Portside

Abolition of the carceral state is a fundamental political goal for the Left today: specifically, abolishing the carceral state’s logic and institutions. . Abolition is both a goal and a discourse: it informs the strategies we adopt, as well as the framework we use to critique the carceral state and describe alternatives.

Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, is being blackballed — itself a revealing phrase — from the National Football League with the collusion of the all-white owners. He is ostracized because a year ago he exercised his First Amendment right to free speech by taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem, as a symbol of protest against police shootings of unarmed African-American men.

As long as white children are constructed as innocent, we must continue to demand that children of color are as well. The idea of childhood innocence carries so much political force, we can’t allow it to be a whites-only club. We argue that black and brown children are as innocent as white children, we assume that childhood innocence is purely positive. The idea of childhood innocence itself is not innocent: It’s part of a 200-year-old history of white supremacy.

Reader Comments: GOP's Secret Health Bill - not popular in Red states; Across the Country, Verdicts Protect Cops Who Kill; Naomi Klein; Mueller's Trump Investigation - Follow the Money; Readers respond to various Portside posts - Progressive Electoral Politics, People's Summit, Socialists and Electoral Politics; On the United Front; Gig Work; and more...

The truth is ugly as sin. The NFL is denying Colin Kaepernick employment not because he isn’t “good enough” but because he is being shut out for the crime of using his platform to protest the killing of black kids by police. NFL owners don’t make pariahs out of players who beat women or face accusations of murder. Kaepernick’s pariah status is about sending a shot across the bow at every political athlete—particularly black athletes—that they better toe the line.

A call for solidarity for justice for Walter Scott from Black Lives Matter-Charleston, South Carolina in response to the trial of former South Carolina police officer, Michael Slager, who shot and killed Scott ended in a mistrial this week.

Reader Comments: Trump-A Setting Time Bomb; You Can Help Protect Our Elections; Inequality (and Climate Change) ARE Defining Issues of Our Time; Women Share Rape Stories; Paul Ryan's Fear - GOP Loss is Win for Bernie Sanders; Lift Us Up - A song for America (Sung by Bethany Yarrow; written by Peter Yarrow); Thoughts on Syria; Announcements: 70th Anniversary of Southern Youth Legislature; Justice for Laquan - Chicago; Book Talk: Women Fight the Islamic State

Before this year, we basically weren’t even able to really provide a very effective number of how many people with mental illness were killed by law enforcement officers. We know, across the country, that people with a mental illness are languishing in jails and emergency rooms, because we simply don’t have enough hospital beds for them.

Another Black man murdered by police. This time in Charlotte, North Carolina, one of the nation's 20 largest cities, The Queen City has tended to see itself as a beacon of New South moderation, but from slavery to segregation to police violence, it faces the same pressures as many other metropolises. Reporters on the ground say, that skepticism toward the police narrative on all counts is 'definitely in order.'

The opposition to Colin Kaepernick's protest - from the police unions to Beltway pundits to an online army of bigots-wants to ensure that this protest against police violence stays as segregated as possible. If high-profile white NFL or Major League Baseball players start to kneel in solidarity with the idea that Black Lives Matter, then the law-and-order crowd loses racism as the most effective tool in their kit to keep this movement quarantined.