Criminalization: the Core of Authoritarianism, Fascism, and Resistance

Criminalization is not only a primary tool to suppress dissent, silence opposition, and enforce policies that consolidate and enforce power - it is at the core of how Right wing, authoritarian and fascist agendas, movements, and regimes are enacted, legitimized, and entrenched.

Interrupting criminalization - a political process that extends beyond criminal laws, policing, and punishment to a collective construction of categories of "others" framed as existential threats to an imagined and actual social order to be contained, expelled, and, ultimately eradicated - must therefore be at the core of our resistance.

Join panelists Andrea J. Ritchie, Rachel Herzing, and Scot Nakagawa in exploring the central role of criminalization in shaping the current and evolving political terrain, and the essential role of challenging criminalization and confronting carceral logics and systems in strategies for resistance and solidarity across movements to fight fascism and authoritarianism worldwide.

Speakers:

Andrea J. Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people for the past three decades. She has been actively engaged in anti-violence, labor, and LGBTQ organizing, and in movements against state violence and for racial, gender, reproductive, economic, environmental and migrant justice in the U.S., Canada, and internationally since the 1980s. Andrea is the co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization, author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color and Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies, and co-author of No More Police. A Case forAbolition and Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States.

Scot Nakagawa is a political strategist and organizer with over four decades of experience exploring questions of structural racism, white supremacy, and social justice. He is the co-founder and director of the 22nd Century Initiative, a national strategy and action hub building power at the intersection of opposition to authoritarianism and expanding democratic governance in the U.S.

Rachel Herzing is an organizer, activist, and educator fighting the violence of surveillance, policing and imprisonment. Herzing is co-author, with Justin Piché, of How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement against Imprisonment (2024). Herzing is director of the Yarrow Institute for Organizing and Analysis, was executive director of Center for Political Education, a resource for political organizations on the left and progressive social movements; co-director of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex; and director of research and training at Creative Interventions, a community resource that developed interventions to interpersonal harm that do not rely on policing, imprisonment, or traditional social services.

Ejeris Dixon is an organizer, writer, and strategist with 25 years of experience leading organizations within racial justice, LGBTQ, anti-violence, transformative justice and economic justice movements. They are the Founding Director of Ejerie Labs where they focus on building movement strategy towards creating transformative futures and curtailing rising fascism. Ejeris serves as the host of the Fascism Barometer, a podcast and learning hub that discusses fascism’s rise in the United States, and how to organize against it. For ten years Ejeris served as the Founding Executive Director of Vision Change Win Consulting, where they partnered with organizations throughout the United States and internationally to build their organizing and community safety infrastructure and capacity. Ejeris is also the co-editor of Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha. Over the past twenty-five years Ejeris has directly worked on thousands of incidents of violence and directly organized around more than a hundred murders of Queer and Trans People of Color.

Woods Ervin is an organizer that has been working for over a decade in movements both for trans self-determination as well as for prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition. She has worked at both TGI Justice Project and Interrupting Criminalization. She is currently a co-director at Critical Resistance, an organization that launches campaigns and projects for PIC abolition, at which she’s been volunteering since 2010.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Interrupting Criminalization.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzuy7U1mdh4

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org