‘Property’ and the Black experience
U of T prof argues for abolition of property and police presence that ownership necessitates
Running a brief but far-reaching and punchy 96 pages, “On Property” has an absolute certainty of purpose: calling for the abolition of private property ownership. A professor of Black, Canadian, cultural, queer and gender studies at the University of Toronto, Rinaldo Walcott serves up a pamphlet — a fundamentally activistic genre with roots stretching back to the mid-1700s — about radical abolitionism for the tense North American cultural moment of the present day.
Asked by Windsor-based independent publisher Biblioasis to develop an essay about policing and the abolition of property, Walcott explains the jolt of pleasure he felt, having “always wanted to write a pamphlet in the tradition of those I had read about as a child, concerning the great Black and white abolitionists of slavery and how they got word out about their cause.”
Writing a pamphlet that “continues the debate on abolition and the historical unfinished project of abolition for Black people,” Walcott argues his cause for a long-term project envisioned as ultimately resulting in the future “reordering of planetary life.”
Walcott’s believes the “entire system” of private property ownership, which necessitate the presence of police, must be dismantled.
Since how we presently live together was learned over hundreds of years, Walcott reasons “it can also be unlearned.” And because, in his view, “Black people will not be fully able to breathe — a word I do not use lightly — until property itself is abolished,” his call for change takes into account the complexities of the issue. Influenced early by aspects of Rastafarianism — “its communal philosophy and anti-capitalist stance” — while also rejecting neo-liberal individualism (with its net deficit of results, such as increased marginalization and inequality, and an entrenched belief that “Black lives are lesser”), Walcott touches on personal moments such as growing up in Barbados.
Across three chapters that stride confidently through history and data — uprisings, incarceration rates, police stops, news headlines, criminal stereotypes, carding and colonial revolts — he returns to key claims.
Notably, he says, “most white people believe that the police represent safety, security and order,” while that same forces represents a “significant problem of Black life.” He concludes: “An abolitionist future is not possible without the abolition of police.”
From there, the correlation between policing and private property (and the call for a societywide divesting from private property) makes credible sense. What’s more, if we all hope to live together better, half-measures and incremental changes strike Walcott as insufficient.
Minority inclusion “in a corrupt and broken system will do very little to change the system itself,” he asserts.
Audacious utopianism (one imagines an apoplectic multicultural coalition of property owners from the Atlantic to the Pacific), the hopes and imaginings of “On Property” will challenge conventional thinking, and Walcott’s proposals might also get relegated to the same category as the beauty contestant wishing for world peace.
For Walcott, however, current abolitionists are not naive dreamers or sloganeering apparatchiks. He says that “a bold demand for a different kind of future” refuses “the inevitability of our present organization of human life”: our views can change and so too can our systems, with the admirable result of life becoming statistically better.
And if statements such as “the problem of property is resolved through its removal” or calls to “abolish everything” can make some people quake, when Walcott’s pamphlet argues for the human ability to reconsider and rebuild societal structures, the stances come across as sensible and, better yet, doable.
Walcott cites philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s words that the “task ahead of us is to reinvent the world as we know it.” About that, he’s fully on board.
What’s more, if we all hope to live together better, half-measures and incremental changes strike Walcott as insufficient