Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Welcome to the publication, “Representations.” This is a project designed to bring the perspectives of a wider variety of groups to the forefront of the anthropology classroom. To celebrate Black History Month, we are covering the accomplishments of 28 Black anthropologists across 28 days. Learn more about our project; read on for the amazing accomplishments of Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
Ruth Gilmore Wilson is an esteemed abolitionist and professor of anthropology and whose decades of activism have encouraged many to rethink and reimagine the current state of the world around them. Her renowned activism and lectures focus on ending the prison industrial complex, tying in matters of racial capitalism and economic geography as a means to encourage meaningful, revolutionary reform. Gilmore’s journey began on April 2, 1950 in New Haven, Connecticut. Her early years were marked by the peak of the Civil Rights Movement. Her father was a working mechanist, active union member, and, most of all, a leading civil rights activist who had instilled the importance of fighting against inequality. Fighting for equal rights was practically encoded into Gilmore’s DNA the moment she came to life.
In her early adulthood, Gilmore followed in her father's footsteps and became a machinist. Gilmore also studied to become an actress and even majored in drama as an undergraduate student at Yale, earning two degrees in Dramatic Literature and Criticism (Johnson 2006). Graduating from Yale was a historical stepping stone, as Gilmore was one of the first African American women admitted.
She utilized these degrees and taught several courses for the African American Studies department at several facilities, including the University of California, Los Angeles, pertaining to culture and power (Gilmore 2014). Soon thereafter, she began to further question the world around her, pushing limits of activism along the way; Gilmore states that she decided to pursue geography in order “to engage with questions of how we make the world and ourselves, and to study how everyday people do so with the dream of justice, equality, and beauty for all” (2014). It was not until she was 43 that she returned to further her education. Gilmore earned her Ph.D. in Geography from Rutgers University in New York in 1998, placing emphasis on the disciplines of economic geography and social theory. Gilmore was not initially planning on pursuing a Ph.D. in geography; it was not until she came across Neil Smith’s work, which focuses on Marxist geography and the concept that capitalist markets depend on the uneven distributions of communities in order to succeed, that she made the change. By pursuing geography as a major, Gilmore knew that she would be able to “examine urban-rural connections and to think broadly about how life is organized into competing and cooperating systems’’ (Kushner 2019). After receiving her Ph.D. she proceeded to develop her ideas of carceral geography that would soon enough take over the world of abolition activism as we know it.
Abolition is a movement that begins with the destruction of the current police and prison systems put in place around us. However, abolition does not stop there. The destruction of these institutions is the first step in reconstructing a more inclusive, anti-racist future that relies on rehabilitation and not vindictive punishment. Ruth Wilson Gilmore brought up a revolutionary point; the carceral system that has been established in America is modeled after the same behavior that has led people to commit crimes and land them in jail in the first place — cruelty and vengeance (Kushner 2019). She then goes on to ask why we, as a society, would choose to treat the problem with the same violence that brought us here; “why don’t we think about why we solve by repeating the kind of behavior that brought us the problem in the first place?” (Gilmore qtd. by Kushner 2019). You cannot fight violence with violence and expect a meaningful solution to emerge. Therefore, by tearing these institutions down, the abolition movement can then shift its focus to rehabilitating and treating the problem at the source by providing better support for communities that have been disproportionately affected by the effects of racial capitalism. These resources range from reallocating massive amounts of government funds into job investments, affordable housing, to education and health care.
In her 1999 publication titled Globalisation and US Prison Growth: from military Keynesianism to post-Keynesianism militarism, Gilmore examines the relationship between growth rates of prisons in the United States and Reagan’s “war on drugs” following the drug epidemic of the 70s and 80s. To set things into perspective before diving in, during and succeeding Reagan’s term in office, California alone built 23 new prisons and increased the prison population by around 500 percent. Following Nixon’s term in office, Reagan not only amplified prison sentences and laws regarding drug involvement, but he also increased social anxieties concerning drug-related crimes greatly. By inciting fear in the public’s eyes regarding the drug epidemic, Reagan was able to justify the need to open up more prisons and fill them up with more prisoners (Gilmore 1999). What Reagan failed to take into account was how the drug epidemic came to be.
Gilmore offers an explanation that blames structural changes in employment opportunities that made it difficult for many people to find jobs, and why would someone keep pushing to find a legal source of income when illegal sources exist and are closer within reach. Rather than treating the drug epidemic problem at the source and creating more job opportunities, the Reagan administration cracked down on hard drug crimes,. Crime rates increased greatly with the passing of these new laws, disproportionately affecting areas that were known to have drug related crimes, which up until now were not considered felonious. The public’s fear was not a direct reflection of State policy, but rather a new perceived definition of deviant behavior introduced by the Reagan administration. This new public fear of crime led to the opening of new prisons and the influx of new offenders. The number of prisoners was growing rapidly, which gave the public a false sense of security — seeing this many people behind bars.
Additionally, as the State rushed to corral more prisoners, these facilities had a new problem: funding. Gilmore writes, “State officials… guided by entrepreneurial California-based capitalists, figured out how to go behind taxpayers’ backs” and retrieve the funding from the tax-payers themselves (1999). These new prisons were now receiving great amounts of funding from the State. Throughout her years of activism and publications Gilmore maintains this argument: motivations behind prisons “are not a result of a desire by ‘bad’ people… to lock up poor people and people of color” (Kushner 2019). Gilmore goes on to explain that “the state did not wake up one day and say ‘Let’s be mean to black people.’ All these other things had to happen that made it turn out like this” (qtd. by Kushner 2019). It is a combination of Reagan’s war on drugs that was disproportionately aimed at Black people and the need to fill up empty prison beds that led California here. Every single form of capitalism is racial capitalism and it is the capitalist system running the prison system, making it an inherently racist one.
Bibliography
Gilmore, R. W. (2014, November 8). Biography. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20141108134627/http://oldweb.geog.berkeley.edu/PeopleHistory/faculty/R_Gilmore.html
Gilmore, R. W. (1999). Globalisation and US prison growth: From military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism. Race & Class, 40(2–3), 171–188. doi:10.1177/030639689904000212
Johnson, P. P. (2006, October 1). Portrait of an Activist-Academic > News > USC Dornsife. Retrieved from https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/223/portrait-of-an-activist-academic/
Kushner, R. (2019, April 17). Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html
