“I had now seen at close quarters the haughty white men who made the laws; I had seen how they acted, how they regarded black people, how they regarded me; and I no longer felt bound by the laws which white and black were supposed to obey in common. I was outside those laws; the white people had told me so.” –Richard Wright
One of the commonly accepted norms of society as we know it is the law. Like the government and the state, laws are considered a reasonable component needed to maintain order. However, like the government and the state, it cannot be separated from its origins. Ruling classes shape the law based on preserving their own political, economic, and territorial interests, among other things. Additionally, issues like subjective morals, religious tenets, ethnicity, race, and more may play a role in what the laws are. Several factors must be considered to understand the partiality of the law. That’s why we shouldn’t be surprised as we see the state wielding laws against vulnerable people that were supposedly meant to protect them. Across the U.S., laws historically associated with racial protections have been weaponized against racialized populations. To understand how this is possible, we have to understand how lawmaking systematizes the very societal acts of violence many expect it to deliver them from.
In Georgia, a domestic terror statute from 2017 provides a noteworthy example of how the law bends toward injustice. Legislators passed it after the white supremacist Dylann Roof massacred nine Black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church. Supporters of the law initially said that this definition of domestic terror was not intended to encompass peaceful protesters. Yet, less than a decade later, that changed. State prosecutors most recently—and for the first time—used the law to target the Defend the Atlanta Forest activists in their resistance to the militarized police facility known as “Cop City.” Notably, Georgia authorities fortified their efforts with historical broadness used in terror law. That broadness is directly connected to the anti-anarchist sentiments of the First Red Scare and international repression. That much is relevant because lawmakers already rooted terrorism in historical radicals pursuing liberation. Older laws are not immune, either.
In North Carolina, politicians are resurrecting public masking rules from laws meant to suppress Ku Klux Klan activity. This ableist attack on immunocompromised people and collective consciousness is meant to send a partisan message at the expense of public health. The 1953 legislation that supposedly targeted the Ku Klux Klan included loopholes Klan members were able to exploit, and the new legislation fails to address these exemptions. Now opponents worry that this might give police a new excuse to target those they would profile anyway. Other examples show that this isn’t merely a coincidence but a part of the contemporary moment to exact political vengeance during rising fascist tides.
The Atlanta-based Fearless Fund, which issues grants to early stage businesses owned by Black women, was sued by right-wing litigant Edward Blum. The Washington Post initially reported, “The lawsuit claims the Fearless Fund practice of awarding $20,000 grants, support services, and mentorship to businesses owned by Black women violates a section of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that guarantees ‘race neutrality’ in contracts.” An 11th Circuit Court of Appeals panel agreed and ruled against the fund.
Decisions like these remind us why it was at the top of former President Donald Trump’s agenda to reshape the federal judiciary. Furthermore, conservative legal “activists” like Blum are the epitome of turning even nominal legal protections and civil rights laws against their target populations. Blum is behind the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the targeting of affirmative action, race-conscious admissions policies, and diversity policies. During a period where a Black woman was targeted for de-arresting someone with an anti-lynching law and an Arizona abortion law from 1864 was invoked after the collapse of Roe v. Wade, we have to see the law for what it truly is.
Revolutionary Black anarchist and jailhouse lawyer Martin Sostre was perceptive about understanding the law. He used it to secure victories for imprisoned people and change conditions nationwide through lawsuits. However, he still admitted that “the law is oppression codified” and questioned authorities, writing, “Didn’t you legalize these crimes against Black people and codify them in your slave codes? Didn’t you legitimize your genocidal slaughter of the American Indians and theft of their land by legislating Indian laws and the Homestead Act? Were not these crimes politically motivated and formed the very foundation of United States capitalism?” He’d note separately that he understood the state uses the law to eliminate its enemies legally. This leads to questions about preventing “crime,” creating safety, and security. Some people might wonder how this can be achieved without the law.
The law is not a location where justice is doled out equally. It’s a place where the ruling classes, economic institutions, religious institutions, and ruling parties name their interests as a universal morality. The foundations of the many nation-states we live in are riddled with genocides, land theft, dispossession, deportation, and territorialization. The U.S. is not unique in that. However, the morality question and law as its code can be answered by examining its origins. Political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal clarifies: “Is law merely morality or the institutionalization of what we commonly view as right and wrong? In the United States, where history evolves from the spectacle and national drama of slavery, law fails on the question of its internal morality.” You cannot have just laws that keep people safe where the law rests upon the unsafety, if not destruction, of others. Abu-Jamal continues, stating, “Now, as then, the law continues to be an instrument of the powerful, morality be damned. For the weak, the powerless, the oppressed, the law is more often a hindrance than a help.”
It’s important to acknowledge that laws supposedly meant to protect vulnerable people being used against them or voided are not merely aberrations, misinterpretations, or contradictions. They are indicators of the law’s partiality and purpose. The prison-industrial complex flourishes because business is so good when sentencing is as harsh as possible. Think about the judges that sold “kids for cash” to for-profit detention centers or private prison companies drafting ready-made anti-immigrant laws to increase their profits. As Peter Kropotkin once wrote, “Law, in its quality of guarantee of the results of pillage, slavery, and exploitation, has followed the same phrases of development as capital; twin brother and sister, they have advanced hand in hand.”
A call to lawlessness doesn’t necessarily mean a call to chaos. After all, the police are “law enforcement.” Calls for their abolition that don’t recognize the law they enforce and the state they preserve may underestimate the breadth of the systemic violence we face. The remedy for the problems the law supposedly addresses comes from creating better conditions for people to flourish and be free from the ills oppression facilitates. Lawmakers and corporate interests trying to preserve their influence are not concerned with fixing issues from which they benefit. That’s why, in the spirit of the many movements, rebellions, and revolts that came before us, we must remember that we will not advance without breaking the law.
