George Floyd’s murder has led to an unstoppable movement. Black Lives Matter UK is a growing force – rooted in the UK, as in the US, in years of work by groups like United Friends and Families Campaign resisting racism and deaths in custody.
Inextricable from BLM’s demands are demands to defund the police, and the wider ‘carceral state’. Such questioning goes to the heart of liberal assumptions about the role of the police, prisons and other carcerative institutions. Liberals ask, ‘who will protect the community’? Liberal feminists ask, ‘who will protect women and girls from male violence’?
At such a time it’s critical to review the abolition feminism envisioned by Angela Davis, and to ask ‘who do you mean by the community?’, and ‘what do you mean by protection?’.
