Read on Twitter
Starting in 15 minutes!! If you can't make it, we'll be live-tweeting in this thread! https://twitter.com/culanth/status/1308083235126153221
We're off! @savannahshange begins by clarifying the difference between revolution and abolition: Revolution seeks to win control of the state and its resources, while abolition wants to quit playing and raze the stadium of settler-slaver society for good
Abolition is a messy break-up with the state, a rending; as a methodology, abolitionist anthropology is principally a genre of Black study
Rather than opposition, the utopia-dystopia dyad is symbiotic; utopia offers an education that aims to specific ideals, while dystopia is also an educational project that aims toward death - and Black folks in San Francisco have a lot to teach us about how to survive apocalypse".
Abolition is not a synonym for resistance; it encompasses the ways in which Black people and our accomplices work within, against, and beyond the state in the service of collective liberation
As an analytic, abolition demands specificity—the very kinds of granularity that ethnography offers as an accounting of the daily practices that facilitate Black material and symbolic death
Abolitionist anthropology is an ethic and a scholarly mode that attends to the interface between the multisited anti-Black state and those who seek to survive it
Savannah recounts her ethnographic position - at a desk, in the school hallways. This hallway was occupied by a large but impish security guard, Jeff (or "Sweety-Pie") - whose title was "student advisor", rather than "security guard"
Even with his fancy title, his piercings, his blackness, his queerness, and his dessert-themed nickname, Jeff served the same function as other school security across the US: removing children, mostly Black ones, from classrooms and delivering them to their administrative fate
Cyarea never stops moving, and aspires to dance in music videos like Ciara, the R&B star whose name she invokes every time a new teacher hesitates when they see the attendance roll
Cyarea’s projection of self is quotidian in its mass-market ubiquity, but dissonant from the self-styling of most of Robeson’s Black staff, who instantiated “Black alterity.” In contrast, Cyarea instantiates “Black girl ordinary,” a genre of “crisis ordinary"...
which, after Lauren Berlant, posits the ordinary as an impasse shaped by crisis in which people find themselves developing skills for adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on
"Black girl ordinary" can serve as a counterweight to what we might imagine as "Black boy special", a category of reverence and urgency that has coalesced around a century of handwringing over the fate of Black men
Only 4 young Black men crossed the stage at the 2013 and 2014 commencements, and a whopping 7 out of the 56 graduates of 2015 were Black boys. Both nonblack and Black staff participated in the institutional focus on Black boys
And yet, in the 2013 and 2014 graduations, five Black girls graduated each year, compared to four Black boys - and in 2015, when seven Black boys graduated, only four Black girls crossed the stage
But while staff expressed concern for excessively discplining Black boys, the student who had been sent out of class the most - 23 times in one year - was Azizi, a Black girl
"You can always tell a Sunnydale girl", says Kate, a white staff member. Sunnydale is a large project, nicknamed "The Swamp" - but for Kate, The Swamp is less a political economic force than an ontological one
Many of the girls from Sunnydale were in fact high-achievers - Kate didn't know, as she had never taught them. She had only encountered many of these girls in the hallway, when she disciplined them for being out of class.
"You can always tell a Sunnydale girl", Kate says, and characterises girls from the projects as hurt, mistrustful, and mad. And yet, Kate never wondered about the histories that underpin why Black girls might be mistrustful of agents of the state
Moreover, Kate's dismissal of Sunnydale and Black girls that live there show how Kate uses The Swamp to foreclose on Black futures generally. This pulls discussions of time into those of space, anticipating the demolition of The Swamp
Kate’s in fact argued that more kids need to be kicked out of Robeson in the service of social justice: “If I can’t really be a social justice educator because I have just a couple of kids being cray-cray, then how are we any different?"
Kate continues, "I want kids to know that they are in a special place. I want them to treat it like they’re in special place.” The Black girls were not demonstrating the proper spirit and bent backs of deserving Negroes (after Sadiya Hartman), so they had to be kicked out
Robeson's exceptionality, and Kate's dreams of being a social justice educator, *requires* the punishment of unruly Blackness. [NB. Kate later left the school due to tensions about her propensity for punishment. She left it to do a PhD in educational policy]
“You can follow me, but I’m not gonna to talk to you.” This is what Tarika told Savannah while she was conducting her ethnography. But, rather than trying to build rapport, Savannah writes in collusion with Tarika's refusal
"I refuse to write light into dark, to coerce quiet from noise, or to wipe color onto a canvas soaked in Black".The reclamation of Black girl sovereignty in the ethnographic text may only be possible through what John Jackson calls a thin description
This is what Shange calls "Black girl opacity" - demanding to be seen, but refusing to be seen through
Now, abolition has gone mainstream. For instance, Naomi Osaka wore masks that named Black people murdered legally and extralegally in the US. And some might say this is a toothless protest. But there's a notable shift - her partner wore a shirt that said "Defund the Police"
But where "Black Lives Matters" - a phrase common at the self-consciously progressive school - there is an assumed "we" in the phrase: "Black lives matter because they are part of we" - a "we" that is given its salience by the centring of whiteness
Conversely, "Defund the Police" is addressed to you. *You* will defund the police.
Now Shange is answering some excellent audience questions about racialisation, taking abolitionist methodologies into interdisciplinary spaces, and abolishing ethnography
Please excuse all the typos!! Here's Shange's book if you're keen to read more (and you should read it!!) https://www.dukeupress.edu/progressive-dystopia
and the video will be made available soon!! Follow @GCCenterWomen for details
Last note - @GCCenterWomen have a great live-tweet thread of the talk here 
https://twitter.com/GCCenterWomen/status/1308529101234466819
https://twitter.com/GCCenterWomen/status/1308529101234466819
