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Additional Resources The Manahatta Fund: The Manna-hatta Fund presents an opportunity for all settlers to support the Indigenous peoples, such as the Lenni Lenape, who were forcefully displaced by European settlers and their descendants to create New York City and the United States.

Rutgers University Black and Native American Healing Event: “A Dream of Kikeokàn/Kuponya: Black and Native American Healing” is centered in the healing practices of both the Black and LenniLenape people. Kikeokàn and Kuponya (Lenape and Swahili terms, respectively) both translate to the English word “healing”.

Landacknowledgements.org: A long list of resources including syllabi, articles, examples, and more on land acknowledgements.

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What do you want from NONYU? What kind of work would you like to see?

What do you want to contribute to NONYU?

What drew you into NONYU?

What would a university without cops look like?

Who are you accountable to?

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Grounded in abolition, Disorientation 2020, a virtual event held in September, made abolition a reality to university students on our campus. The event consisted of a series of breakout rooms focused on a single aspect of the university’s participation in the iceberg of the prison industrial complex as a space for learning and discussion.

The breakout rooms were developed based on the following themes: Cultivating Racism Since 1831, Gentrification and Displacement in NYC, NYU's Investment and Labor Practices, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Will Not Get Us Free, and Policing at NYU. The culture of policing in NYU’s Office of Public Safety perpetuates anti-Blackness and violence, finding new ways to inflict violence upon our students through ambiguous ties with NYPD to make sure there’s an armed officer at their call who comes no questions asked. The expansion of NYU's private property unhouses people, then NYU calls the police on unhoused people.

NYU's expansion of private property is the expansion of policing. The school is always going to fall back on oppressive institutionalized definitions of "safety," but as students we need to build a program to ensure all people are safe around NYU property. We are creating active alternatives. The current movement against COVID deathmaking and uprisings against anti-Black racism are the backbones of our movement. Consciousness-raising is useful, but collective struggle demands justice — student activists can start action by thinking creatively. The following pages share the content of each breakout room.

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Before NYU was established, the property that became Washington Square was called Potters Field, where strict social norms for Black people were enforced. Here, 19-year-old Rose Butler, an enslaved Black woman, was lynched for setting fire to her masters’ residence despite no death or injury.

The area called Minetta Lane used to be Minetta Stream, which was the location of a freed Black community called Little Africa. Here, Black people could find work and lodging. In the early days of NYU, Albert Gallatin spoke out against independence for the plantation colony of Saint-Domingue, which would become Haiti after a successful rebellion. He feared a nation of freed Black men, likening them to releasing “a wild tiger” onto society.

The university continued to deny Black students admission, including reneging on admission and room and board to students once administrators realized they were Black. Such was the case with Thomaa W. Young, who was denied housing although his fees had already been paid, and Reba McClain, who was expelled because of her race. In 1952, US Army veteran and economics graduate student Enus L. Christiani was murdered by an armed campus security guard. The current Office of Public Safety had no knowledge of this incident.

NYU maintains this white supremacist framework of policing by keeping direct relationships with the NYPD. Today, NYU fails to tenure or hire significant numbers of Black staff. However, Professor Lawrence Mead, a politics professor in the College of Arts and Science, is tenured. Lawrence served as advisor to Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor of New York, and an architect of Welfare Reform in the early 1990’s. His racism can be seen in his white supremacist paternalistic article entitled “Poverty of Culture,” in which he argues that “Blacks and Hispanics” live in impoverished areas in the West because of the West’s “free culture;” in other words, they cannot take care of themselves.

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NYU uses our tuition dollars right now to fund imperialist, expansionist projects across the globe (using forced labor to build NYUAD, creating a campus in occupied Palestine, etc.) while simultaneously displacing people right here in New York. NYU sits on $3 billion free of donor restrictions in its endowment. Unlike presidents at schools with equal or higher prestige like Stanford and University of Southern California, Andrew Hamilton has kept his $1.9 million salary intact. The Board of Trustees has financed holiday homes for faculty and administration and remains the second largest owner of private property in New York City.

NYU would rather cut costs by firing workers during a pandemic and using forced labor to build NYUAD than cut its plan to increase NYU’s real estate expansion six million square feet by 2031 (the “2031 Plan”). The development of ‘superblocks’ of land owned by NYU shows its increasing privatization of the public sphere.

Because when it comes down to it, academics and wellbeing comes secondary to NYU’s real purpose of accruing mass amounts of wealth and land by displacing New Yorkers from their communities to turn a profit for those on top.

NYU could ensure workers receive livable wages and compensate the migrant workers who built NYUAD, but it won’t. NYU could fund its own dining services rather than outsource it to prison industrial complex-connected companies like Compass Group, but it wont. It is clear that above all, NYU has a commitment to creating profit even if it means shutting down resolutions widely accepted by the student body. NYU sells itself as a liberal bastion, a “university without walls,” but the bottom line is this: If it hurts NYU’s profit margin, it won’t do it.

We don’t owe anything to an institution that sees us more as dollar signs than people. Our allegiances and debts lie with the workers from whom NYU also profits and with those displaced and harmed by NYU’s expansion. The university extracts from us in different ways; as students, however, we have power to leverage against the university to demand recompense for workers and displaced communities.

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As all land grabbing institutions do to sustain capital, power, and land, NYU has many contracts and exploitative labor practices to support the giant business it is. This breakout room runs through a couple of those that are directly connected to our organizing, identities, and lives as students.

Investments In September of 2018, the Incarceration to Education Coalition (IEC) demanded that NYU divest from Aramark and switch to self-operated dining. Aramark is a company that provides food service to hundreds of prisons in the U.S. It is responsible for starving incarcerated folk, serving food of extremely poor quality, and exploiting the labor of its workers. IEC held a sit-in in Bobst and Kimmel that was planned before NYU could seal a five-year cycle contract with the four FSPs offering their services (including Aramark, Sodexo, AVI and Compass Group). Students who participated in the occupation were threatened with suspension. In the Spring of 2019, Marc Wais held a committee meeting with IEC members during which he congratulated NYU on the creation of the Prison Education Program, giving the university a pat on the back despite its complicity in the violences of the PIC from its contract with Aramark. IEC did, however, manage to win a scholarship program for formerly incarcerated students. While NYU did divest from Aramark, the university signed a contract with Chartwells, a company which is also entangled in the PIC. NYU also has investments in the companies Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, and General Electric. All three of these companies have enabled Israel’s imperialist military expansion as well as their suppression of pro-Palestinian activists. In 2003, Israel used a Caterpillar bulldozer to kill Rachel Corrie, a pro-Palestinian activist. Meanwhile, NYU operated and financed seven Caterpillar engine generators. As Israel used engines manufactured by General Electric in attacks on Palestinian civilians and their homes, the NYU Langone Medical Center takes advantage of a General Electric gas firing engine. And in 2006, Lockheed Martin produced warplanes that enabled Israel’s violent invasion of Lebanon, in which thousands of people were killed. Despite this massacre, Tandon and the Center for Urban Science and Progress at NYU are both partners of Lockheed Martin. NYU directly funds and supports the deaths of Palestinian people through their relationships with these companies.

Labor Although NYU has a 4.3 billion dollar endowment, receives 25 million dollars in federal aid, pays its high-level administrators enormous salaries (President Andy Hamilton, for example, makes 1.9 million dollars a year, and provides select faculty with forgivable vacation home loans, its most vulnerable workers barely make enough to afford NYC living expenses. The cost of living in NYC is $37,000 while graduate students make only $28,000, and in 2018, Hamilton received a pay large enough to equal 67.5 graduate student stipends. NYU admin have shown little regard for its most vulnerable workers, evidenced by the fact that student employment is frozen, research funds and department funds are frozen and dining workers are on unemployment.

Meanwhile NYU lines the pockets of high-level admin and select faculty. As abolitionists, we reject this blatant disregard and exploitation of workers whose labor, while being the most precarious, the University sustains itself upon.

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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) work is the umbrella term for programs and policies at settings (e.g. workplaces and universities) that purport to advance acceptance of people representing various aspects of human difference such as race, sexuality, and gender. DEI work in practice is used as a placeholder for radical change. This session critiques the ways in which DEI work functions at universities (specifically NYU) to “raise awareness” of injustice while not only maintaining the status quo, but producing the violences that marginalize various groups of people.

DEI at universities is buttressed by the academic industrial complex, a term that explains why we have the form of institutionalized education that we do and what the role of universities is in maintaining the status quo while furthering harms caused by capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy.

The academic industrial complex is thus implicated in the harms produced by the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex. If our work as students of abolition is to critique and dismantle the PIC, then it is also to critique and dismantle the academy as we know it—including its cooptation of radical struggle through DEI work.

The article “Black Study, Black Struggle” by Robin D.G. Kelly is critical for our understanding of the tension between being abolitionists and/or students of the Black radical tradition while also attending the neoliberal university. Kelly critiques DEI as counter to radical struggle and change, arguing that “DEI vampirized the energy of a radical movement that began by demanding the complete transformation of the social order and the eradication of all forms of racial, gender, sexual, and class hierarchy. ” He also locates the dilemma of the radical university student existing within an institution of reform which is a force against revolutionary values. Ultimately, he asks us to consider what it means to be in the university as opposed to of the university.

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In the Policing at NYU breakout room, we did an overview of NONYU’s work so far to characterize the ties between NYU and NYPD. We talked about Enus Christiani, an NYU law student and NAACP activist who was murdered by NYPD at NYU in 1952, and the institutional forgetfulness about what happened to him—when asked about it, the current public safety administration was unaware of the murder.

We discussed the ways in which NYU is directly invested in anti-Black police violence in NYC, its ties with NYPD being one of many sites of this investment. The NYU administration has flat-out denied—and lied in many ways—about the university’s ties with NYPD in memos and conversations, despite overwhelming evidence and threatening daily contact on and around NYU property between students and cops.

These lies have been maintained even as we have established that 1) NYU contracts NYPD for policing in the university’s hospitals, 2) NYPD officers have been repeatedly granted high levels of access to NYU buildings, 3) NYU capitalizes off of the decentralized nature of the campus to defer responsibility away from the university when called out, and 4) Formerly incarcerated students and Black and brown students consistently experience policing and surveillance by NYPD and public safety in and around NYU buildings.

We also talked about “soft” policing, which is carried out when students, staff, faculty, or others in and around the university who are not cops or officers carry out policing work such as calling the police or reporting people to the police or the university’s carceral bodies. In light of this, we discussed why not to call the police, questions we might ask ourselves if we feel the urge to call the police, and alternatives.

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NYU: Cultivating Racism Since 1831: NYU: Cultivating Racism Since 1831 Presentation Gentrification + Displacement Welikia Beyond Mannahatta Map Native Land The Manna-hatta Fund NYC Tenant Movement History Timeline Just-Fix: Who Owns What In NYC? The Biggest Landowners In NYC The Role of Police in Gentrification Displacement Alert Project Map Decolonization is Not A Metaphor NYU Disorientation Guide 2017-18 Renter Nation Housing Justice Training Folder The Imperial Presidency A Walk In The Park Viva Loisaida Documentary NYU’s Investments: NYU Can Afford It 2020 Report Student Divestment Campaigns Compass Group Research DEI Work will Not Get Us Free!: Your Anti-Racism Books Are a Means, Not an End Black Study, Black Struggle The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non Profit Industrial Complex 712: Nice White Parents The End of Policing (specifically chapter 1) Policing at NYU: Haymarket webinar “Abolishing Policing, Not Just the Police” Mariame Kaba has created many resources on prison and police abolition, transformative justice, and other focus areas.

Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter Alternatives to Calling the Police - this is DC specific but there is generally useful information as well and other city-specific resources here Alternatives to Calling 911 Policing and the Violence of White Being: An Interview With Dylan Rodriguez

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What does it mean to you to be a student of abolition?

What do you see as the role of abolitionists working inside of a university setting? What challenges does the university present?

Are you originally from New York City? If not, what does it mean to you to practice abolition as a transplant to New York?

What does it mean to you to practice abolition while attending NYU? Consider NYU’s impact on the NYC and global community (read: gentrification, imperialism, other violence).

What does it mean to you to practice abolition on stolen land?

Consider your own identity and positionality (ie. your race, gender, sexuality, disability, socioeconomic status, religion, immigration and citizenship status, etc.). How does your identity influence your abolitionist praxis?

What do you see as your role in NONYU? What is one step you will take to practice abolition in your daily life?

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abolition is seed, earth giving way to root, ground giving birth to stems growing towards the sky. abolition is concrete cleaving, the pressure of nature wanting, gentle at first: mosses peep out of sidewalk cracks making way for flowers to bud and spring, for leaves to fall and kiss the ground in their photosynthetic frenzy. abolition isthe softening of the earth at the touch of rain, is ants scurrying around beads of loose dirt, is pollen furnishing the trees, the sidewalks, the hoods of abandoned cars. abolition is the signs of spring, tulips sprout in beds we thought were dry, fertile earth calls to us, saying (softly) “I am still here.”

abolition is destruction, eruption, flame that burns brick to ash, is soot and smoke that colors the air black, choking the rot we inhabit. abolition is magma churning beneath the ground, beneath this terra firma not so firm under our feet, is fissure, (through these faults our own and not our own) which gives way to lava: kinetic fuel for revolution. abolition is leveling forests to field with heat, for ecological rebirth: have you ever heard of seeds that germinate only after fire? abolition is making homes in vacant spaces: in jagged floorboards left ajar in this for sale, rented land across these man-made borders in the folds of our hands.

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Music, movies, podcasts, books and television to plant the seeds of abolition.

Movies

Dope is Death Time Prison in Twelve Landscapes Mangrove Hunger Clemency If Beale Street Could Talk It's a Hard Truth Ain't It The Mustang The Force Crime + Punishment Beyond the Wall The Farm: Life Inside Angola Prison Serving Life Black Power Mixtape BET: Boiling Point - Attica MILWAUKEE 53206 Belly of the Beast Trial of the Chicago 7 No Human Involved 23

Books We Do this Till We Free Us by Mariame Kaba Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis Beyond Survival Edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha Prison by Any Other Name by Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law Abolition. Feminism. Now (coming out in July 2021) by Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and Beth Richie Abolition Now!: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex

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Abolition - a political vision with the goal of eliminating prisons, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.

Academic industrial complex - an ideological state apparatus by which the capitalist system reproduces itself ideologically. "Education" is not innocent or neutral, it is designed to teach people to be subject to colonial and capitalist structures.

Accomplice - the actions of an Accomplice are meant to directly challenge institutionalized racism, colonization, and White supremacy by blocking or impeding racist people, policies, and structures. Accomplices actively listen with respect, and understand that oppressed people are not monolithic in their tactics and beliefs. Accomplices aren’t motivated by personal guilt or shame.

Accomplices build trust through consent and being accountable.

Accountability - not only a critical mechanism of justice, but a powerful tool of transformation. We hold ourselves individually and collectively accountable for transforming oppressive and abusive dynamics that prevent us from being in integrity with and realizing our visions of justice.

Anti-Blackness - the systematic devaluing of Blackness and marginalization of Black people and their issues. This comes in the form of overt racism as well as in the disregard for Black lives and institutions.

Anti-Black racism - policies and practices embedded in institutions that reflect and reinforce beliefs, attitudes, prejudice, stereotyping and/or discrimination that is directed at Black people and is rooted in their unique history and experience of enslavement and colonization across the globe.

Black radical tradition - the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being.

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Capitalism - an economic system in which a small number of people maintain ownership and control of the means of production (the machines, factories, and land needed to make goods) and the ways of distributing and making money off those goods.

Carceral - any tool, institution, or practice that reinforces the prison industrial complex through policing, surveillance, and/or control.

Care/Care Work - a daily response to violence that chips away at the holds that capitalism and the prison industrial complex have on our lives. Care work is abolition in practice.

Cis-heteropatriarchy - the manifestation and institutionalization of male dominance over girls, women, and gender nonconforming people in society in general. Patriarchy is deeply connected with cissexism and heterosexism through the perpetuation and enforcement of the gender binary.

Colonialism - composed of two forms. External colonialism denotes the expropriation of fragments of Indigenous worlds, animals, plants, and human beings, extracting them in order to transport them to - and build the wealth, the privilege, or feed the appetites of - the colonizers. Internal colonialism is the biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora and fauna within the “domestic” borders of the imperial nation. This involves the use of particularized modes of control - prisons, ghettos, minoritizing, schooling, policing - to ensure the ascendancy of a nation and its white elite.

Decolonization - the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools.

Divestment - in recognition of the fact that all white wealth is stolen wealth, allies and accomplices should make reparations work a central part of their political practice, and organize other white folks to make reparations in addition to making personal contributions

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Formerly incarcerated - someone who was previously in jail or prison and is now free.

Gentrification - a process of neighborhood change that includes economic change in a historically disinvested neighborhood — by means of real estate investment and new higher-income residents moving in — as well as demographic change — not only in terms of income level, but also in terms of changes in the education level or racial make-up of residents.

Harm - we define harm BOTH as something one person does to hurt another — from yelling at your partner to killing another person — AND as the effect of oppression or violence carried out by the state. Importantly, these kinds of harm are linked.

Imperialism - a global system founded upon the seizure of wealth, orchestrated by the global North against the global South, resulting in intense wealth polarization between these two regions. The countries of the global North profit off of the labor and land of the global South, leaving these countries in the oppressive poverty that feeds the gross wealth of the North. Imperialism additionally enables and receives support from other types of oppression, i.e., white supremacy, capitalism and the patriarchy.

Intersectionality - a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there.

Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things.

Military industrial complex - phrase used to signify the rather 'comfortable' relationship that can develop between government entities (namely defense) and defense-minded manufacturers/organizations. This union can produce obvious benefits for both sides - warplanners receiving the tools necessary for waging war (while also furthering political interests abroad) while defense companies become the recipients of lucrative multi-million or multi-billion dollar deals.

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Neoliberalism - sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Non-profit industrial complex - a system of relationships between the State, the owning classes, foundations, and non-profit/NGO social service & social justice organizations that results in the surveillance, control, derailment, and everyday management of political movements.

Prison Industrial Complex - a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social, and political problems.

Racism - the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.

Safety - liberation from violence, exploitation, and the threat of further acts of violence. The safety that we seek manifests on three intersecting and mutually reinforcing levels - individual, community, and between communities.

“Soft” policing - methods of surveillance and control that are outside of the formal institution of policing, but are still rooted in carceral logic and serve to reinforce the prison industrial complex.

Trauma - harmful experiences that persist long after an immediate threat or abusive experience is over. The impact of trauma can live on in the individual, group, or culture for years and even generations.

White supremacy - a system of power that has its historical roots in the European effort for social, political, economic, and geographical dominance.

This system of power is also key to how the U.S. has been organized to systematically benefit white people and act out violence on people of color.

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Abolition Now! Andrea Smith Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism Community Ready Corps Accomplices and Allies Critical Resistance Abolition Toolkit Decolonization is Not a Metaphor Generation Five “Toward Transformative Justice” INCITE! Kimberle Crenshaw Movement 4 Black Lives Glossary "Neoliberalism - the ideaology at the root of all our problems" Ruth Wilson Gilmore The Anti-Oppression Network The Toronto Action Plan to Confront Anti-Black Racism Urban Displacement Project

"What is the Military Industrial Comlex?"

White Accomplices

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Make these coloring pages your own!

Customize them & share your art with the hashtag #CultivatingAbolitionNYU

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artist's comment We used imagery associated with gardening because we envision weeding out oppressive systems from our society and cultivating an abolitionist future to be much like the rewarding, reciprocal and nourishing work of gardening.

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@noNYPDNYU

@noNYPDNYU

nypdoutofnyu@gmail.com

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