The Kings ain’t playin’ no one tonight: Desanctifying property as an abolitionist practice in Sacramento

As the ruptures caused by protests and riots reveal, property is neither static nor infallible as an arrangement of space. Rather, it is relational and contingent on state force and self-disciplined social behavior. I argue that transgressing the physical markers of property reflects a more revolutionary practice of destabilizing the ideologies of social order upon which property depends. Such interruptions desanctify property by refusing its legitimacy as an arbiter of social life and movement in space. Desanctifying property practices the forms of collectivity, autonomy, and deviant kinship that abolition demands.

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Excerpt

(Page 322)

“The maintenance of space as property is always partial and incomplete. This maintenance requires an exertion and performance of ownership in space that is not a universal practice but is rather geographically and historically specific. Rooted in a colonial history, the making of property is perpetually reenacted as an act of conquest. This reproduction of property is central to maintaining the state’s function as a vehicle for capital interests (Smith, 1992). Through processes of expropriation, partitioning, and policing, the maintenance of property entrenches the socio-spatial relationships necessary to racial capitalism (Blomley, 2003; Bonds, 2019; Melamed, 2011; Ranganathan, 2016). As such, property is more meaningfully thought as processual and relational rather than static or physical.”