Dylan Brown (he/him/himself) /
Critical Resistance /
Oakland, CA /
Since the end of June, I have been working with Critical Resistance (CR), a national member-led organization that seeks to dismantle the prison industrial complex (PIC). When I think about the historical underpinnings of the sustained revolutionary moment we are all living through this summer, the first thing that comes to mind is “the wake.”
In scholar Christina Sharpe’s book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, she explains:
“I use the wake in all of its meanings as a means of understanding how slavery’s violences emerge within the contemporary conditions of spatial, legal, psychic, material, and other dimensions of Black non/being as well as in Black modes of resistance” (14).
I am living in the wake. My people are rebelling against U.S. policing (a modern continuation of 1700s slave patrols that were tasked with dismantling rebellions and chasing down stolen African peoples who had escaped enslavement) and are demanding an end to police violence and state terror. We are not appealing to our oppressors but are rather exercising our agency and using a variety of organizing tactics to demand freedom.
This understanding informs my work with the Oakland Chapter of CR. I work most frequently with the Oakland Chapter organizer, and I work as well alongside volunteer CR members in various organizational working groups. Overall, my work so far has mainly focused on supporting the emerging campaign to defund the Oakland Police Department and political education workshop development.
A recent project I worked on was the creation of a workshop that highlights the shared points of struggle in the environmental justice and PIC abolition movements. Conducting research for this project has allowed me to deepen my understanding of how the term “environment” in mainstream EJ work often does not take into account that prisons are part of our environment and a threat to the health of our communities, despite the fact that many prison facilities throughout the U.S. are built on highly toxic superfund sites.
An unexpected aspect of my time with CR this summer has been spent doing editorial work for their publication, The Abolitionist Newspaper. This publication is circulated to more than 7,000 readers internationally, both inside and outside of jails and prisons. Moreover, working with CR has helped me to deepen my own understanding of how to navigate working in a member-based organization. In this moment of upheaval, it has been extremely empowering working alongside Black and indigenous people to ensure the health and well-being of folks in our community.
Immersing myself in CR has provided a renewed sense of purpose and guidance in my life as I attempt to determine what I want my role in the movement to look like after I graduate from NYU in 2021.