My rage isn't only about history. It's about the present tense of the decision, which is the pedestrian infrastructure — or the absence of it.
His 2003 essay, Necropolitics, names what Foucault's framework couldn't hold: the sovereign power to decide whose death is acceptable. Not necessarily who is directly killed — though that too — but who is left without the legal recognition, the infrastructure, the protection from violence that makes survival reliable. This is necropolitics: the foundational operation that the state's management of life rests on. The colony is the original necropolitical space. But the colony is not an exception to modern sovereignty. It is its foundation. The sovereign right from which citizenship and the rule of law extend is finally the right to decide which deaths are acceptable. Everything else rests on that prior decision.
The prison in the United States: by the 1990s, a necropolitical space constructed on domestic soil. In 1971 there were 200,000 people in American prisons and jails. By 2008 there were 2.3 million, disproportionately Black and Latino, in conditions of violence, disease, and permanent civic death. The decisions that produced this were distributed across prosecutors, legislators, police departments, judges — no single person decided. The outcome was decided. Embedded in ten thousand individual decisions that all went the same way.
Robinson and Rodney named the structure. Fanon and Mbembe named what the structure does to the person inside it. Two motions of the same demon.
Incantation casts subjectivity on the mind — the slow speech that turns the way things are into the way things must be. Race as the categorization that explains the dispossession. Nothing we can do, said until it sounds like a fact. Inscription does to the body what incantation does to the mind — cuts the structure into the flesh, the nervous system, the gait, the gaze, the ambient knowing of which spaces are yours and which ones require you to manage something. The yanked arm. The shrug taught early. The shoulders that drop where the body has been told it can rest, and tighten where it has been told it cannot.
Paulo Freire, writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed in exile from Brazil in 1968, held the harder part: both sides of the line are inscribed. The colonized's body is marked at the sites of harm; the mind is taught the explanation that makes the harm look like nature. The colonizer's body is marked at the sites of ease; the mind is taught the explanation that makes the ease look like merit. Different inscriptions. The pathology Fanon treated walked into his clinic from both sides of the line for a reason.
This is why removing the colonizer is not yet liberation. The colony in the mind. The colony in the bone. The flag comes down; the inscription continues, the incantation continues. The work is to break both.
You cannot classify people as available for extraction without a prior framework that places them outside the category of the fully human. You cannot produce colonized subjects who cooperate in their own subjection without a prior classification of what the human is that places the colonized outside it. Necropolitics requires a prior decision that certain lives are not worth managing. The racial architecture of capitalism requires a prior framework that makes the classification legible as something other than crime. All of it rests here: a specific, historical, constructed definition of the human that was designed to exclude and has been functioning as designed ever since.
Angela Davis has been building in exactly that direction longer than most people have been thinking about it.
Her argument is structural: the prison is not a response to crime. It is an institution for managing the people capitalism has made surplus — the outside made permanent, administered, funded. Davis was making this argument decades before Mbembe named it necropolitics. The Black radical tradition had already arrived where the European theoretical tradition was still heading. Mbembe was reading Davis. The lineage was already there: the wizard before the wizard's name. In 1971 there were roughly 200,000 people in U.S. state and federal prisons; by 2008 there were 2.3 million — the highest rate in the world, produced by traceable decisions: mandatory minimum laws applied with documented racial disparity, the defunding of public mental health care that moved people from hospitals to jails, the destruction of public housing that produced homelessness and then criminalized the homeless. Each decision followed the same logic — instead of addressing the material conditions producing surplus people, enclose them. The prison is cheaper than housing, cheaper than mental health care, cheaper than economic opportunity, if you don't count the people inside it as costs.
Davis's political conclusion is also Wynter's and Crenshaw's, stated in material terms: abolition is not the demand to close prisons overnight. It is the demand to build the world that doesn't need them. Housing stability. Community mental health infrastructure. Economic democracy. Restorative justice processes that address harm without severing community bonds. There is a name for this: abolition geography — trace the chain of disinvestment decisions that produces incarcerable surplus people, and change the investment decisions at every link. Change the geographic organization of resources, and the prison becomes structurally unnecessary.