Subverting State Violence

We live in a White, patriarchal carceral state that enacts daily violence on its citizens. Surveillance, criminalization, violent policing, incarceration, and deprivation are facts of life for millions of Americans and, importantly, the source of growing profit for the corporations who have been given cart blanche to monetize human suffering. This system is not the result of natural social evolution, but the carefully executed agenda of the U.S. Right.

From state persecution of Muslims in the post-9/11 era to the criminalization and demonization of sex work to the alignment of county sheriffs with influential far-right movements, this series will explore some of the most pressing and historically-rooted manifestations of state violence and the work of social justice organizers working to dismantle them. We conclude with a look at forty years of right-wing state infiltration–beginning with the formation of the New Right in 1981–and a strategic discussion of what must happen next in the fight for multiracial, feminist democracy.