‎“We had a feeling that we weren’t wanted in this country, a feeling that we were despised.” Alex Wheatle

“All governments, without exception, make only those concessions deemed absolutely necessary for the maintenance of the status quo; and if one wishes to know how highly this American republic esteems Black freedom, one has only to watch the American performance in the world.” James Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not Seen

Throughout London, poor black people are rebelling against anti-black governmentality, police violence and (Thatcher style) neoliberal penality. (There is a rich history of black power, feminist and Panther movements in Brixton and across England). Those very same forces of anti-black and anti-poor governmentality, racial and spatial violence, are active in the neoliberal city of Philly, symbolically and substantively we see it in the curfew that criminalizes black youth and their parents “to protect and serve” Center City and “University City” (the current name for university gentrified West Philadelphia) businesses, making the streets “safe” for hetero — and in the Center City “gayborhood,” homo — normativity, middle and upper class white and non-black adults. The curfew, a reactionary response to sometimes harmful convergences — marked as unruly “flash mobs” by mediatized discourse as a means of policing the crisis — operates in concert with increased surveillance of social media like Twitter. Speaking at the puplit and using angry rhetoric saturated by racial respectability and uplift ideology, the mayor unfortunately demonized and pathologized poor black youth and their parents and the district attorney agreed wholeheartedly. “What he was saying was perfectly accurate. People need to hear that….Call it for what it is.”

Curfew derives from “coverfeu,” meaning to cover and/or smother fire, dates back to William I’s edict. Curfews were used in the US (and the Carribean) to restrict movement and maintain social control of both free and enslaved blacks. Police constables patrolled cities and rural towns — from Savannah GA to Providence RI, from Washington DC to Boston MA — and arrested and brutalized blacks who violated curfew laws. The curfew traces back to slavery.

The curfew is also a manifestation of racial capitalism, anti-black governmentality & ageism. Transphobic police harrassment of black trans folks who are read as “underage” is going to have yet another legalized legitimation. It’s scapegoating the black poor and youth. Its being perpetuated by black and white officials, Democrats and Republicans, in our “post racial” era of mass incarceration. Its functioning in accord with the larger logic and matrix of the white supremacist, anti black, anti poor, homophobic and transgendercidal prison industrial complex.

Philadelphia’s continuum of anti-black, anti-queer, anti-trans police violence includes but is not limited to the MOVE bombing “This is America!”, Rizzo’s raids of gay clubs, coffeehouses and attacks on gender non conforming people, the “courtesy ride” the police provided for Nizah Morris.

“One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on Black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight…so unbearable a memory…But, no, they appear to glory in their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure their safety in chains and corpses.”

We have seen how our communities — black, disabled, queer and/or trans, poor, houseless, drug user, sex worker — have been impacted in the past and at present, by the prison industrial complex and criminalization. We have been subject to obliteration by police violence, so many lives have been extinguished and stolen. We are meant to perish but we are not disposable. Even as the prison industrial complex tries to contain our communities, keep our bodies and genders captive and policed, we know that our political imaginations are free. There are viable alternatives — both that already exist and are being created — to “organized abandonment,” to interpersonal harm, to the regulation of our lives and institutionalized death via the prison industrial complex. Let’s support and expand them.