Parenting Through the Lens of Abolition

This chapter explores the complexities of parenting from an abolitionist perspective, focusing on the evolving relationships between parents and their adult children, especially in the context of incarceration. It delves into the emotional dynamics and challenges faced by parents, emphasizing the importance of communication, humility, and awareness in combating systemic oppression. The speakers share personal experiences that highlight the reciprocal nature of love and pain within familial relationships, particularly under the strain of societal injustices.

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Dylan Rodriguez joins Kim for a conversation about respecting his children’s autonomous voice, why he named his Fantasy Football team “Uncle Dylan Never Lies,” and what that has to do with abolitionist parenting. Dylan shares why he believes that caregivers and parents must take children's questions of ‘why?’ seriously, and how it is possible to treat why as a radical question that is fundamental to any aspirational abolitionist parenting praxis. They close by talking about the ways that the state deploys technologies of warfare against incarcerated people and their families, and the heightened state of emergency that people in prison experience and how this gets translated into the ways that we engage with and are in relationship with incarcerated people.

This is the third installment of our new series, Lessons From The Garden, where Kim will be interviewing contributors to the forthcoming anthology that she co-edited with Maya Schenwar titled We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition. You can pre-order this volume now from Haymarket or wherever you buy books.

The name of the series, Lessons From The Garden, is an apt phrase that reflects the metaphor in the book’s title, and allows us to consider many issues related to caregiving, parenting, and abolition. As Lydia Pelot-Hobbs once said “our citation politics matter,” and in that spirit we want to credit Susie Parras for the series title. Lessons From The Garden is an opportunity to engage in further conversation with the many brilliant organizers, writers, and thinkers about their work, and how they practice abolitionist parenting and caregiving in their daily lives. Additionally, we will draw on some of the themes that they wrote about in the book in order to help us deepen our understanding of caregiving - broadly configured - and what it means to live collectively in a world that is designed to keep us isolated from each other.

Dylan Rodríguez is a parent, teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator who holds a job as a Distinguished Professor at the University of California-Riverside, where he has worked since 2001. He is a faculty member in the recently created Department of Black Study as well as the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. Since the late-1990s, Dylan has participated as a founding member of organizations like Critical Resistance, Abolition Collective, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, Cops Off Campus, Scholars for Social Justice, and the UCR Department of Black Study, among others. He is the author of three books, most recently White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide (Fordham University Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Dylan believes in the right—in fact, the obligation—of occupied, colonized, and incarcerated peoples to fight for their liberation against external oppressors as well as internal reactionaries, and the parallel responsibility of those who profess solidarity to take all necessary measures to protect, defend, and advance liberation struggle.

Episode Resources & Notes

Pre-order We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, Edited by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson

IN STORES NOV. 19, 2024!

Abolition has never been a proposal to simply tear things down. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks, “What if abolition is something that grows?” As we struggle to build a liberatory, caring, loving, abundant future, we have much to learn from the work of birthing, raising, caring for, and loving future generations.

In We Grow the World Together, abolitionists and organizers Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson bring together a remarkable collection of voices revealing the complex tapestry of ways people are living abolition in their daily lives through parenting and caregiving. Ranging from personal narratives to policy-focused analysis to activist chronicles, these writers highlight how abolition is essential to any kind of parenting justice.

HELP SEND THIS BOOK INSIDE: Contribute toward sending copies of We Grow the World Together to folks in prisons and jails by donating at https://haymarketbooks.app.neoncrm.com/forms/we-grow-the-world-together

Books by Dylan Rodriguez

White Reconstruction and the Logics of Genocide

Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition

Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime

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