Guest feature on No Police Radio!

I was super excited to get the chance to be a guest with No Police Radio on KDVS 90.3 FM on the UC Davis campus last month. I spoke with DJ Abbie and DJ Juniper about my recent work on abolition geography, which focuses on policing, property, and protest in Sacramento. We also touched on some recent direct action and mutual aid efforts in Davis in what was then an ongoing University of California wide graduate student worker strike. We talked about how making people mad is delicious. Finally, we talked about everyday practices that demystify social movements, and how everyone can get in where they fit in.

KDVS 90.3 FM is a student-run community, alternative, freeform radio station based in Davis. No Police Radio is a series of episodes hosted by the UC Davis Cops Off Campus coalition, which is part of the larger UC Cops Off Campus coalition, which is doing amazing work across the University of California system. The views presented in this interview do not reflect the views of KDVS sponsors or the University of California. I’m sharing selections of our conversation with some light editing. Thanks to No Police Radio for inviting me to have this conversation with you!

DJ Abbie: Welcome to No Police Radio. This is DJ Abbie and we are broadcasting on KDVS 90.3 live from Davis, California. You can hear us every other week discussing all things abolition— from tuition to the prison industrial complex, and everything that has to go to make way for a free university. We’ll feature conversations with guest organizers, abolitionist scholars, and people who have taken part in the university’s radical history, all with an eye towards how we get free.

This week, we have a couple of super exciting things. We have a special guest Mia Dawson of the Graduate Group in Geography, who is going to talk to us about how abolition geography works in relation to both Davis and Sacramento, and the broader world. But before we get to that, I would love to introduce my co-host this week, DJ Juniper.

DJ Juniper: I’m very excited to be here, this is my first time co-hosting! I’m going by DJ Juniper. I’m a student here at UC Davis studying sustainable agriculture. I got into abolition work a couple years ago. What planted the seed was reading about the prison industrial complex and how it disproportionately affects black people. And that made me really angry, so I started getting involved in more protests. And then the 2020 uprisings happened, and that’s what pushed me further into abolitionist work. So, that’s how I got into it and I’m really excited to be here. I’m very excited to talk with Mia about her work. I did some reading and a little homework before and it was fascinating. So I’m excited to get into it.

By way of introduction, Mia Karisa Dawson is a community organizer and scholar based in Sacramento. She is a PhD candidate in Geography with a designated emphasis in African American studies, and her scholarly work focuses broadly on human geography, black social movements, and specifically on the contemporary movement for abolition in Sacramento.

DJ Abbie: Mia, welcome to No Police Radio. We are so excited to have you.

Mia Karisa: I’m so happy to be here!

DJ Abbie: As an opener, could you give our listeners a sense of what you do, for folks who haven’t studied geography since middle school or high school? What it is that geography brings to the table in terms of abolition? How do those two things connect in your work and in broader work in the field?

Mia Karisa: Yes. So geography is a huge field. It can mean all kinds of different things but let me break down where I situate myself and how it relates to abolition. So, I’m a human geographer. And human geographers focus on social systems alongside physical and natural systems, and are also very interested in how these systems interact. I’m also an urban human geographer. So I focus on cities, and my focus right now is in Sacramento. I’ve been active in the movement for abolition in Sacramento since around 2016, so my scholarship and my work as an organizer have evolved together and informed each other. To sum it up, my approach to urban human geography allows me to think through the ways that race and capitalism organize city space, how power dynamics are made material and maintained, and from there, how they can be changed.

DJ Juniper: That’s incredible. I didn’t get into geography for a while, but I really admire it. I think the focus on what is actually physically impacting people is amazing. And you get into a lot of different things in an article you wrote called The King’s ain’t playin’ no one tonight: Desanctifying property as an abolitionist practice in Sacramento. As I mentioned earlier, I was reading that and I loved it. And I think that segues into the next question: what can the practice of radical geography tell us about social movements and how they move?

Mia Karisa: There are two main threads that I will touch on here, especially in terms of what I write about in the article. The first thread looks at large protests and seeing how they navigate urban space, what their targets and tactics are. And then the second thread looks at the everyday practice of collectives— the ways that spaces are appropriated, not just for these bigger protests, that might happen once every few months or once a year— but rather for the everyday sustenance of life and community taking care of each other. I try to connect those two things and make sure that we don’t overly focus on social movements being defined by the bigger and more visible actions that are covered more in the news.

DJ Abbie: I love that because it connects both the high-profile moments of radicalism and engagement with a kind of everyday practice, practices you can do in your everyday life, things that you can engage around on a daily level. It’s kind of a version of the idea that politics goes beyond say, voting, right? Politics is something that you engage in every day.

So, you write a lot about how property tends to structure space. And it’s a structuring that necessitates policing, right? So, can you give us a sort of deeper sense of that? And maybe an example, either local or otherwise, of how property space in policing work together.

Mia Karisa: Yes. Property relies on exclusion and discipline, and policing is the means by which both of those can happen. And this has everything to do with history of what property means in the United States settler colonial context. Property was introduced as a relationship to space here by colonists. So, relating to land through ownership— through property— is not just a given. It’s not a neutral or natural relationship to land. It’s something that they imposed through the drawing of boundaries and the development of violent technologies and techniques to enforce those boundaries. And furthermore, it was only colonists who had the ability to own property— indigenous people and enslaved or free black people had no access to this form of ownership, this relationship to land.

So, property has violence that is inherent to it. It relies on exclusion and force. And so, in that way, police and property are intimately connected. One of the most important ways that we can think of the role of police is through thinking about the role of that police play in maintaining property relationships.

DJ Abbie: Yeah. So one of the things that you write about and, this is something that seems to connect both on a local level in our current space, but then also the way that that space been historically shaped. One of the events that you go into in your article that is super fascinating is the way in which what started as a protest march took over the Interstate 5 freeway in Sacramento and then migrated to the space around the Golden 1 arena, which gives your article that great title that DJ Juniper read just a second ago.

So can you go through the history of that space in particular in downtown Sacramento, the space that the freeway sits? And then, and then the space at the arena as well?

Mia Karisa: Yes. So, it was really fascinating to write that article and to learn more about the history of that space. Because I think a lot of things that felt very real during the protest— in terms of the arena as an architecture of power and as representative of white power— actually have a real material historical basis. The I-5 freeway was built in the 1950s during a period of urban renewal. And urban renewal was a euphemism that meant clearing and destroying black and brown neighborhoods in order to build freeways and commercial districts. So, there was a neighborhood called the West End that was integrated. It was largely black and Japanese people who had a thriving economy, a self-sufficient economy that the city destroyed in order to build the highway, simultaneously destroying much of their economic and political power. Those people who lived there were displaced to neighborhoods in outlying areas of Sacramento including Oak Park, which I believe we’re going to talk about in a bit, and including Meadowview, which is where Stephon Clark, the young man whose death sparked the protest, lived. So there are a lot of connections there. The freeway was built through the destruction of this integrated neighborhood. And then the arena was built really close by, in the footprint of where that neighborhood was. And it also was subsidized by the city and sparked a huge amount of gentrification once it was built. So, it’s pretty layered.

DJ Juniper: Yeah, it’s a really interesting history. Especially with the Golden 1 Arena. I remember when it was being built, there was a lot of backlash from even just regular people about all the money that was going into it, and a lot of the displacement that was happening and a lack of focus on like public infrastructure and things like that. So it’s very fascinating to know the history of that, and then also when you contextualize it with how we’re showing up in those spaces and desanctifying it, as you say. That leads into the next question: what do you see as the role of disruption of these spaces or of property within social movements?

Mia Karisa: I think it’s critical for a lot of reasons, one of them being that it does gain so much visibility. It sparks discussion, right? It kind of forces people to reckon with the way that our cities and our spaces are structured and how racism is cemented into the built environment, and also how we can demand access to space. We have the agency to relate to space in different ways. I think that’s really important. It allows us to learn different ways of relating to one another.

In protest there’s this exciting element of seizing a unique kind of agency over space. But there is also danger, right? Because the police are there and they’re militarized. So people take care of each other. People look out for each other. And it’s in a way that allows us to think about different ways of relating to each other and relating to space.

DJ Juniper: Absolutely. And it’s a whole issue too with people that are so vehemently against property destruction. I remember during the 2020 uprisings, I had so many heated discussions with people that just could not wrap their heads around it. They just for some reason loved the idea of just having order, of property not being destroyed.

Mia Karisa: Yes. They test my patience but I do my best.

DJ Abbie: Before the break, we were talking about the role of disruption in relation to social movements and how disruptions allow us to rework space and the usual spatial and social relations that regulate movement. I want to ask a little bit more about that. As you might know, there’s been a blockade at Russell Boulevard and Howard Way for the better part of the strike. That space has been held by a courageous band of folks, mostly undergrads in sympathy with the strike. It results in an extensive disruption of the normal everyday action and flow of traffic around the campus. So how is it that space, and the disruption of space, work in relation to social movement? You can you give us a sense of that either in your experience or in relation to geography more broadly.

Mia Karisa: Yes, of course. Shout out to everyone who’s out there holding the line. It’s hard work. It’s emotionally taxing. To answer your question, disruptions are critically important. Making people uncomfortable is a good thing. People should be uncomfortable. If a protest isn’t making anyone uncomfortable, it’s probably not a protest. I think the discomfort is part of the point, right? And getting people to think differently, getting people to think about how their their day-to-day lives might actually be contributing to or upholding or enabled by violent, oppressive systems. That is uncomfortable for people to think about if they haven’t had to think about it before. But what’s more uncomfortable is grad student workers living in their cars. What’s more uncomfortable is grad student workers deciding which meal they’re going to eat in a day.

So, it’s crucial for people to be uncomfortable. If your reaction to students demanding better living conditions is anger or condescension, I think you need to ask yourself what would happen if you actually talked to people on the line. Because they’re not just an inconvenience, they’re human beings who have stories. They could probably teach you something. So that’s what I’ll say specific to the disruptions that are aligned with the strike.

More broadly, I just have to emphasize that making people angry is not a bad thing. If you’re not angry about the system that we live in, then, I don’t really know what you’re looking at or reading or doing because this system of racial capitalism is infuriating and violent. So we should all be angry, not that anger should be the only emotion. There’s joy to the struggle, there’s beauty and joy and care. But anger is also an important driving factor. And so, I ask people who are angry at protesters to question what’s driving their anger. Where is it coming from?

DJ Juniper: Absolutely. I think the visceral response that people have to just minor inconveniences is really upsetting. I’m also a huge fan of the phrase scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds. I think it’s very applicable to sort of how people can respond to what they perceive as sort of immoral violence, which is causing them disruptions. As in, oh, you’re not being angry in the way that you’re supposed to.

Mia Karisa: Yes. Just to add, in terms of people taking these disruptions as a personal attack, that’s something that I also wrote about in the Kings article. People will take disruptions very personally. So, with the example of the disruption of the Kings game, hundreds of people were prevented by a line of protesters from going in to watch a basketball game. It’s fascinating how there can be hundreds of people around experiencing the same exact thing and they’re each taking this as a personal attack. Like, it’s a nice day outside— what if you all put your heads together and figured out some other way to entertain yourselves?

So this gets at a bit is the relationship between white identity and property, and how whiteness is so domineering. And how whiteness and property make and remake one another. And so when people disrupt or transgress property relationships, it’s often taken as a threat to whiteness and white identity itself. So people do have these really visceral reactions and feel like they themselves are being violated.

DJ Abbie: Yeah. I think one of the other things that I’d like to bring in is the role of mutual aid in all of this- occasionally in direct action, but also just on an ongoing basis. The role of mutual aid can play in materializing alternative social structures. You know, shout out again to the folks on the picket line.

One of the other things that happened this past week was both at Davis and at other campuses was a dining hall liberation. The name of the game was preparing and serving free food for the people for some length of time. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about abolition and a radical approach to the sort of larger social structure, but then also the role that mutual aid and more direct action plays in that way.

Mia Karisa: Mutual aid is crucial. I think that mutual aid is a basic unit of a lot of social movements. It’s just recognizing that we can provide for each other. We can take care of each other and we are more powerful when we when we act together. So mutual aid is crucial in terms of thinking about the everyday practices of social movements and bringing the way we think about social movements down to earth a bit. Mutual aid is absolutely crucial.

With regards to the liberated dining hall, I absolutely love everything about that. It really makes you think about how arbitrary and cruel it is that we have to go in and swipe these cards to access the nutrients that we quite literally need to live. When you are able to experience an alternative where it’s just people serving food and eating for free, that can be the first step towards opening up people’s minds to thinking about what’s wrong with capitalism. So I think that that kind of action is really, really powerful and important.

DJ Abbie: Absolutely. If needs are universal: say food, housing, healthcare, etc., it’s amazing that these things are so differentially regulated and policed, right? The way that that access to these things is you know so closely stipulated based on race, based on so many different factors that seem to have nothing to do with with the need itself.

Let’s get into some of the more specific issues about Sacramento. What makes Sacramento and such an interesting place for a scholar like you to do the critical geographic work that you do?

Mia Karisa: The two bullet points are that the problems are very extreme and that the organizing work is incredible. To go a bit more into the first one, Sacramento is really emblematic of the problems that abolition is up against. The racial geography of the city is a quintessential U.S. city having been shaped by processes of redlining, urban renewal, toxic loans, and now gentrification. There’s a giant county jail that’s just blocks away from state and federal offices, that houses three thousand people per night in downtown Sacramento. So that’s a very visible sign of state power, terror and cruelty. And in Sacramento, the police are incredibly lethal. They kill people routinely every year. And per capita, in Sacramento, the police are more lethal than other big California cities that we would think of like Oakland, San Francisco or Los Angeles.

Another important thing about Sacramento in terms of the work of abolition is that we’re in a conservative county. Sacramento County is very conservative. The County Sheriff’s Department especially has a far-right influence. They work with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to proactively target and deport people. So we see all these intersecting problems come together in Sacramento. And then there’s a wealth of organizations and really powerful organizing happening in the city as well.

DJ Abbie: One of the things that you write really nicely about it is how it’s the capitol of California, of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has defined as the Golden Gulag. We so often hear that part of California’s identity is that it leads the nation on certain things. And it seems like in what you’ve laid out for us in the article, Sacramento leads California in a certain kind of violent policing. I think many have the image of “liberal” California.

One of the our guest last episode, Davarian Baldwin, works a lot on the way that universities reshape space. And one of the places that UC Davis itself is reworking in Sacramento is the Aggie Square project. Aggie Square is this space in downtown Sacramento that the university is currently in the process of building. And it’s one of these urban renewal projects that seeks to use the halo of the university to force through a certain kind of commercial development into a specific space. So, I would be curious to hear so much of what we hear about things, like Aggie Square, like the Golden 1 arena, is that these are real sort of promise and opportunity for the local neighborhoods that get bulldozed to put them in. I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about how those things are far more of a problem for those neighborhoods and the kind of ways that they rework space to privilege some and disadvantage others.

Mia Karisa: Yeah, these projects are a nightmare for the communities that they’re built in. Aggie Square is forecasted to displace and price out people in Oak Park, a historically black neighborhood that’s already suffering from rapid gentrification. And last I heard, the University was only offering very surface level, insufficient concessions. It’s going to be really destructive. And with these conversations, I think it’s always important to focus on, are people able to stay in their homes? And, are people who are displaced going to be able to find affordable places to live? So it’s not about, you know, having black-owned businesses, it’s not about having like the surface level fixes, it’s really about affordable housing. The housing crisis is very, very distinct and real and devastating in Sacramento. So, any development project that’s not creating affordable housing is harmful.

Affordable housing is pretty much inaccessible in Sacramento. I think the number that they were talking about with Aggie Square was adding like 400 units or something which is not meaningful. People are on years long waiting lists for affordable housing. I’ve heard organizers say that people don’t live long enough to actually get affordable housing. So that’s a huge transformation that we would need to see in order to actually combat gentrification and keep people in their homes. Because thousands of people are living outside.

DJ Juniper: Yeah, absolutely. It’s really sad to see. I’ve been in Oak Park my whole life and there’s been lots of changes, one being how policing works. This is not great, but my mom used to call the cops because there would be gunfights in the park and they would just laugh at her. Now there’s more white people in the neighborhood and they’re calling the cops on what they perceive to be criminal behavior, but it’s absolutely not. We know that black people, just for existing, are criminalized.

On the topic of gentrification in Oak Park, in your essay that I mentioned earlier, you write about the impossibility of black ownership in space, which I found really interesting. And so could you get into that and how that is related to gentrification?

Mia Karisa: Yes. So just to reiterate something I said earlier: it’s important for us to think of property not as being material or permanent. Instead, it’s something that only exists to the extent that laws policies and law enforcement uphold it.

So if we think about black home ownership as having promise in terms of progress for black people, it ends up always being undermined. You know, houses lose value, just by virtue of black people living in the neighborhood. And there are some very dramatic and very literal ways that having a home while black does not offer you the protections that you might think. We can think about the role of SWAT teams killing people in their own homes, people like like Breonna Taylor. If the police decide you don’t have a right to space, then you don’t. Peoples’ homes are routinely invaded.

Stephon Clark, who I talked about earlier, was shot to death in 2018 outside his own home while he was trying to get in. He was hunted down by a helicopter in response to a call about vandalism. So it’s unthinkable, if you think of a residential white neighborhood, that that kind of thing could happen. So that’s a strong illustration of the limitations of property ownership for black people and in black neighborhoods— without being tied in with whiteness, it becomes immaterial. It holds no weight without the force of the law behind it. And in fact, the force of the law is so often actively against it.

DJ Abbie: Yeah, absolutely. This is a question that I often ask guests on some level or another. To the extent that your work so powerfully demonstrates that racial capitalism, property and control of space are also tightly connected. And in resisting, disrupting, or contesting property as a kind of social relation, where do you feel like we start to make those changes? For young radical folks out there who see the injustice that you point out or see the sort of things that your work so nicely illustrates, where do you get started? And a lot of what you’ve written about talks about the role of affect in both organizing and in protest. What words of advice would you have for folks who are doing this work and for folks that want to get started doing it?

Mia Karisa: Well, taking over a dining hall and giving people free food is a great start. I think an important part of your question fundamentally is asking, how do we think of abolition as a creative process? Where do we start in terms of building what we want and what we need and deserve rather than just identifying what we need to tear down? I think that it does really come down to mutual aid. It comes down to collectives and self-determination. So deciding to take our lives into our own hands and take care of each other.

It is kind of reassuringly straightforward to think of it that way, right? It’s essentially just connecting with people, rejecting the ways that we are isolated from each other very strategically under a racial capitalist, wage centered system. It requires us to connect with each other, to see what the needs are, and then see how we can be creative in taking, stealing, and making what we need. And then from there, all kinds of other things become possible. By meeting one need, by creating one initiative, you’re going to connect with other people who are working on something that’s related. And so that’s how movements are made, right?

I would say find out what’s already happening, based on what you care about, find out what people are already doing, and join them. And if it doesn’t exist, find other people who are enthusiastic. Everyone should feel empowered to be a part of social movements. It doesn’t require you joining a party or signing in blood. It just requires you to find people who care about something similar to what you care about, who have shared ideals and visions, and working to make them happen.