Stop Cop City is a campaign to block the construction of a new militarized police training center in Atlanta and preserve the Weelaunee Forest. If built, Cop City would have a devastating effect on the people of Atlanta – most directly on Black communities. Last week on January 18, a law enforcement officer murdered Tortuguita, a forest defender organizing with the coalition to Stop Cop City alongside organizations like SURJ and Community Movement Builders. You can read more about Tort and their legacy in this resource doc.
Class is something white people in our movements rarely talk about. Yet is essential that we talk about and normalize it if we’re going to build a successful anti-racist movement.
How does class impact our organizing? What do middle-class and owning class folks have to learn from working-class leaders? How has the left historically ignored class and what’s the impact on our movement?
As we look at class, we want to look at it fully. This means looking at class identity, which is knowing what class we are part of (or if we don’t know, thinking about why we don’t know and what would help us to know). This means looking at class consciousness, which is understanding who is with us and who we are with related to class background and culture. This means bringing a class analysis, which means understanding how oppression is maintained and how we might dismantle it. Too often conversations about class, like conversations about race, get stuck in focusing on identity only or consciousness only or analysis only, and all these pieces matter and are necessary.
Require (and do not always receive) public assistance
Basic needs are unmet
Exploitation, underpaid/unpaid labor, high risk employment
Working Class people often experience the following:
Often wage laborers
Little or no access to formal education beyond high school (though student loans are shifting this dynamic so that more working class people are accessing higher education, often with great risk and sacrifice)
Debt
Rental housing or limited access to ownership
Few options with regard to field of employment (typically service, manual, caretaking)
Middle Class people often experience the following:
4 year college degree or more
Securely housed in owned home(s), ability to upgrade housing, renters by choice and not necessity
Able to control work, select job fields
Economically secure, but must remain employed
Owning Class people often experience the following:
Can expect large inheritance
Access to education as desired, including private or elite schools
Working is optional
Able to access luxuries
Class is a very complicated matter, and class groups are not clearly divided. For example, some people are born into one class and then change their class status due to (in)access to healthcare, education, employment, cross-class family relationships, and other challenges and opportunities. Also, due to the successes of poor working class organizing on issues like living wages, housing access, and education, some class markers have and will continue to shift.
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Class is not just the amount of money someone has in their pocket or the resources they can access. It is a culture. The spaces that we grow, learn, play, work, and struggle in teach us norms, or how to do things on a daily basis. These norms include things like language, how to build relationships, and who has power or influence.
It is important to note that the spectrum of poor and working class identity is very broad, and that often as people have more secure working class employment, they are pushed to resemble the middle class more and more due to the shame working class people are made to feel. When we talk about class culture, we are talking about general things that are often seen in communities. These are not absolutes.
The social construct of race in the United States was created and enforced by Owning Class people in the 1600s to prevent poor white European people from joining African and Native American people in revolts. Since then, economics have played a long and painful history in the ways that racism has been enforced against People of Color, and how poor and working class white people have been scapegoated for racism.
When many people think of what racism and white supremacy in the United States looks like, they fall back on negative stereotypes of poor and working class white people. In reality, it is the hyper-wealthy, the corporate elite, and the politically powerful who benefit from maintaining the status quo.
In the midst of the Black-led mass uprisings across the globe calling for and end to police murders, SURJ created this toolkit for white communities to learn and take action around calls to invest money in communities and divest from Police.
Living in a world without police is possible and is on its way.
Black, Indigenous, and people of color-led movements and organizations have been dreaming of, planning for, and working towards a world without police for generations. Minneapolis is showing us that defunding the police is possible. As the Movement for Black Lives explains, this is about investing in “Black communities, determined by Black communities, and divestment from exploitative forces including prisons, fossil fuels, police, surveillance and exploitative corporations.” Re-investing police budgets in education, healthcare, and community safety is possible and necessary.
Nine Minneapolis City Council members have publicly committed to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and begin a community led process to re-imagine and reinvest in a transformative model of community safety. The people are speaking and Minneapolis is showing the world that transformation and abolition of the policing and prison system is possible in our lifetimes.
As this toolkit is being released the Movement for Black Lives is planning a weekend of action over for the Juneteenth holiday. This weekend of action will primarily center the demand of defunding the police and investing in Black communities. As well as the demand that Trump must resign.
We know that for decades the greedy few and the Right have used racist fear-mongering to divest from public health infrastructure, good housing and healthcare and instead pump money into police departments implementing social control and retributive — not restorative or transformative justice. At Showing Up for Racial Justice, we refuse to accept the lie that our communities are safer with more police.
SURJ has attempted to compile some of the best of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) work on abolition which has been generations in the making. SURJ is offering this for white folks who are newly politicized around abolition and defunding, those who are trying to understand or deepen their understanding of what it means, those who want to take action for Juneteenth, and those who want to join the ongoing organizing to defund the police.
Join us and deepen your commitment to fighting for a transformed world. (view full SURJ Statement here).
Definitions:
We recognize that there are a lot of misconceptions about what it means to call for defunding or abolishing the police. In this section, you will find some definitions. Those who actively oppose abolition, media and the Right will purposely obscure the calls for abolition and insight fear among people that abolition will lead to more violence and no mechanism for accountability for harm.
A social relationship made up of a set of practices that are empowered by the state to enforce law and social control through the use of force. Reinforcing the oppressive social and economic relationships that have been central to the US throughout its history, the roots of policing in the United States are closely linked the capture of people escaping slavery, and the enforcement of Black Codes. Similarly, police forces have been used to keep new immigrants “in line” and to prevent the poor and working classes from making demands. As social conditions change, how policing is used to target poor people, people of color, immigrants, and others who do not conform on the street or in their homes also shifts. The choices policing requires about which people to target, what to target them for, and when to arrest and book them play a major role in who ultimately gets imprisoned.
What do we mean by ‘defund the police’?
Across the country, $100 billion is spent on law enforcement. What is meant by defunding the police is reducing the size of police budgets and re-allocating the funds toward social services. If more funding was allocated to social programs and the social safety net was strengthened, this would have a positive effect on public health and safety without the harmful consequences that police have in communities.
The Movement for Black Lives has made a direct call nationally to defund the police which we are fully aligned with. Read more here about what they mean by this. This video by BLM co-founder and Yes on R campaign strategist Patrisse Cullors gives a good overview of what we mean by Defunding the Police. Here is an article by SURJ Leadership Team member Hilary Moore calling for white folks to with draw support for policing and call for defunding the police.
What do we mean by the ‘prison industrial complex’?
Policing is one component of the prison industrial complex (PIC). Critical Resistance defines the PIC as:
the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems. Through its reach and impact, the PIC helps and maintains the authority of people who get their power through racial, economic and other privileges. There are many ways this power is collected and maintained through the PIC, including creating mass media images that keep alive stereotypes of people of color, poor people, queer people, immigrants, youth, and other oppressed communities as criminal, delinquent, or deviant. This power is also maintained by earning huge profits for private companies that deal with prisons and police forces; helping earn political gains for “tough on crime” politicians; increasing the influence of prison guard and police unions; and eliminating social and political dissent by oppressed communities that make demands for self-determination and reorganization of power in the US.
What do we mean by divest and invest?
The Movement for Black Lives policy platform demands include divest/invest: “investments in the education, health and safety of Black people, instead of investments in the criminalizing, caging, and harming of Black people. We want investments in Black communities, determined by Black communities, and divestment from exploitative forces including prisons, fossil fuels, police, surveillance and exploitative corporations.”
a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment. From where we are now, sometimes we can’t really imagine what abolition is going to look like. Abolition isn’t just about getting rid of buildings full of cages. It’s also about undoing the society we live in because the PIC both feeds on and maintains oppression and inequalities through punishment, violence, and controls millions of people. Because the PIC is not an isolated system, abolition is a broad strategy. An abolitionist vision means that we must build models today that can represent how we want to live in the future. It means developing practical strategies for taking small steps that move us toward making our dreams real and that lead us all to believe that things really could be different. It means living this vision in our daily lives.
Check out a current campaign to demand an abolition of policing, visit www.8ToAbolition.org SURJ National is in line with the 8toAbolition demands. We are in support of the Movement for Black Lives main demands of Defunding the police, Investing in Black Communities, and Trump Must Resign. 8toAbolition demands are in line with these demands from the Movement for Black Lives which you can learn more about here.
#8toAbolition was released shortly after Campaign Zero’s #8CantWait platform. Campaign Zero has since apologized and changed course after being challenged on their platform. You can read more about that pushback here.
Resources and Examples of Local Defund Police Campaigns
Now is a critical time to use the momentum of the uprising happening around the country in urban and rural areas to defund the police and create alternatives. This can happen through ongoing campaigns, or by using the energy of protests to push those in power to make the demands that we have a reality.
Justice Now PNW has tips and templates for how to contact city council and local officials to demand they defund the police. Organize a phone zap to call and email local officials and decision makers.
Sign up to be part of the ongoing national campaign of defunding the police with the Movement for Black Lives by signing this petition.
Resources and Examples of Alternatives to the Police
The notion of policing has become equated with public safety. Furthermore, an initial reaction to the idea of defunding police usually is, “who do we call?” Limiting public safety to be carried out by law enforcement also limits our imagination from developing possibilities that can exist and be scaled up across the country to replace current policing with alternative community-based responses. Examples of alternatives do exist and they benefit communities without leading to violence and killing perpetrated by law enforcement. From intervening on violence, mental health crisis, or drug overdose, communities have been practicing alternatives to calling the police for many years. Here are some examples:
CAHOOTS [Although they do collaborate with law enforcement, this is a model that has been built out to redirect 911 mental health calls away from law enforcement]
Creating Alternatives Ways of Dealing with Conflict and Harm
Part of our work is to share the wisdom from organizations and movements that have been building alternatives to the police and systems of community safety and accountability without the police. It’s important to learn about and begin to build strong infrastructures and networks for alternatives, while creating a culture shift to normalize not calling police.
Many people are concerned about going too fast or what will emerge in the absence of police. The importance of being strategic and also creating our own alternatives so we don’t leave a void for far right paramilitary groups to take over; especially in rural areas.
Defunding the police and investing in health care, housing, education, a living wage, transformed economy, and healthy environment–all the things communities need for actual safety and wellbeing–is long-term work. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color led organizing to divest from systems of harm and invest in systems of care have given the vision and path forward. Global uprisings are bringing about transformations faster than we could have previously imagined, and M4BL reminds us to stay involved beyond when this is an uprising moment. Let’s continue organizing, learning, building relationships, taking action, and bringing more white people into the movement for racial justice. Join SURJ by signing up here. Find and join a local SURJ chapter or affiliate, and if there isn’t one in your area, start one!
