How to Work for Peace and Justice?
Thoughts on the Prejudice of Pollution, Police, and Prisons
by Anthony T. Fiscella
In a moment of conciliation often mocked by social justice activists, Rodney King (1965-2012), famously beaten by Los Angeles police in 1991, asked in the midst of ongoing rioting: “Can we all get along?” Many activists countered his call for peace with the chant “No Justice, No Peace,” yet, in the 31 years since those riots, the slogan seemed more like a prophecy: we remain with exactly that, neither justice nor peace and seemingly wrapped in a ceaseless spiral of violence. In our extremely unequal and highly racialized society, how do we work for justice and, significantly, how can we get along while doing so?
The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), a critically acclaimed film, has received the description “black tragicomedy” referencing not ethnicity but the type of dark humor employed throughout the story. And yet, thanks to Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White (1995), we can see that even if the all-Irish characters did not qualify as “black,” nor did they qualify as “white.” The British Empire had already honed its racialized divide-and-conquer tactics in its occupation of Ireland hundreds of years prior to enacting the first laws distinguishing “whites” from “non-whites” in the Virginia colony of the 1600s. Well into the 1800s, British and similar racial elites in the United States often did not regard Irish Americans as “white.” Although initially similarly subjugated and allied with Blacks, the Irish had to “prove” their whiteness by betraying and attacking their former comrades and attacking them. They did this, in part, by working as city police and firefighters—the same forces that participated in massacres against Blacks in cities such as New York (1863), Memphis (1866), and New Orleans (1866) (while the New York incident has received a fair amount of attention, the massacres in both Memphis and New Orleans as well as many others have largely faded from the collective memory of U.S. history—a convenient amnesia further exacerbated by recent legislation in Florida).
Although The Banshees of Inisherin seemingly relegated war to mere backdrop to the main drama (a relationship dispute between two—former—friends) and it seemingly ignored race altogether, the film actually exposed some of the most personal, intricate, and strikingly absurd roots to war. It illustrated the poverty of loneliness and the loneliness of poverty that stifle our creativity, numb our sensitivity, and leave us desperate for meaningful human connection. The entire film takes place on a tiny island. This symbolism worked to capture the sense of claustrophobic confinement that characterizes daily life for most people on Earth: few people have the ordinary option to choose their neighbors, co-workers, landlords, classmates, or bosses.
Trapped on physical, economic, and psychic islands, the impoverishment of our social lives and opportunities leaves us fighting among ourselves with an inability to even reach—much less fight against—the powers that brought this impoverishment upon us. The film manages to level implicit critique of the British occupation, the Irish civil war, patriarchy, and the brutality of police all without ever discussing them directly as institutions. In doing so, it articulates, like an apt aphorism, a neat sum of the desperation and violence that permeates daily life whether shootings on the streets of Nebraska or bombs falling in Yemen, Ethiopia, Gaza, and Ukraine. The universality of guns today stretch like thick toxic weeds of mechanical ivy growing in the soil of inequality, racism, and fear. How can we replace those weeds with gardens that nourish us instead?
As Curtis Bryant noted in this journal last year, quoting Joan Baez: “Action is the antidote to despair.” And when we find issues that enable us to work across gender, class, and racial barriers we find opportunities to untie the knots that bind us. Such steps, of course, do not resolve the question but they bring us into dialogue and learning curves with the terrain we aim to plant, plough, and harvest.
We find one example of activists effectively uniting together in the Defend the Atlanta Forest campaign. Outside of Atlanta, mostly Black residents and mostly “white” out-of-town activists have opposed the construction of a $90 million dollar training center for police dubbed “Cop City” by activists (titled “Atlanta Public Safety Training Center” by City Hall). Prior to the vote in 2021, city council recorded public comments—with 70% of residents opposed to the proposal—before the council proceeded to pass the plan with a 10-4 vote.
The proposed police training center (the largest in the U.S.) would include roadways for high-speed vehicle chases, a helicopter landing pad, a shooting range, and a fake town set-up to practice police raids. In response, residents who want neither police militarization nor destruction of the forest, nor the sound of bombs and guns as a backdrop to their daily life, have called to preserve the area known as South River Forest or Weelaunee Forest—the name bestowed by the Indigenous Muscogee Creek (from whom the land came after colonists took it over in the 1700s and Andrew Jackson forcibly removed most Muscogee Creek from Georgia along with the Cherokee in 1832). The local Natives revere the forest. Residents want to preserve it. Police and politicians want to raze 85 acres of it and build on the location of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm human rights abuses took place for decades. The forest area has critically prevented stormwater flooding and, if preserved, would form Atlanta’s largest protected green space.
Activists have occupied the area in an attempt to stop the project. In January 2023, police swept through the forest shooting and killing 26 year-old protester Manuel Paez Terán known as “Tortuguita,” whom police claimed had fired at them. More recently, police arrested 23 people on charges of “domestic terrorism” (including a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center there to observe). A local pastor, Chad Hale, commented to a local newspaper: “For us to get more and more militarized is not a good direction—it’s the most uncreative way to approach crime.” We might recall that immediately prior to this project’s approval, Atlanta police had shot 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks in the back—killing him as he ran away. More police and The issue, however, unites across social identities and ideological interests in opposition.
In Philadelphia in the early 1970s, a group arose named MOVE who united these issues together as well. Guided by their co-founder John Africa, they critiqued capitalism, industrial pollution, animal exploitation, racism, militarism, prisons, police brutality, and authoritarianism. They lived communally on a raw food diet, homeschooled their children, and worked to unite various movements to defend “Life”. Although plagued by their own sectarianism and authoritarian tendencies, they nevertheless provided a model for comprehensive social change. One person attracted by their example, Mumia Abu-Jamal, reported, at that time, for local news agencies. Tried before a nearly all-white jury in 1982 for killing a police officer whom he witnessed beating his brother, Abu-Jamal has spoken from behind prison walls that have confined him for more than 40 years: “Simply put, capitalism kills. The unrestrained search for unlimited profits have endangered the air, water, temperatures, and water levels around the world. And human populations are facing survival threats that can’t be met by America’s formidable war machine. Perhaps, the planting of millions of trees and making human habitats green spaces could delay the coming environmental carnage. Perhaps.” In Weelaunee Forest, the trees don’t need planting—just protecting.
Thanks to Prison Radio, an organization that brings the voices of the incarcerated out through the bars to a wider public, we can read Abu-Jamal’s words unlike many whose voices remain stymied and stifled. Despite years of intensely covering issues regarding social, racial, and ecological justice for decades, despite his old age, despite his severe health problems, and despite the passing of his wife Wadiya in December, Mumia Abu-Jamal remains committed to working toward a re-trial and, ultimately, his release. Right now, Common Pleas Court Judge Lucretia Clemons could potentially overturn Mumia’s conviction and grant a new trial (see more info at www.prisonradio.org ).
Issues such as Abu-Jamal’s case or “Cop City” could require particular attention from “white” activists precisely because racism hides from those unaffected by it the damages afflicted to those affected. Much like how ecological and animal-related issues take a distant back seat to other issues unless they directly affect humans (and often not even then), issues that affect Blacks in the United States get typically relegated to “side issues” rather than central keys to resolving fundamental flaws in the constitution of American society. Of all humans, those incarcerated seem to rank lowest in priority: a 2017 study by Candice Bernd and other found more than 500 prisons in the U.S. located within 3 miles of toxic waste sites—close to contamination yet far from the public eye.
From Tyre Nichols to Breonna Taylor to Elijah McClain, police terror against Black Americans continues. Industrial pollution and addiction industries profit from and terrorize Black people in less obvious ways. And when we recognize how entangled these issues remain, we can perhaps better work together committing the spirit of both Rodney King and the activists who critiqued him to work together not just to “get along” for the sake of it but to get along with each other while getting justice together.
Like the characters in The Banshees of Inisherin, we remain stuck on islands of isolation that damage our ability to creatively engage with the very issues that keep us on these islands. Yet, as Rodney Kind concluded, “We’re all stuck here for a while, let’s try to work it out.” To this, we can recall the words of Malcolm X who stated in response to police violence in Los Angeles in 1962, “It is because of our effort toward getting straight to the root that people oftentimes think that we are dealing in hate. …[Yet] the only way that we’re going to get some of this oppression and exploitation away from us is to come together against the common enemy. …The white man is intelligent enough if he were made to realize how Black people really feel, and how fed up we are without that old compromising sweet talk …[that] if he’s not ready to clean his house up, he shouldn’t have a house. It should catch on fire. And burn down.” As we can see through the forest fires plaguing the planet, the “white man” does not even seem to care that profiteering from industrial pollution contributes to the burning of the home. Because the narrow and addictive concern for profits obscures far more complicated and pressing issues such as collective survival.
In contrast, we, like Abu-Jamal, can recognize how various institutions intertwine to sustain the unsustainable, to justify the unjustifiable, and normalize the terror of the status quo. Ecology, pollution, prisons, police, and racism connect and entangle. And likewise, the knot unravels when solutions connect to untangle. Prison abolition (which connects to) addiction treatment (which connects to) defunding police (which connects to) alternative forms of conflict-resolution and safety could all help nourish eco-systems of social justice that root themselves in the actions taken in daily life. This means, for example, prioritizing jobs and livelihoods that, rather than pollute, deplete, and destroy our social and environmental eco-systems, serve instead to clean, heal, and preserve them. Like an urban gardening for the soul, that which we plant together, we can grow together….if we exercise our remaining capacity for creativity.
In a moment of conciliation often mocked by social justice activists, Rodney King (1965-2012), famously beaten by Los Angeles police in 1991, asked in the midst of ongoing rioting: “Can we all get along?” Many activists countered his call for peace with the chant “No Justice, No Peace,” yet, in the 31 years since those riots, the slogan seemed more like a prophecy: we remain with exactly that, neither justice nor peace and seemingly wrapped in a ceaseless spiral of violence. In our extremely unequal and highly racialized society, how do we work for justice and, significantly, how can we get along while doing so?
The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), a critically acclaimed film, has received the description “black tragicomedy” referencing not ethnicity but the type of dark humor employed throughout the story. And yet, thanks to Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White (1995), we can see that even if the all-Irish characters did not qualify as “black,” nor did they qualify as “white.” The British Empire had already honed its racialized divide-and-conquer tactics in its occupation of Ireland hundreds of years prior to enacting the first laws distinguishing “whites” from “non-whites” in the Virginia colony of the 1600s. Well into the 1800s, British and similar racial elites in the United States often did not regard Irish Americans as “white.” Although initially similarly subjugated and allied with Blacks, the Irish had to “prove” their whiteness by betraying and attacking their former comrades and attacking them. They did this, in part, by working as city police and firefighters—the same forces that participated in massacres against Blacks in cities such as New York (1863), Memphis (1866), and New Orleans (1866) (while the New York incident has received a fair amount of attention, the massacres in both Memphis and New Orleans as well as many others have largely faded from the collective memory of U.S. history—a convenient amnesia further exacerbated by recent legislation in Florida).
Although The Banshees of Inisherin seemingly relegated war to mere backdrop to the main drama (a relationship dispute between two—former—friends) and it seemingly ignored race altogether, the film actually exposed some of the most personal, intricate, and strikingly absurd roots to war. It illustrated the poverty of loneliness and the loneliness of poverty that stifle our creativity, numb our sensitivity, and leave us desperate for meaningful human connection. The entire film takes place on a tiny island. This symbolism worked to capture the sense of claustrophobic confinement that characterizes daily life for most people on Earth: few people have the ordinary option to choose their neighbors, co-workers, landlords, classmates, or bosses.
Trapped on physical, economic, and psychic islands, the impoverishment of our social lives and opportunities leaves us fighting among ourselves with an inability to even reach—much less fight against—the powers that brought this impoverishment upon us. The film manages to level implicit critique of the British occupation, the Irish civil war, patriarchy, and the brutality of police all without ever discussing them directly as institutions. In doing so, it articulates, like an apt aphorism, a neat sum of the desperation and violence that permeates daily life whether shootings on the streets of Nebraska or bombs falling in Yemen, Ethiopia, Gaza, and Ukraine. The universality of guns today stretch like thick toxic weeds of mechanical ivy growing in the soil of inequality, racism, and fear. How can we replace those weeds with gardens that nourish us instead?
As Curtis Bryant noted in this journal last year, quoting Joan Baez: “Action is the antidote to despair.” And when we find issues that enable us to work across gender, class, and racial barriers we find opportunities to untie the knots that bind us. Such steps, of course, do not resolve the question but they bring us into dialogue and learning curves with the terrain we aim to plant, plough, and harvest.
We find one example of activists effectively uniting together in the Defend the Atlanta Forest campaign. Outside of Atlanta, mostly Black residents and mostly “white” out-of-town activists have opposed the construction of a $90 million dollar training center for police dubbed “Cop City” by activists (titled “Atlanta Public Safety Training Center” by City Hall). Prior to the vote in 2021, city council recorded public comments—with 70% of residents opposed to the proposal—before the council proceeded to pass the plan with a 10-4 vote.
The proposed police training center (the largest in the U.S.) would include roadways for high-speed vehicle chases, a helicopter landing pad, a shooting range, and a fake town set-up to practice police raids. In response, residents who want neither police militarization nor destruction of the forest, nor the sound of bombs and guns as a backdrop to their daily life, have called to preserve the area known as South River Forest or Weelaunee Forest—the name bestowed by the Indigenous Muscogee Creek (from whom the land came after colonists took it over in the 1700s and Andrew Jackson forcibly removed most Muscogee Creek from Georgia along with the Cherokee in 1832). The local Natives revere the forest. Residents want to preserve it. Police and politicians want to raze 85 acres of it and build on the location of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm human rights abuses took place for decades. The forest area has critically prevented stormwater flooding and, if preserved, would form Atlanta’s largest protected green space.
Activists have occupied the area in an attempt to stop the project. In January 2023, police swept through the forest shooting and killing 26 year-old protester Manuel Paez Terán known as “Tortuguita,” whom police claimed had fired at them. More recently, police arrested 23 people on charges of “domestic terrorism” (including a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center there to observe). A local pastor, Chad Hale, commented to a local newspaper: “For us to get more and more militarized is not a good direction—it’s the most uncreative way to approach crime.” We might recall that immediately prior to this project’s approval, Atlanta police had shot 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks in the back—killing him as he ran away. More police and The issue, however, unites across social identities and ideological interests in opposition.
In Philadelphia in the early 1970s, a group arose named MOVE who united these issues together as well. Guided by their co-founder John Africa, they critiqued capitalism, industrial pollution, animal exploitation, racism, militarism, prisons, police brutality, and authoritarianism. They lived communally on a raw food diet, homeschooled their children, and worked to unite various movements to defend “Life”. Although plagued by their own sectarianism and authoritarian tendencies, they nevertheless provided a model for comprehensive social change. One person attracted by their example, Mumia Abu-Jamal, reported, at that time, for local news agencies. Tried before a nearly all-white jury in 1982 for killing a police officer whom he witnessed beating his brother, Abu-Jamal has spoken from behind prison walls that have confined him for more than 40 years: “Simply put, capitalism kills. The unrestrained search for unlimited profits have endangered the air, water, temperatures, and water levels around the world. And human populations are facing survival threats that can’t be met by America’s formidable war machine. Perhaps, the planting of millions of trees and making human habitats green spaces could delay the coming environmental carnage. Perhaps.” In Weelaunee Forest, the trees don’t need planting—just protecting.
Thanks to Prison Radio, an organization that brings the voices of the incarcerated out through the bars to a wider public, we can read Abu-Jamal’s words unlike many whose voices remain stymied and stifled. Despite years of intensely covering issues regarding social, racial, and ecological justice for decades, despite his old age, despite his severe health problems, and despite the passing of his wife Wadiya in December, Mumia Abu-Jamal remains committed to working toward a re-trial and, ultimately, his release. Right now, Common Pleas Court Judge Lucretia Clemons could potentially overturn Mumia’s conviction and grant a new trial (see more info at www.prisonradio.org ).
Issues such as Abu-Jamal’s case or “Cop City” could require particular attention from “white” activists precisely because racism hides from those unaffected by it the damages afflicted to those affected. Much like how ecological and animal-related issues take a distant back seat to other issues unless they directly affect humans (and often not even then), issues that affect Blacks in the United States get typically relegated to “side issues” rather than central keys to resolving fundamental flaws in the constitution of American society. Of all humans, those incarcerated seem to rank lowest in priority: a 2017 study by Candice Bernd and other found more than 500 prisons in the U.S. located within 3 miles of toxic waste sites—close to contamination yet far from the public eye.
From Tyre Nichols to Breonna Taylor to Elijah McClain, police terror against Black Americans continues. Industrial pollution and addiction industries profit from and terrorize Black people in less obvious ways. And when we recognize how entangled these issues remain, we can perhaps better work together committing the spirit of both Rodney King and the activists who critiqued him to work together not just to “get along” for the sake of it but to get along with each other while getting justice together.
Like the characters in The Banshees of Inisherin, we remain stuck on islands of isolation that damage our ability to creatively engage with the very issues that keep us on these islands. Yet, as Rodney Kind concluded, “We’re all stuck here for a while, let’s try to work it out.” To this, we can recall the words of Malcolm X who stated in response to police violence in Los Angeles in 1962, “It is because of our effort toward getting straight to the root that people oftentimes think that we are dealing in hate. …[Yet] the only way that we’re going to get some of this oppression and exploitation away from us is to come together against the common enemy. …The white man is intelligent enough if he were made to realize how Black people really feel, and how fed up we are without that old compromising sweet talk …[that] if he’s not ready to clean his house up, he shouldn’t have a house. It should catch on fire. And burn down.” As we can see through the forest fires plaguing the planet, the “white man” does not even seem to care that profiteering from industrial pollution contributes to the burning of the home. Because the narrow and addictive concern for profits obscures far more complicated and pressing issues such as collective survival.
In contrast, we, like Abu-Jamal, can recognize how various institutions intertwine to sustain the unsustainable, to justify the unjustifiable, and normalize the terror of the status quo. Ecology, pollution, prisons, police, and racism connect and entangle. And likewise, the knot unravels when solutions connect to untangle. Prison abolition (which connects to) addiction treatment (which connects to) defunding police (which connects to) alternative forms of conflict-resolution and safety could all help nourish eco-systems of social justice that root themselves in the actions taken in daily life. This means, for example, prioritizing jobs and livelihoods that, rather than pollute, deplete, and destroy our social and environmental eco-systems, serve instead to clean, heal, and preserve them. Like an urban gardening for the soul, that which we plant together, we can grow together….if we exercise our remaining capacity for creativity.
