By Rahsaan Mahadeo
After beginning my PhD in sociology at the University of Minnesota in 2011, it didn’t take long to realize that the Department does more than produce knowledge. It also produces police. And my discipline is good at its job. So good, in fact, that Thomas Lane and Alexander Kueng, two of the officers responsible for George Floyd’s murder, graduated from the Department of Sociology at the U. As a recent alum of the Department, I was troubled by its attempt to silence internal dissent by urging current graduate students to direct any media inquiries to the College of Liberal Arts. In a moment when protest and outcry is not only warranted, but necessary, silencing students is another example of sociology reproducing the problems it claims to study. Now is not the time for silence. Now is the time for sociology to reckon with its/our role in the production of a system subsidized by Black captivity, dispossession, debt and death.
An inside joke among sociologists is that we enter the field hoping to save the world. What then is the purpose of learning about a system that needs not to be saved, but dismantled? You see, I am not a police apologist. I am a police and prison abolitionist. I want to live in a world without police, prisons, detention centers and other destructive systems that have caused irreparable harm to my family and so many others. Any academic attempt to distinguish between “good policing” and “bad policing” makes policing itself not just theoretically possible, but legitimate. As a consequence, we must wrestle with our complicity in a system that is, rightly, being called out in this moment. The University of Minnesota has already committed to cutting ties with the Minneapolis Police Department. Now it must take the next step by cancelling carceral curriculum.
Courses like “Deviant Behavior,” “Criminal Behavior and Social Control,” “Terrorist Networks and Counterterror Organizations,” and “Juvenile Delinquency” not only legitimate the criminal legal system, but also employ academics. As sociologists, we encourage our students to exercise their sociological imaginations to make the mundane matter and reveal what is hidden in plain sight. Seldom do we ask, however, how sociology, as a discipline, remains complicit in hiding that which is hidden. For example, sociologists fail to consider how “deviance,” “delinquency,” “criminal,” and “terrorist” still conjure up racialized images that cops, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, and white vigilantes used to justify the killing of Black people. Sociology faculty have profited off of Black people’s pain for far too long. Within our field, careers are established on investigating lackluster “reform” measures that amount to tinkering with a fundamentally flawed system. Critiques of policing, jails, and prisons end up reifying and expanding state power, while denying any possible alternatives to systems of “crime and punishment.”
Criminologists remain the key architects of the university-to-police academy pipeline. They build this destructive infrastructure hoping to have something to read, write, and teach about.
However, Minnesota Sociology is far from the only institution implicated. Rather, what’s happening is symptomatic of a more pervasive problem in the discipline and higher education, more generally. Sociologists can no longer make a living off of life-taking systems. As demands to defund the police grow, there must be parallel calls to defund sociology departments invested in the production of police and greater state power. The sociology department at Minnesota should not struggle alone with this problem. All sociologists must find creative ways to spark students’ sociological imaginations and make the familiar (i.e. the criminal legal system) strange.
When I taught “American Race Relations” in the Fall 2018, I knew I could not in good conscience become another assembly line worker in the cop shop that is sociology. Hence, the course syllabus included both learning and unlearning objectives. I provided a counternarrative to the Department’s “Law, Crime and Deviance” track by assigning Andrea Ritchie’s, Invisible No More. The book lays bare the incommensurable levels of violence against Black women, Indigenous women and women of color by local, state, and federal authorities. We learned that violence is not anomalous to policing, but standard operating procedure, making “police brutality” redundant. The graphic scene of Derek Chauvin using his knee to casually press the life out of George Floyd makes this exceptionally clear. We also learned how sociologists and law enforcement cooperate to turn survival strategies into “crime.” We broke through the “gloom and doom” of sociology by imagining what a world without police would look like. Finally, we learned about the many visionaries in the Twin Cities already making these aspirations a reality through transformative justice and mutual aid networks.
Within every absence is a presence. The absence of police and prisons gives us greater opportunities to implement new ways to keep each other safe. Healing through harm is not sustainable, but healing through abolition is. Abolition is not simply the absence of oppressive systems, but the presence of new ways of addressing harm such as accountability pods, survivor support groups, and healing justice collectives. Organizers, activists, and scholars in the Twin Cities and around the globe already rely on these systems, proving that a world without police is possible. Sociologists need not feel threatened by the prospects of a police-free world. The likelihood that the end of policing may put some sociologists out of a job is real. But there also exists more meaningful opportunities to engage in acts of industrial sabotage now to help destroy that which is destructive. We must halt all police production lines in sociology departments immediately. Criminologists and others who expect their students to save the world, but remain adamantly opposed to transformative social change needed to do so must begin to search for a new line of work. Many sociologists work without any end in sight, while abolitionists recognize that endings are but opportunities for new beginnings. To many of us the end of policing is both near and clear. It’s now time for sociology to catch up.
When I received my final course evaluations for my “American Race Relations,” I expected a number of negative reviews given how triggering abolition is to students aspiring to become cops or with personal ties to law enforcement. So you can imagine how surprised when a student said they entered the class intending to become a police officer, but decided not to after learning about the terror police unleash on Black people every day. Maybe sociology can save lives after all.
Rahsaan Mahadeo holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Minnesota and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Georgetown University. Prior to beginning a career in academia, Rahsaan spent over seven years working as a youth worker in Providence and Boston. Rahsaan’s research examines how time is racialized, how race is temporalized and how racialization and racism take time. His current book manuscript, Funk the Clock: Transgressing Time while Young, Prescient and Black, is currently under review. His writing has appeared in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Theory in Action, Contexts and The Poetry Project Newsletter.
A version of this essay appears in Turthout.