New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)life of Erica Garner

By Joy James

Joy James has a long, well regarded career marked by praise from author/activists including Angela Davis, Robin D.G. Kelly, Howard Zinn, Manning Marable and reviews in trade, academic, and popular press.

This, her first book published by a trade publisher, is poised to break out and join with her academic/activist peers in reaching a broader audience

This book was inspired by and is dedicated to Erica Garner–Eric Garner’s daughter–and will be embraced by Black Lives Matter activists

• Language: English
• Publisher: Common Notions
• Release date: Oct 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781942173984

Joy James

Joy James is the Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams College and author of Resisting State Violence among other works, and the editor of the Angela Y. Davis Reader and co-editor of The Black Feminist Reader.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

On a December night in 2014, I found myself stuck in a cab traveling from Penn Station to upper Manhattan.¹ My African driver was frustrated, but also patient and sympathetic, as I became increasingly annoyed by the slow pace of traffic and the mounting cab fare. As we inched forward in traffic that had been rendered all but a standstill, the driver suggested that I simply walk back to Penn Station and navigate the subway. He then, without my asking, voided my $75 fare for the seven blocks that the cab had sat or crawled through.

The driver knew what I did not. His patience and generosity, I later realized, were inspired by an act of political and communal recognition. He understood that the traffic was snarled, not because of routine congestion in the metropolis, but because of street protests against predatory policing and anti-Black violence. I accepted what I first thought to be kindness and charity only to later recognize it as an expression of political solidarity and ethical community.

Exhausted by the Amtrak ride from my institutional work at the college, I made my way on foot through animated crowds back to then Pennsylvania Station (now Moynihan Hall-Penn Station) on West 34th Street. Energized by the shouts, chants, and bedlam, I gradually realized that this was not typical Gotham dysfunction, but a #NYCShutItDown mass protest over the NYPD murder of Eric Garner and the Staten Island Grand Jury’s refusal to indict Daniel Pantaleo police and other officers who killed Mr. Garner. Surprised and moved by the outpouring of Agape—love as political will—I began to see the shutdown of midtown NYC streets as an astute political strategy by organizers who wielded confrontation as a countermeasure to predatory policing and the dysfunctional bureaucracies that protected it.

During the following years, I occasionally participated in marches and watched from my apartment window as people flooded Harlem streets with chants and drums, songs and bellows—waves of color and determination. The protestors were boisterous, focused, undeterred by the wealthiest and most well-connected militarized police force in any US city, if not the Western world. I was impressed by the young organizers’ strategies and their coordination of mass gatherings.

Along with millions of people within and beyond New York, I learned about the horrific death of Eric Garner on a street in Staten Island in July 2014 by watching the traumatic video of Garner’s homicide by the NYPD. The footage captured on cell phone by Ramsey Orta—a friend of Mr. Garner’s, who would later be imprisoned by the NYPD after releasing the footage to the Garner family and the public—was replayed endlessly by the media.

In a December 23, 2014 New York Times interview with philosopher George Yancy, I attempted to process my shock and rage:

George Yancy: Among my friends and colleagues of all races, the killings of Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, and Eric Garner and so many others like them have caused emotional pain—feelings of being sick and hurt, feelings of depression, angst, hopelessness. It’s crazy.

Joy James: That’s grief. And yes, it is crazy. Welcome to Black life under white supremacy.

Grief as a painful historical trajectory is one thing; to grieve intensely in the misery of the present moment is another. Ferguson, Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Cleveland (we can add Detroit for seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and Bastrop, Texas for Yvette Smith)—these disparate sites have forced diverse people around the country and internationally to huddle closer together as we scrutinize laws and policies that reward police violence with immunity.

Being denigrated and victimized by your designated protectors is shocking to the core, because their job is to protect and serve. We’re stunned because our trust in law is violated; police departments tolerate hyper-aggressive officers by underreporting and under disciplining them. These officers are not going rogue in wealthy, white communities because those communities have the economic and political resources to discipline them.

Police are our employees whom we have to obey ostensibly for our own safety and that of the general good; but also, because they will hurt us often, with impunity, if we don’t—and sometimes even when we do—obey.²

MEETING IMPACTED FAMILIES AND CAPTIVE MATERNAL WAR RESISTERS

Before and after Erica Garner died, I had met and worked with impacted mothers who had lost their children, siblings, or relatives to predatory police forces in North and South America. Chicago mothers, Shapearl Wells and Dorothy Holmes,³ taught me a lot through their battles in Chicago against police involved in the killings of their sons. They also traveled out of the US to share and consult with other impacted families and mothers. Across generations and familial roles, the battle to maintain in public memory, state violence, and the necessary struggles for justice, altered their lives. There were contradictions given that victimization is not inherently a sign of valor and veracity. As I traveled outside of the US I was introduced to vulnerable people—some impacted by police violence, others impacted by the wounds of family violence and civilian violence. Their despair and desires did not always mirror the principled stances embodied in Shapearl Wells and Dorothy Holmes. I learned that it is not just bourgeois academics or journalists who bend reality to amplify their profiles—it is also those traumatized and lacking material stability and comforts.

By coincidence or spiritual design, around this time, I met another gifted truth-teller, a young griot named Chaédria LaBouvier. The artist-activist wrote a compassionate and brilliant interview with Erica Garner, published in Elle magazine, discussed in Chapter 7, Captive (After)Lives. I first encountered the Afro-Cuban artist on a bus from the college town where I taught, to NYC. I recognized LaBouvier (class of ’07) as gifted but did not realize that they were an abolitionist and a member of a family impacted by lethal police violence. LaBouvier’s brother, Clinton Allen, was killed in 2013. During our long commute from the college to the city, the Afro-Cuban artist engaged me in conversation about their residency at their Ivy League alma mater. We spoke about artistic work and exchanged email addresses before we disembarked at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on West 42nd Street. When LaBouvier later asked to meet again, I suggested that we connect at a Harlem dojo for children on West 116th Street; it was a unique space created and led by Africans who taught Taekwondo to a multiracial community. Weeks later as we sat chatting in metal folding chairs off to the side of the dojo floor, we spoke quietly while watching young children train in self-discipline and self-defense. I became more focused on LaBouvier’s narratives which began to detail police violence and abolitionist struggles. I gradually realized that I was sitting next to someone profoundly impacted by police terror and the dishonor of severed natality as police kill with (qualified) immunity and impunity.⁴ Police predatory power is disproportionately wielded against Black people, especially Black males.

I learned later that LaBouvier had given the 2015 keynote address, Mothers Against Police Brutality at Williams College’s annual Claiming Williams.⁵ College press described LaBouvier’s discussion of her family tragedy in order to educate and galvanize people to resist lethal police violence. The contributor to Elle, Medium, and the Bold Italic had created The Allen Wells Project, a website named for her brother, who was killed by a Dallas police officer; she also recognized and honored antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells, author of Southern Horrors and The Red Record.⁶ In the Elle article on Ferguson’s police violence and family loss, LaBouvier describes police violence as a feminist issue: Women are so often on the front lines in the aftermath of these murders. They’re the ones left behind to pick up the pieces, like my sister-in-law, who’s now raising Clinton’s twin boys without their father. We can’t have this. Something has to change.⁷ Police violence has a devastating impact on women caretakers, children as caretakers, and fathers and nonbinary and reproductive people who provide care.

Meeting and working with impacted families, I have seen firsthand that the work of familial care after predatory policing is predominately, but not exclusively, addressed by mothers. For some of those mothers who become activists—or who succumb to exhaustion and grief that can facilitate another family death—familial caretaking labor is passed onto their eldest female child. This was the passage that LaBouvier and Erica Garner had to navigate. They had mothers and elders, but the most radical work for accountability would be done by young Black women who were daughters or sisters of the slain.

Noting gender differences in the distributions of care labor, the Captive Maternal is about the function of care that becomes entangled with stages (and concentric circles) that include caretaking, protest, movement-making, marronage, and war resistance. The identity of the caretaker has no inherent value without an investment in care that becomes politicized through function. Hence, Agape as political will enables the longevity of self and community within a web of caretaking that is not inherently conventional or safe (in regards to predatory policing).⁸

At the Harlem dojo, LaBouvier briefly sketched strategies to bring honor to traumatized and dishonored families (including her own) who had lost members to predatory violence. I listened intently as I watched young children practice the arts to protect themselves from harm. I heard, above their Taekwondo and Korean language commands for maneuvers, shouts of self-affirmation and self-defense. These underscored LaBouvier’s voice as an elder child, grown but grieving—one amid legions of impacted families bereft of loved ones lost to predatory policing or tortured by cops or prison guards.

During our few conversations, LaBouvier critiqued funders and nonprofits that offered compensation packets from the state in ways that normalized the monetization of Black death as political economy. She painfully addressed her personal need to maintain the memory of her brother, Clinton Allen, and the criminality of Dallas, Texas policing. This loss, noted in her interview of Erica Garner, allowed both to forge a spiritual and political connection with each other. Recalling my conversations with LaBouvier, I see the artist building abolitionist strategy upon a scaffold of broken bones. She spoke of writing a book that would trace and imprint upon memory and through text, the crime and the name of the white police officer who murdered her beloved Black brother. For future generations, this text would reveal the murder throughout his lineage—to children, grandchildren, and great-grands. We have to wrestle with bearing witness to murder in which white police, empowered and shielded by the state’s inebriation with anti-Blackness, kill with impunity.

I was fortunate to have met LaBouvier. I did not have the opportunity to meet Erica Garner. Given her busy schedule I don’t know if she would have had the time or interest to even meet with me. However, over several years of reflections following her death, I gradually recognized her contributions and strengths that offered clarity and political will to challenge predatory police powers. Both LaBouvier and Erica Garner shared insightful analyses of family members who lost loved ones to predatory policing. The traumas, distress, and rage alter the consciousness of those who were not impacted families. The loss of life at the hands of predatory police is a communal feeling of shock, rage and grief that can radiate across the globe. Hence the 2020 uprisings, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, were seismic. Before, during, and after George Floyd was suffocated in a slow death with a nonchalant killer employed by the state, civilians yelled, cried, and screamed, but could not interrupt the eight-minute affixation because they so feared the police. Civilians could tape video footage while traumatized, but could not raise hands for peaceful restraint as Manuel Tortuguita Terán did with both of their hands in the air. On January 18, 2023, Tortuguita was shot fifty-seven times by Georgia State Patrol while protesting Cop City in Atlanta’s Weelaunee Forest. No one dared to place an open palm upon a uniformed shoulder in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and firmly instruct Derek Chauvin, who had both of his hands buried in his pant pockets and his knee pressed into Floyd’s neck to STOP. Despite our care, emotional intelligence, and political determination, without collective strategies, our caretaking freezes or falters. Becoming trained maroons capable of coordinating war resistance deflects or defies predatory violence. Analyzing our diverse roles as caretakers in revolutionary love, we explore how Captive Maternal agency encompasses the epicenter and the hypocenter of freedom struggles.⁹

BOOK STRUCTURE

New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner explores our capacity to care for and defend ourselves from state violence while also nurturing and being nurtured by individual selves and communities. New Bones Abolition notes the constant confusion and betrayals that mystify our radical impulses to address violators. New Bones Abolition is not a biography of Erica Garner. It does not attempt to paint a full portrait of a complex, fierce Black mother who became an antagonist of predatory and lethal policing from the July 2014 death of her father to her own death in December 2017. This book uses the Captive Maternal analytic to weave a narrative of a community, a collective informed by her tweets, die-ins, organizing, and the ways we think as radicals, feminists, abolitionists, human rights advocates, impacted families, and communities. New Bones Abolition recognizes Garner as one of many leaders. As a working-class Black mother shaped by Agape—love as political will and communal care and protections—she shared her resistance against police violence with her family, community, and the world, and offered spiritual and material protections to deflect or defeat predatory formations. With cadres, she battled local, state, and national governments, rejected corporate and nonprofit buyouts, and defied the intimidation of the NYPD.

Part I begins with Chapter 1, Black Feminisms and Captive Maternal Agency, which reviews the contributions and contradictions of agency by engaged caretakers and political actors. Chapter 2, Old/ New Bones Abolition: Academic Conferences and Communal Gatherings, explores diverse communities in caretaking or protecting from trauma, and violent death at the hands of police. Movement Capture and Monetized Black Death, Chapter 3, discusses the hundreds of millions of dollars funneled through nonprofits, private donors, for-profit corporations, and state funding that sought to direct the trajectory of radical resistance to police forces into conventional reforms and restoration of police budgets.

In Part II, The Killing and Dishonor of Eric Garner, Chapter 4, reflects on trials, journalism, and NYC records to reconstruct Garner’s death and the (lack of) ramifications for police killings. Mother-Daughter Doula, Chapter 5, discusses Garner’s evolving agency as a Captive Maternal who begins with liberal political statements and after betrayals by government and mainstream media moves into more protests and movements that create a maroon community that refuses to merge into duopoly politics and nonprofit largesse and management. Chapter 6, Campaigning for Bernie and Against the DNC, reviews the stunning campaign ad that Erica Garner created for the 2016 presidential campaign of Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders. In defiance of the Democratic National Committee and President Barack Obama, Sanders ran as a democratic socialist in the framework of New Deal or FDR policies—and primaried the DNC heir-apparent: Senator Hillary Clinton. Chapter 7, Captive (After) Lives," reflects upon the growth of political families and Black communities that emerge from trauma. It centers on Erica Garner’s interview with Chaédria LaBouvier. Despite their different backgrounds, shared grief, rage, and political thought connected both Black women. This chapter concludes with Erica Garner’s Harlem funeral, and reflections by her mother, Esaw Snipes-Garner.

Part III opens with Chapter 8, Police Violence and the Limits of Legalism, which focuses on public attention to predatory policing and the structural deficiencies of the legal system, as noted The Limits of Legalism, an article written by Da’Shaun Harrison, Samaria Rice, and me for Scalawag. Chapter 9, International Alliances for Human Rights, examines human rights advocacy and alliances with international jurists and analyses who discuss the case of Eric Garner and anti-Black violence within policing practices in the United States. Chapter 10, "War Resistance: We Charge Genocide and Return to the Source" explores historical and contemporary political strategies to address contemporary crises.

The Conclusion, Prioritizing Care and Ancestors, evokes the legacies of historical freedom, struggles from slavery abolition, civil rights, and Black revolutionary histories. Erica Garner’s contributions register her as an ancestor. Despite the structural violations and predatory policing that sever natality and our connections with communities and ourselves, brokenness is mended through connections to the past, through the present, and into the future. The knowledge from those who watch over and care for us includes both the living and those who have transitioned. Hence, ancestors who fought to caretake, protest, march, create maroon camps, and engage in war resistance are never dead in spirit or in tutelage.

1. Nicholas St. Fleur, They Shouted ‘I Can’t Breathe,’ The Atlantic, December 4, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/New-York-City-Eric-Garner-Protests/383415/.

2. George Yancy and Joy James, Black Lives Between Grief and Action, The Opinionator, New York Times, December 23, 2014, https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/joy-james/.

3. For student interactions with Shapearl Wells and Dorothy Holmes, see: https://sites.williams.edu/jjames/files/2019/06/Love-and-Justice-Transcription-1.pdf.

4. For a discussion of natality and the loss of family kinship ties, see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

5. Collette Flanagan and Chaédria LaBouvier, Claiming Williams 2015 Keynote: Mothers Against Police Brutality, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBzb9-3zZvE.

6. See Ida B. Wells, The Red Record, 1895 (e-book), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14977/14977-h/14977-h.htm.

7. See Julia Munemo, Challenging Police Brutality, Williams College, April 9, 2015, https://www.williams.edu/feature-stories/challenging-police-brutality/.

8. Flanagan and LaBouvier, Claiming Williams 2015 Keynote: Mothers Against Police Brutality.

9. For additional discussion on the Captive Maternal, see Joy James, The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft, and the Captive Maternal, The Carceral Notebooks, 2016, https://www.thecarceral.org/cn12/14_Womb_of_Western_Theory.pdf; Joy James, In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love; and the 2022 Captive Maternal Roundtable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0i3IiKR6ZXQ

PART I

Figure 2: Jordan Engel, 500 years of Black Resistance. The Decolonial Atlas, decolonialatlas.wordpress.com.

CHAPTER 1

BLACK FEMINISMS AND CAPTIVE MATERNAL AGENCY

BLACK FEMINISTS CAN BE CAPTIVE MATERNALS, BUT IT’S COMPLICATED

Feminism has no gender. To be a feminist is to advocate for equal rights and equity in resources for women and men (this would or should include trans wo/men and nonbinary people). If Black people lack equal rights and equity with (bourgeois) whites—and are not considered to actually be human and suffer disproportionate violence, severed natality, exploitation, and incarceration administered through the state and (vigilante) police forces—then this discussion is about more than gender. It is also about empire and colonialism, the ungendered and queered Black. The Captive Maternal as extension, companion, or alternative to Black feminisms is not inherently antagonistic to radical-centrist-liberal Black feminisms. Yet, unlike the majority of Black feminisms, the Captive Maternal is positioned as antagonist to the imperial state. Any forms of state feminisms that promoted Black feminisms—from Hillary Clinton to Gloria Steinem—would also have to be critiqued in order to gain greater clarity. The Captive Maternal journey is rooted in war resistance. Those promoting a militarized state would never become allies of the Captive Maternal—they would become allies of liberalism and compradors.

As noted in The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft, and the Captive Maternal, US democracy was birthed in genocide, anti-Black animus, colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism. Black feminisms, in the plural, offer capacity for progress, but its diverse destinations are driven by centrism, liberalism, radical liberalism (the most popular form of abolition), radicalism, and revolution. Black feminisms in conflict with Captive Maternal constructs are incubators for state feminism. Black feminists could also be Captive Maternals. Given the varied forms of caretaking, Captive Maternals, even on the first stages of labor dedicated to home and social order, wield a function disciplined by strategy with interior emotional affects aligned with rebellion. Feminists are not inherently seeking rebellions against capitalism and colonialism. Captive Maternals acknowledge but do not always openly celebrate personal progress or gains under capitalism that largely accrue to (petite) bourgeoise sectors. Captive Maternals intuitively or consciously understand that the entire system is a predatory mechanism. Their freedom dreams are often laced with rebellions in which the old order collapses because someone enacted a move rarely conceived on a three-dimensional chess board. When David (and today’s Davina) face Goliath and an entire army, persecuted people often become too terrified to fight. David, or Davina, thinking outside the box creates a war resistance strategy built on simple resources—a sling and a rock. Victories accrue from the war resisters to all—even those who fear the fight.

Captive Maternals resent and resist the theft or repurposing of their generative powers to stabilize state colonialism and police forces. Yet, every caretaker does not consciously reflect on their role in the social and political order. Captive Maternals intuit or scrutinize the inequality, dysfunction, and barbarity of power. To expand epistemology they must enter the fray and risk their (social) safety. To scrutinize the stratified (dis)order of things requires stepping beyond personal trauma and grievances to see and confront structures.

Even in the midst of labor hustles—not to be confused with brand or propaganda hustling—caretakers understand that the battles are not about an individual persona if battles of integrity are fought to secure and provide resources to self and others. To the extent that Black feminisms are aligned with state feminisms, care will not be subversive. Black feminisms aligned with state power boost one’s individual or group ego to deflect from the fight to quell state predatory powers.

In the concentric circles of care, the dialectical spiral of struggle moves from caretaker, to protester, into movement maker, marronage, and war resister. Given that the majority of Americans, and US Blacks/Africans, are not radical, the majority of Black feminists are not radical either (nor are the majority of trauma victims). As the Captive Maternal moves closer to marronage and war resistance, i.e., into the zones of direct confrontation with predatory police and state, most feminist, conventional abolitionists seek to reject, obscure or attack the militant Captive Maternal. My earlier work in Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics discusses managerial Black feminisms and (de)radicalizing Black feminisms—not to cancel Black feminism but to clarify that its diversity and hegemony do not seek or serve revolutionary anticolonial purposes.¹

Most narratives placed into the public realm offer protagonists and punchlines. Hence, without a quest, discipline, or desire for duty, one has not a strategy but a form of entertainment. The story becomes the political contribution. The more drama the better; the storyteller as agent and victim and survivor becomes the major or minor celebrity, or political leader. However, the world of material struggle demands a communal ethics and security strategy. There is no security strategy without care. There is no care without Agape; love as political will or political will as love to vanquish all predators requires sacrifice and a confrontation with fear. Without disciplined collective agency, no movement goes beyond the performative.

For the Captive Maternal, function is central.² How we practice communal engagement with honor, and define love in a war zone, is pivotal for analyses and agency. The personal victimization narrative, although important, does not inherently render every story as virtuous or veracious. Capacity and agency discipline the ability to be truthful and the willingness to participate in communities with political structure and radical ethics. Prominent Black feminists bell hooks and Assata Shakur took their