The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Talk about what is your critique on mass incarceration and how it is a narrative for white reconstruction.

Dylan Rodríguez:

So it’s important that I start from this statement, which is that Mansa, you’ve heard me say this before, I think in other context we got to stop using the phrase mass incarceration. We got to stop using it. And there’s a couple reasons why. One is that it’s fraudulent, it’s inaccurate. It’s a fever dream of bullshit. It’s not mass incarceration, okay? The masses are not being policed, targeted and incarcerated. It’s a targeted war with asymmetrical casualty. So it’s not mass. When you say mass, it sneaks a kind of white liberalism in through the back door, within a social and otherwise a kind of social justice or a pseudo abolitionist discourse. It’s not slavery, it wasn’t mass slavery,

Mansa Musa:

It was slavery.

Dylan Rodríguez:

It was the captivity and trafficking of Africans. That’s what it was. Anything else is ridiculous. So it falls into the narrative of white reconstruction because this is the logic of white liberal reform permeates so much of what in contemporary terms we would come to call social justice discourse, rhetoric and movements in the sense that there’s this kind of demand that you have to find a way to universalize a relationship, to targeted suffering in order to make it palatable, to organize around. So rather than call it shoot Manning marable of all people, the Urban League, one of the more conservative black organizations, civil society organizations in the United States, between manning Marable, between the Urban League, et cetera. In the eighties, they in their own ways referred to the emerging Reagan administration war on drugs through the terms of anti-black genocide in the eighties.

They weren’t calling it mass genocide, general genocide, universal genocide. This was, they identified it correctly as a targeted policing and incarceration of primarily poor urban black population. So they said this has genocidal implications to it. So fast forward 10 to 15 years, you have the rise of the prison industrial complex, the form of anti-black, anti brown domestic war that gets turned into an infrastructure, the infrastructure being the policing and prison industrial complex that gets turned into the phrase mass incarceration around the early 2000 tens. Okay, so let me talk about that. A couple things happened in the early 2000 tens. One is that our colleague, Michelle Alexander’s book came out the New Jim Crow, and there’s a lot of energy behind it, and it circulated massively. It was widely read by generations of people. And I will argue that the analysis is a liberal analysis.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, of course. And let me side,

Dylan Rodríguez:

We got to say that Mansa, because a lot of people would not concede that. A lot of people, a lot of people that I’ve talked to who don’t honestly don’t know that they say it’s an abolitionist analysis, but she would tell you it wasn’t, anyway, go ahead.

Mansa Musa:

No, I’m sorry about it. You get back. I was just at a thing in Georgetown and she was one of the persons going there, and she said after she wrote that book, okay, going back to what liberals do, they got to find somebody to be, they spoke person for their ideas so they can get this narrative out. So she said it, she said that, mind you, after she wrote the book, now what’s going on in Palestine is front page and center. And if you say anything other than Israel is right, they got a right to defend themselves. They kidnapped me killed. Yeah. If you say anything other than that, you being blackballed, she said out her own mouth, said she was a coward because she didn’t stand up because she wanted to protect the gain that she had. And then she got to a point where her conscious wouldn’t let her sit on sit back and say, I can’t say nothing. But she, by her own admission, she recognized that. But I’ve been looked at that book in the context that it was given and wild,

Dylan Rodríguez:

Hey, to her credit, at least she’s honest. I give Professor Alexander, I give Michelle credit, she’s honest. She will tell you, during that phase of my political existence, I was not where I am now. And I’ll tell you what’s interesting is that in the 15 or so years since Michelle Alexander published New Jim Crow, her political and ideological positions have actually come closer toward a radical and abolitionist focused liberationist position than it was during that time. But here’s the thing that happens in terms of thinking through, first of all, the book uses prominently uses the phrase mass incarceration. So that becomes part of it. And then simultaneously, in many ways, the book was just kind of the propaganda arm of what I view as a liberal progressive philanthropic agenda fueled by foundations to canonize the phrase mass incarceration. And the way it canonize it is, is not only by platforming spokespeople, not only by supporting the circulation of certain kinds of books, but actually philanthropic foundations created research and funding streams for think tanks for academics. It created organizing streams for grassroots organizations and whatnot organized around the term mass incarceration. So the other reason why that phrase is so fraudulent and damaging is it presumes the notion that the problem is not incarceration. The problem is mass incarceration.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, yeah, that’s right. That’s

Dylan Rodríguez:

Right, Dylan. Right? That’s

Mansa Musa:

Right, that’s right.

Dylan Rodríguez:

So whether it’s the Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, all these kind of liberal humanitarian type foundations, which are again, given our previous definition of civilization, these are the think tanks of civilization. Their funding, research, artistic and organizing efforts around the phrase mass incarceration, that is based on a strident, reformist framework. The idea that the point of engaging with mass incarceration is to reduce incarceration to a respectable level. So maybe rather than having two and a half million people in some version of lockup from children to elders, maybe you get onto a mission, okay, we will no longer call it mass incarceration when the threshold reaches 1.5 million, no one ever told

Mansa Musa:

Us,

Dylan Rodríguez:

Right? No one ever told us when it would stop being mass incarceration, general squishy liberal term. But it’s no different man than there’s other terms like this that also do the same fraudulent work. The phrase school to prison pipeline is another one.

I have a couple comrades, Connie one and Damien, so joiner that did some foundational analysis of this, and they showed how it’s the very same forms of academic and philanthropic collaboration that canonize the term school to prison pipeline based on a couple assumptions. One is that the notion that school is actually a great place to be, which for many people it is not. Why could, it’s a continuity with prison. The school is actually one of the most carceral police sites that people go to other than jail or jail or juvenile incarceration. So the idea instead is that it’s not a pipeline. It’s actually kind of an overlapping flow. It’s like two tributaries that flow into the same.

Mansa Musa:

We don’t want to the same place.

Dylan Rodríguez:

Yeah, that’s the point. So this is the thing is that when we start to hear these phrases like mass incarceration, like school to prison pipeline, when we start to hear these things get canonized and used in a universal way, put it this way, as soon as you see a professor, somebody in my line of work, as soon as you see one of my coworkers start to use the phrase in their research start, as Fanon would say, start sharpening your swords, start sharpening your swords. You need to start asking questions about where that’s coming from, what’s funding it. Usually there’s some kind of foundation or think tank that’s funding that operation and they will institutionalize it. I mean, we’re in a moment right now as well where prison education is another major funding point for universities and for philanthropic

Mansa Musa:

Foundation.

Dylan Rodríguez:

You see it everywhere. So we have to start asking questions. What is that? Because a lot of the people who are in my line of work, I argue with them all the time because they try to tell me that these prison education programs where you sign a memorandum of understanding generally with the warden, with the state corrections folks, you sign an MOU with them and they try to make the argument to me that somehow what they are doing is abolitionists.

This is the problem, right? This is the problem is that you are doing something that is actually an extension of the Department of Corrections by doing prison education and you are calling it abolitionists. That’s the problem. If we were honest about it and said, okay, this is not abolitionists, but we’re doing this because we’re trying to reach out to a tiny fraction of the people who are locked up, maybe 20, 25 people who are locked up, who have a good chance to get parole so that they can leave with a college degree. You know what? I’d actually be cool at some level with people who just said that. I guess that’s at least an honest representation. The problem that we have right now is that people will take something which is an overtly minor incremental liberal reform type effort, meaning something like prison education, and they’ll inflate it and try to douse us. People nowadays, they call it gaslighting, right? It is a form of liberal propaganda and they’ll try to saturate our thinking and make us believe that somehow it is abolition. It is not. You’re actually undermining abolition, right? Because you’re legitimizing the prison system.

Mansa Musa:

System. And I’d like to take this a little further because I want our audience to understand that we both had the same disdain for liberals. We both had the same disdain for what is called liberals. Lemme say that, but Malcolm say a Democrats and the Republicans, Dixie… ain’t no more than Dixiecrats now. And it’s the same thing when we’re talking about a Republican and a Democrat. You saying one is a conservative and one is a liberal. No, they’re both operating out the same allies playbook. And we always get quoted upon this liberal, this so-called liberal projection or analysis. And like you say, they heavily, this thing I was with when Michelle Alexander was there, that’s what everybody there was philanthropic. Everybody there was at the Georgetown, they got everybody in there that’s giving money to nonprofits. And that right there become the problem because you don’t have the right to your autonomy once you take it and accept that money.

Dylan Rodríguez:

That’s right.

Mansa Musa:

Talk about how the 13th amendment essentially to Y reconstruction and the prison industrial complex.

Dylan Rodríguez:

Yeah, I think it’s important to think about the 13th Amendment in a really particular way. So let me say one thing about how I see the implication of the 13th Amendment being kind of seized by a certain kind of liberal discourse that leads to problems. And that’s the notion that the 13th amendment needs to be discussed primarily because it creates the capacity to exploit incarcerated people for free labor, meaning involuntary servitude. So folks don’t know 13th Amendment. Look it up real quick. Press pause, read it real quick. It’s like a couple sentences long. But what it inscribes as the conditions of the so-called emancipation era of the United States is the notion that involuntary servitude will no longer be allowed in the United States or any of its connected territories except for as punishment

Mansa Musa:

For

Dylan Rodríguez:

A crime. So in other words, it actually authorizes involuntary servitude at the site of conviction and incarceration. So the reason why that’s important is not primarily, not even in a significant way because of the exploitation of prison labor. That’s not the reason why it’s important. In other words, the way that a fixation on prison slave labor can be damaging is that you can have a reform of the prison system in which people are either compensated minimum wage or they eliminate prison labor completely. And you’re still going to have the prison industrial complex. You’re still going to still have carceral, domestic warfare. It will not stop that. In some ways, it might actually enhance and increase it. The other part of this too is that the fixation on prison slave labor by way of the 13th Amendment, I think it also dissipates the political energy of a lot of collectives and organizations towards trying to abolish the prison slave labor component of the 13th Amendment. This is something that I closely observed here in California a couple of years ago with a proposition that was attempting to abolish prison slave labor.

Here’s the thing, it failed. I live in a state, supposedly liberal state where it overwhelmingly failed. So the overwhelming majority of voters in California rejected the notion that you needed to abolish prison slave labor. So they’re for it. That’s the other part. So people are in favor. They’re in favor of captive people doing involuntary servitude. And then the third thing, and this is the most important thing in my view, is that a misreading of implications of the 13th Amendment fails to understand that the reason why it’s so crucial is not because of the hyper exploitation of prison slave labor. No, it’s because what it’s actually about is the logic of anti-black terror. What the 13th Amendment actually does is by virtue of the phrase involuntary servitude, we all know what that means. It’s not the kind of generic notion of mass slavery. It’s about the particular form of policing ens and enslavement, chattel trafficking that involved black people in the transatlantic trafficking complex and in the apartheid formation of the United States, the plantation slavery and apartheid formation of the United States. It’s about a society that is premised on anti-black state terror.

So the logic of the 13th Amendment is actually that what it says is that we will actually formally reproduce the conditions of involuntary servitude, which means all the things I just said, except now we’re going to say we’re authorizing at the site of incarceration. So in that sense, it eg legitimates the foundational anti-black terror of the United States by way of the plantation apparatus, the slave plantation apparatus into its policing and so-called criminal justice and incarceration apparatus. So I think that’s a reform, okay, that is emblematic of what we’re talking about here with white reconstruction. That’s what the 13th feminine is. It actually reinscribe and reproduces the carceral domestic anti-black warfare of the United States by virtue of a reform that again, takes the shape of abolishing slavery. When a fifth grader is taught about, or when they used to get taught about, when they used to be taught about the end of the Civil War and so forth and so on, at best they would be taught that the 13th Amendment entailed emancipation. It meant the formal abolition of slavery. So we have to rethink and theorize all that for the implications that it has for all of our loved ones who are held captive.

Mansa Musa:

And so we have Bob Moley say War, war in the east, war in the West, everywhere there’s war. So now we find we can take and transpose that saying into what’s going on in prisons. Now we have strikes, Alabama’s reported to be going on statewide strike. We had the Georgia strike in 2010. We had Pelican Base strike, which the movie, the documentary for the benefit of everybody. They need to look at that and see the tenacity that went into that to get that done. We had that strike. What do you see? Can you talk about or expand on what you see going on in terms of dissatisfaction and the organizations and organizing around people that’s affected by taking the stance and doing something about it?

Dylan Rodríguez:

So this is a great way to end our conversation because a lot of what we talked about today had to do with the liberal magical thinking that permeates so much of social justice and anti-racist and grassroots organizing that is affected by academia, by philanthropic foundations, by elected officials, by the democratic party, et cetera. And then you have this recent sequence of incarcerated people going on strike, and the strikes have taken various forms, which I think is really crucial. Some of them are labor stoppages, some of them are hunger strikes. Some of them are basically like a concentrated version of a general strike, and some are a combination of all those things, right?

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Dylan Rodríguez:

So what they signify back to people who are paying attention in the non incarcerated, so-called free world, is another different kind of moment of clarity, which is people who are in the most vulnerable conditions of subjection, who are most exposed to everyday concentrated unmediated, unequivocal forms of state terror and state violence like physical, emotional, psychological, and otherwise make a collective commitment, which is actually a life and death commitment, they make a collective commitment to refuse to consent to the legitimacy of the state. That’s what it is. These are radical acts. Sometimes people get caught up in what the demands are of these strikes. The demands are important, but I think strikers will tell you the demands are formulated in a very tactical way.

So I think, yeah, so you got to pay attention to the demands, but you can’t lose sight of the fact. You can’t lose track of the fact that the very act of people who are locked up, many people who actually have a chance to get parole, I think most people actually have a chance to get parole. They’re putting themselves in direct vulnerability to the whims of a domestic warfare state by going on strike. But they’re so committed and so militant in demonstrating their refusal to accept the legitimacy of the state, the legitimacy of state power. They refuse to consent to the forms of terror that they’re subjected to. I mean, make no mistake, folks have consistently said that we went on strike because it was our last resort,

Mansa Musa:

Right?

Dylan Rodríguez:

Our suffering under this particular genocidal apparatus had gotten so intolerable that we had to go on strike because if we didn’t, we were going to fucking die anyways

Mansa Musa:

Anyway.

Dylan Rodríguez:

And so this is the moment of clarity, and what I’m getting at is that people who are not in jails, prisons, detention centers, et cetera, need to allow themselves to embrace some basic political humility, political humility, and be guided by the leadership of captive people that are taking militant and radical measures to refuse the legitimacy of the state. That is the lesson.

Mansa Musa:

Alright, thank you John. And you got the last word. What you want to leave our audience with,

Dylan Rodríguez:

Everyone here has to do two things. One, you’ve got to refuse the noise that is oncoming with the so-called midterm elections.

Mansa Musa:

Refuse

Dylan Rodríguez:

The noise of the midterm elections, refuse it,

Come on, refuse the impulse and get caught up in supporting some version of the Democratic Party. The Democratic party is not, they are part of the warfare genocidal apparatus. They are not the solution. That’s number one. Number two is that everybody who is paying any attention to the stuff that you and I are saying today, find a way to get engaged in some form of collective activity. Right? I’m not even saying join an existing organization because around where you are, they might be terrible, okay? But you find a way to create or join an existing collective of people. I don’t care if it’s a study group, okay? Like a poetry reading group, a mutual aid, like a neighborhood, whatever it might be. You got to get involved in collective activity where you can begin to stoke some autonomy, some autonomy, some self-determination away from these existing structures, which have nothing more than misery driving them,

Mansa Musa:

Don’t believe the height we found ourselves. And next year is the anniversary, I think the 65th anniversary of the Black Panther Park. But we found ourselves in the space where we didn’t call them we trade program, but they was, we called survival program, survival and revolution.

Dylan Rodríguez:

Yes.

Mansa Musa:

We didn’t call it, we took a position in warn Earth that we did, taking our families up to prisons. We took a position that we stood outside and protest against dehumanization that was going on in Attica. We went to Attica and represented the issues of Attica. So we are telling our audience, as y’all unpack this conversation, don’t believe the hype, don’t believe the midterm hype. Don’t believe the hype about what’s being perpetuated by this fastest government. Don’t believe the hype, what’s being perpetuated. Local governments don’t believe the height and they telling you anything other than why is no budget equity, why they can’t give you no money to feed you, why they can’t give you money for medical, why they can’t give you money for housing, why they can’t let you go in these abandoned buildings and turn ’em into a place to live. Don’t believe the height that the money ain’t there, the money is there. It is just that they don’t care. As Dylan said, when you look at the prisoners, we look at prisoners, they say, we don’t have no choice. What choice do you have today in society? We actually continue to support the real news around violence because guess what? We are actually the real news.