Justin C. Mueller

Tag: Violence

  • Categorical and Dialectical Abolitionism

    We need to have a difficult conversation about prison abolitionist responses to police violence. Many abolitionists have responded to the Chauvin conviction by opposing any calls to imprison or punish him. This response is something I find politically and ethically unconvincing.

    Yes, prisons are a nightmare and the bane of a just society. Yes, they eviscerate social relations and exacerbate structural violence, foreclose futures, and denigrate human dignity, and in the U.S do so in service of a larger system of white supremacy. Yes, retribution is a shallow conception of justice that fails to mend wrongs. And yet, what is to be done — right now — with your Derek Chauvins, your Darren Wilsons, your Daniel Pantaleos?

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  • The Violence of Demanding “Peaceful” Protest

    In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, dozens of U.S. cities have be rocked with unrest, ranging from small protests to open rebellion and riots. In watching coverage of the protests over the last week, several predictable issues and themes have emerged in how these protests are being framed by city and state leaders, police, and mainstream media outlets. I think that those of us who are committed to anti-racist politics need to directly grapple with some of these frames if we are going to shift how our collective efforts to challenge racism and injustice are understood going forward, for the wider public and for ourselves:

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  • The Dangers of Remembering MLK

    mlk-in-the-end

    As a national holiday, the commemoration of Martin Luther King jr. has been fraught with problems. Aside from the resistance to its creation, the act of collective remembrance itself is a deeply political affair. The building of monuments, the preservation of moments, and the mythologizing of symbols, people, and places are much more than a simple, dry cataloguing of dead facts. They are acts of creation that can be deeply contentious, as other recent conflicts surrounding Confederate symbols and statues have (again) reminded us. These fragments of pasts are commonly portrayed as something like a woven quilt, with patchwork pieces that we stitch, replace, and re-stitch together to tell shared stories that inform our understanding of the present and convey values and lessons for the future. We can also think of them as weapons, to be used and deployed in struggles over those same understandings, values, and lessons. As weapons, these commemorations can be dangerous, depending on how they are wielded and to what ends.

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  • Haiti and the violence of quasi-natural disasters

    san_domingo

    Hurricanes are destructive. Haitian misery, however, is not a natural disaster. It is the logical consequence of the quite man-made deprivations and vulnerabilities it has been subject to for the entirety of its existence… the slavery of multiple empires… over a century of extorted tribute payments to France after independence for the crime of abolishing slavery… multiple military interventions, coups, or occupations by the United States government designed to prop up brutal and corrupt dictators who proceeded to bleed the country dry… the destruction of its domestic agriculture and food security through neoliberal trade policies imposed through weaponized debt via the WTO and Washington policymakers… even hurricanes themselves are no longer free of the fingerprints of malignantly negligent human agency.

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