When Peter Rachleff, former Macalester history professor, and Beth Cleary, former Macalester theater professor, opened The East Side Freedom Library to the public in 2014, visitors were greeted by dozens of dark blue chairs that circled between the bookshelves. According to their website, the library’s mission is to mobilize community knowledge through storytelling and conversation. That means that these chairs have rarely been empty in the twelve years since its opening.
As guests settled into these seats last Thursday, Feb. 26, they were greeted by a Pennsylvania high school teacher and abolitionist scholar named Arturo Castillon. His first question for the room: “Is abolition a dead concept?”
The event, titled “Taking Abolition Seriously,” was a part of the “Bring the Heat, Melt the ICE” week of action in the Twin Cities, which took place during the last week of February (ICE refers to Immigration, Customs and Enforcement). But anyone hoping for a straightforward answer on how to take abolition seriously would have been disappointed — and according to Castillon, that was the point.
“I wanted to bring out the tensions between reform and revolution within the movement, in order to provoke a collective discussion and try to get people to challenge their assumptions,” Castillon said.
“It’s not about someone telling anyone what abolition is supposed to mean or be about,” an organizer, who asked to remain anonymous due to safety concerns, said. “[It is about] helping people interrogate the idea for themselves.”
“I want to encourage debate,” said Castillon, as the discussion began. Going into the event, he had hoped to create a space where people felt they could disagree with each other, something that he considers “generative.”
Guests were up to the challenge. Across the next hour, participants disagreed with each other, found common ground and disagreed again. They drew out tensions between ideas of reformist and revolutionary abolition, the role of institutions in abolitionary movements, and what alternative systems outside of the state can look like.
“If there’s anything I would like people to take away from this discussion it’s more tools to think about what they believe and how it informs their actual practices,” said the anonymous organizer. “With buzzwords like ‘abolition,’ it’s too easy to just use the terms without grounding it in a real meaning and real practice.”
Castillon similarly hoped that participants would reflect on the materiality of abolition.
“Abolition is a practice, not an identity,” he said. “It is something you do as part of a day to day struggle for dignity and peace, and it is derived from the insurrectionary lineage of maroon societies, slave rebellions, the underground railroad, the American Civil War and Reconstruction,” Castillon said. “People need to learn how [to] overcome the separation between care work and insurrection, or between mutual aid and direct confrontation with the state, rather than treating them as binaries or opposed to each other.”
