The Role of Utopia
Abolition and alternative forms of justice
The role of Utopia: abolition and alternative forms of justice
ʻCivil rights’ are defined by Miriam Webster Dictionary as rights citizens are guaranteed by their government through legislation or other government action to ensure equal opportunities (as for employment, education, housing, or voting) and equal protection under the law, regardless of personal characteristics such as race, religion, or sex. Presidents since Truman, both Democratic and Republican, have identified the first civil right of Americans to be the freedom from violence and fear of potential violence. The U.S. government continues attempting to protect this theoretical civil right bipartisanly “guaranteed” through legislation that has relied on increasingly higher amounts of state-sanctioned violence enacted by militarized police. However, “laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic class of a given nation. It is… the promise of violence and the police are… an occupying army” (Mulligan 2019) and the development of the modern United State justice system has not, in fact, been for the purpose of achieving safety for the individual nor the public, but rather for the interests of that dominant socioeconomic ethnic group for which the Constitution was written. “More than a shared rhetorical flourish, the liberal-cum-conservative “right to safety”” (Murakawa 2014) is not a civil right at all, but a bicameral promise of violence realized in a carceral state that separates, isolates, and forces labor upon those classes that might otherwise unite and threaten the status quo.
This power dynamic has very specific requirements in order to be maintained. As Thomas More identified, long before the theft of Turtle Island from its Indigenous nations, “If you suffer your people to be ill-educated and their manners corrupted since infancy and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded but that you first make thieves and then punish them” (1516). Rather than taking More’s words as a warning, the United States has used them as a framework, taking them one step further through capitalism by making state-sanctioned violence profitable for the ruling class. This economic system has demanded constant rationalization through racism and perpetual adaptation to obscure the fact that it relies heavily upon involuntary labor. As these things are pillars of the United States Constitution, it must be ultimately faced that the existing institutions cannot be reformed, only abolished.
Laws are threats: historical context and legacies
The kidnapping and enslavement of Africans, which began when America was English Colonies, became the backbone of the U.S. democratic experiment not because of racism, but rather due to the economic significance of free labor for white landowning men to maintain and expand their power. Institutions and governance were crafted with the importance of this economic enterprise in mind, justifying the exploitation through racism. “The idea of race emerged as a means of reconciling chattel slavery - as well as the extermination of American Indians” (Alexander 2012). Exploitation was and continues to be the true American dream.
The first law enacted in the United States of America was the Act to regulate the time and manner of administering certain oaths of 1789 (U.S.C. 1, 1), which held all members of the US government accountable to the Constitution. The same document that denied Indigenous peoples personhood and permitted only ⅗ of a Black individual to be counted as human, and only in the interest of their enslaver. Oaths taken to the Constitution established a government beholden to systems of state-sanctioned violence, ensuring that institutions serving the interests of the dominant class would last. Slave codes were some of the first colonial laws enacted (Rugemer 2013), and were incorporated into the Constitution in Article IV, making any congressional member complicit to slavery or treasonous. The Constitution also allowed for the development of slave patrols, the first American police force (Hadden, 2001). This violence was not only utilized against Black and brown enslaved peoples, but threatened anyone who might interfere with the existing power structure.
This intentionality cannot be overlooked. Judge Rost is quoted as saying “We at the South view Slavery as the balance wheel of the government, which enables us, by placing the power of labor in the hands of those who control the government, to prevent those underswells among the masses, which often lead to revolution” (1856) in a speech given in Concord New Hampshire more than 75 years into US History. Slavery wasn’t simply a consequence of racism, but rather a strategic method of control justified through racism. As Marvin Harris points out, most beliefs stem from material and ecological importance (1966), not the other way around. Slavery did not develop as a byproduct of racism, rather racism was cultivated and then entrenched in religious doctrine because of its material and ecological importance to the dominant class.
As abolitionists gained traction in the mid 1800’s, those in power shifted tactics, claiming “slavery [was] the natural and normal condition of the laboring man, whether WHITE or black” (1856). This allowed the Thirteenth Amendment (U.S. Constitution. Amend. XIII) to maintain a slave population while cosplaying freedom. The Reconstruction Era demonstrated this when congress attempted to build upon the country’s racist colonial foundations instead of dismantling them. Slave Patrols had served the dominant socioeconomic ethnic class, which continued to employ them to harass, intimidate, and harm Black communities, keeping them segregated from their white counterparts (Bhattar, 2021). Within an institution built upon the economic necessity of racism, it was inevitable that a disparity would exist within any new institutionalized involuntary labor. Paul Frymer points out, “Racism does not become problematic simply because some or even many individuals hold racist attitudes; it becomes so because institutional dynamics legitimate and promote racist behavior in a concentrated and systematic manner” (Murakawa 2014).
The United States economy demands an enslaved population to build power and developing laws that feed into existing racist narratives and target those already disenfranchised is much easier than building from the ground up. These laws threaten marginalized groups with the promise of violence in multiple forms, including incarceration. Jim Crow laws specifically identified Black and brown people, especially men, that might otherwise upset the existing power dynamics if they were to become successful, and placed them into enslavement through imprisonment. Murakawa identifies this early on in her 2014 book, arguing that the US does not face a racialized crime problem, but rather a criminalized race problem.
This systemic racism falls into two main categories: pity and contempt, which mirror one another. The first believes that BIPOC commit more crimes because of the injustices they have faced, while the second believes they commit more crimes because they are of an inferior race not meant to be integrated into white society. Both rely on the fallacy that Black and brown individuals commit more crimes and are more dangerous than their white counterparts, permanently locking all BIPOC into the position of suspect for any lawlessness. Meanwhile, the violence of white citizens lynching Black and brown people continues to be seen as indvidual wrong-doing in response to theoretical Black violence, rather than a systemic representation of all white people. The embarrassment of these “isolated incidents” forced the US government to further develop and regulate existing systems (Murakawa 2014), rather than address the need for intervention on these systems of white supremacy. “Any candid observer of American racial history must acknowledge that racism is highly adaptable. The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations… evolve and change as they are challenged” (Alexander 2012).
Robert Carr identified this back in 1947, “since the police and courts stand behind any practices which preserve white dominance, the white population, acting individually or in groups, has not hesitated to make extensive use of violence and intimidation… The administration of justice, violence and intimidation, and lynchings are all cut from the same cloth.” However, legislators and presidents continue to focus on reform rather than other forms of change, increasing state-sanctioned violence to combat what they consider individual violence against and by racial minorities. The reforms pushed by liberals focus on procedure and formulaic equality, undermining any ability to achieve justice or the supposed first civil right for BIPOC Americans. This removal of equitable justice in favor of equal processes plays an essential role in maintaining an enslaved population. The dominant socioeconomic ethnic class may have had to shift tactics and vernacular, but ultimately the method through which American power dynamics utilize an undercurrent of racism has remained the same even as laws and language have changed.
These laws have developed specifically to threaten minorities. Loitering became a crime when freed slaves did not necessarily find work immediately after being released from slavery, public intoxication became a crime because many BIPOC did not have access to the same kind of privacy in their homes or communities as whites families, the consequences for the possession and sale of crack-cocaine were one hundred times harsher than those for powdered cocaine. These threats come with additional stigmatization, continuing the American tradition of using racism to justify slavery in the form of incarceration. Targeted by laws without the possibility of equity within the US justice system, BIPOC people are left exposed to imprisonment at a much higher rate than their white peers, therefore are disproportionately represented within prison populations. This means that despite the “end” of slavery in 1865, racial minorities continue to make up the majority of the United States involuntary labor force as a consequence of unjust and unequal incarceration, the promise of violence realized.
The Promise of Violence: Contemporary Disparities
Within its historical context, the justice system can be seen more clearly to be an intentional development and continuation of the racist economic policies of the past. Disparity within the institution does not only exist within laws, but every aspect of the system. Economic policies place Black, Indigenous, and immigrant families in positions of extreme vulnerability, making them more susceptible to violent policing, inadequate representation, economic instability, harsher sentencing, and incarceration practices. It is important to acknowledge the intentionality of the structural violence that connects these seemingly separate things in order to understand the disparity between the BIPOC and white experiences.
In Phillipe Bourgois’ 1995 article, From Jibaro to Crack Dealer: Confronting the Restructuring of Capitalism in El Barrio, he exposed these inequalities by focusing on the method by which systems are developed and operate in order to maintain wealth and power disparities, as well as how ethnicity and race play a role. His examination of how the Puerto Rican working class being stripped of their unions (community), manufacturing (labor), stability (income and benefits), and cultural norms (machismo) ultimately alienated men in the community (1995) draws a direct line to More’s identification of what creates and sustains a “class” of criminals (1516). Dealing crack was easier and more profitable for many Puerto Ricans than continuing to participate in the acceptable alternative being forced upon them.
This promise of violence against minority communities relies on the types of “reform” and “progress” that Bourgois identifies (1995) in order to continue the racist narratives that create economic opportunity for the dominant socioeconomic ethnic class. U.S. institutions and reforms are explicitly guilty of intentionally removing social-care systems and then performing state-sanctioned violence as if it is crime prevention. In order to create faith in the federal government’s ability to correct itself through reform, Legislators must continuously find new ways for state-sanctioned violence to appear legitimate. This appears in the growing amount of open-ended discernment police officers are given, even as the judicial system has less and less (Murakawa 2014). As laws promise violence against BIPOC, they must also protect the state agents of that violence. Rhetoric like “they ran”, “they may have had a weapon”, and “they appeared threatening” explains away any possible critique. This gives police an almost free pass to enact violence as they see fit, whether they wish to perform an outright execution to make an example of someone or the consistent mistreatment of those in the state’s possession.
After slavery “the aggressive enforcement of criminal offenses opened up an enormous market for convict leasing, in which prisoners were contracted out as laborers to the highest private bidder… the private contractors had no interest in the health and well-being of their laborers” (Alexander 2012). While convict leasing no longer occurs under that specific name, “forced and often unpaid labor under the threat of punishment continues in prisons across the country” (Mast 2025). Prisoners continue to endure in a system that does not care for their health or well-being, doing labor that often places them directly in harm’s way for the benefit of the wealthy. The cornerstone of the United States remains the ruling class’s ability to profit through the exploitation of enslaved minorities under the threat of violence.
While this type of cultural hegemony is not unique to the United States of America, the utilization of the carceral state to maintain wealth and power for dominant socioeconomic ethnic class is very specific to the U.S. ethos, and it is only possible by creating contradictory consciousness within exploited minority groups through repeated fear-driven media narratives. The 1965 Moynihan Report identified a disparity between white and Black Americans, but used that disparity to dismiss any and all accomplishments made by Black individuals and/or the Black community. The report placed the responsibility on Black family structures; painting men as aggressive, absent, drug addled and unemployed with the women depicted as weak, stupid, and reliant on the state. While the report repeatedly discusses the lack of scientific backing for its own findings, this does not alter the damage it caused as these two images have continued to be perpetuated in both nonfiction and fiction media (United States Department of Labor 1965). Additionally, Black youth were pitted as troubled thugs or hoodlums, responsible for unrest, riots, and violence (Murakawa 2014). These perceptions fanned the flame of racism that had already been taught to justify white violence.
The Central Park Five were repeatedly subjected to this type of characterization. Donald J. Trump took out a full page in the New York Times to demand the return of the death penalty in New York for these boys before they had been convicted, and never printed a retraction despite their convictions being vacated in 2002 (Burnett 2025). Instances of these media cliches have only intensified, despite cases like Central Park Five that have been proven to be false. Visual media has repeatedly challenged historical records written and told by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic class (Murakawa 2014). With the development of new technologies has come the ability to question classic narratives, as body cams often show a different story than the one told by the police and/or the media (Bhuttar 2021). However, these media are often dismissed because police and state agents rely on written cliches and caricatures of BIPOC in order to regain control of a situation when visual aids are in opposition to an initial story, like in the cases of George Floyd or Ronald Greene (Bhattar 2021).
As Michelle Alexander points out, “criminals, it turns out, are the one social group in America we have permission to hate” (2012). In fact, it is almost necessary to justify the state-sanctioned violence committed against those thus categorized. When combined with the racism that initially justified maltreatment of an enslaved class, the disparities in violence experienced by minorities as opposed to whites makes perfect sense. Especially when discretion given to officers of that state is so broad.
Police as an Occupying Army: Militarization & Money
State-sanctioned violence requires agents loyal to the ruling class. Just as racism was used to justify enslavement, it continued to be employed by former Slave Patrols as they became police officers. Their wealthy white employers, dependent on involuntary labor, were willing to invest in the long term success of policing (Bhattar 2021) in order to maintain a steady flow of workers. Despite the media’s consistent attempts to claim that the US percentage-wise spends an average amount on policing, their statistics remain the enemy of fact, which is that the United States has a higher militarization budget not spent on military than another other country’s actual military budget. The 2018 police expenditures in the United States were over $118.8 billion dollars, not including DHS, the FBI, ICE, and incarceration costs (US Census Bureau). More recent numbers are hard to pin down exactly because they are spread out across Federal, state, and local budgets in different categories.
Many scholars point to police militarization beginning with the War on Drugs (Marquez 2021), while others identify Clinton’s crime bill in the 1990’s (Murakawa 2014), or the Civil Rights Riots (Marquez 2021), but the employment of military methods by private wealthy citizens in order to secure economic interests is a time honored tradition of the ruling class. From Slave Patrols (Hadden 2021) to the overthrow of Hawaiʻi, there has never not been an overlap of policing and military. However, normalization has occurred rapidly since the rise in paramilitary organizations after 9-11. Now it is business as usual for police departments to utilize discontinued military gear, be trained by foreign militaries, and wear full SWAT equipment during civilian protests (Burnett 2025). Despite rhetoric that has claimed government departments like ICE and DHS were created to secure American safety from external threats, the majority of their deployments have been for drug raids (Marquez 2021). This disproportionately affects Black and brown individuals because of forced economic hardship (Bourgois 1995), increased surveillance in BIPOC neighborhoods (Murakawa 2014), and racist public perceptions (Alexander 2012).
To combat the growing awareness around these disparities, there was a concerted effort to diversify the police force (Murakawa 2014). Racism handed down only through a ruling class inevitably leads to conflict; i.e. Slave Rebellions, Civil Rights Riots, etc. However, racism internalized and carried out by BIPOC on BIPOC has much more longevity in sustaining the power of the dominant socioeconomic ethnic class. The added militarization of those police officers helps legitimize state-sanctioned violence, further obfuscating racist justifications.
An important part of legitimizing the violence is its normalization within pop culture. Lego’s police minifigure has changed over the years from a smiling capped officer in formal uniform to a scowling law enforcement official in riot gear. Beginning with Dragnet in the 1950s (Burnett 2025), modern television has been rife with ‘copaganda’ attempting to establish police behavior as normal in response to public distrust and embarrassment over police officers’ involvement in lynchings of Black veterans (Murakawa 2014). Cop shows reinforced the idea that police officers had reasoning behind their actions and anything that might make them look bad was simply a misunderstanding. Portrayals of urban crime and the “hero police officer” trope convinced the majority of Americans that violent crime was on the rise and that policing is one of the most dangerous professions, despite the opposite being true on both counts (Burnett 2025). Violence committed by agents of the state was and is portrayed as not only sanctioned, but necessary to ensure individual violence is not perpetuated. According to television, cops and paramilitary organizations represent the fine line between lawlessness and order for ordinary citizens. However, when we look at who state-sanctioned violence affects and protects in reality, we see that only the ruling class benefits (Marquez 2021), while BIPOC continue to be incarcerated or even murdered.
It isn’t only agents of the state that are allowed to perpetuate state-sanctioned violence as a response to individual violence, but also members of the dominant socioeconomic ethnic class. From George Zimmerman murdering Trayvon Martin and signing bags of skittles for his fans to Daniel Penny murdering Jordan Neely on a train full of passengers, white men are frequently given a free pass in carrying out the threat of law against minorities. This also applies, much like the Fugitive Slave Acts, to any who would stand against the state with those minorities, like in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse shooting and killing two men participating in the Kenosha Riots in response to the police execution of Jacob Blake, wounding a third. These vigilantes are almost a type of reserve for the on the ground occupation that is the police force, an arm of state violence that can operate with immunity beyond state lines as long as they can claim self defense based on the terror inflicted by media perpetuated narratives about the criminal nature of BIPOC.
Murakawa points out that the “wrongful execution of a black man is unremarkable” (2014). It is, in reality, perhaps more American than apple pie or stars and stripes. From Michael Brown to Tamir Rice, it is almost uncommon to not know the name of a Black boy or man murdered by a white one. However, as more people begin to challenge the narrative that they deserved to die, more question the system that allowed their deaths to happen in the first place. If the foundation of a nation is built upon slavery for the economic success of the few, what protections actually exist for those outside the dominant socioeconomic ethnic class?
Moreover, what else could exist?
The Role of Utopia: Abolition and alternative forms of justice
Futurists love to detail steampunk universes with new technologies, fashion, food, drugs, and more. But the one thing that doesn’t change in these imaginings are the systems. There are always wealthy individuals in positions of power and control, and those in poverty, who invariably are involved in crime whether out of necessity or morality. There are always cops. There are always prisons. There is always corruption and exploitation.
Murray Bookchin argues that futurism is simply reform with technology, and that if people are truly interested in the future, they must be more imaginative, they must look to build concrete Utopias (1978). “The only way to transform our reliance on prisons and our retributive systems is to replace it with one that relies on opportunities for personal and community transformation” (Mukerjee & Martinez 2025. Transformation moves in the face of the existing United States economy because it requires one thing to become entirely new, rather than adjusting it or adding to it. Economic reliance on an enslaved population would not be permitted to continue if there was true transformation. The abolishment of slavery did not change the bedrock Americans stand on, it simply shifted how that enslaved population was acquired and held. This demonstrates why reform of the existing system has not and cannot work. If America seeks to ever be anything more than a slave state upholding wealthy land barons, it must start again upon a cornerstone of true equality.
Michelle Alexander’s entire book is about how the institutions in place are simply a method to keep Black and brown people in prison or restricted by their status as former prisoners, despite none of the legislation or policing ever actually affecting crime rates or the overall wellness of Americans (2012). Rehabilitation, on the other hand, is proven to work (Murakawa 2014). “Restorative justice and abolitionist principles provide the framework within which real safety can be attained” (Mukerjee & Martinez 2025). This again proves More’s point that “if you suffer your people to be ill-educated and their manners corrupted since infancy and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded but that you first make thieves and then punish them” (1516). Involuntary labor as a form of punishment makes little sense save for the economic benefit privatized prisons have for their owners and patrons. Rather, investigating what is needed “to remedy the root causes of a person’s harmful behavior” (Mukerjee & Martinez 2025) is exceedingly more logical. “By reshaping society and its structures, we can ensure that the needs of the people in society are met while preserving their fundamental rights” (Bhattar 2021).
However, the abolishment of police and prison systems isn’t enough. They are mere symptoms of the institution they are part of and the foundation it was built upon. Extending abolition beyond the justice system and toward the United States as a whole “could eliminate the oppressive climate brought on by the social hierarchy that has been ever-present in policing throughout American history” (Bhattar 2021). Heolimeleikalani Osorio makes an argument that alternative blueprints for maintaining order within a society already exist in indigenous systems. Her article on Puʻuhonua, places of refuge, details how another world could be possible through radical self accountability and freedom from the state, “offer[ing] alternative ways to imagine relationality under American settler colonialism and white supremacy” (Osorio 2024). Anarchists have long argued similarly that radical self accountability and community are far more motivating factors for individuals to behave a certain way.
“A world without law is not a world without guidelines. We are opposed to law because law is a way of understanding human conduct that was designed - and has been implemented - for social control rather than the furtherance of justice. Laws are designed to be obscure yet rigid, creating a series of traps for those who are already disenfranchised by society” ((Strangers in a tangled wilderness).
The world has not always been the way it is now and it does not need to continue to be. The threat of law, the promise of violence, a dominant socioeconomic ethnic class, and an occupying army of police - none of these things need to exist. World building can extend beyond what currently is, we are only limited by our imaginations, so we must “be practical, do the impossible” (Bookchin 1978).
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References
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U.S. Constitution. amend. XIII.
