The Slogan and the Map

I wish at the outset to state my opposition to the MLA Executive Council's refusal to let the Delegate Assembly vote on a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions resolution (as of February 2024). 1 If higher education and the intellectual life it has made possible are to survive, academic organizations must serve as organs of collective representation.Indeed, it is not difficult to see that the formation of collectives capable of fighting back against the forces oppressing us is an urgent task of the present moment.In the summer of 2020, while marching in the streets along with thousands of others in Detroit and seeing hundreds of thousands marching in cities around the world, it felt like such a collective might be emerging.Finally, everybody seemed to see the fundamentally white supremacist character not only of the police but of the state itself.The abolitionist work of scholar-activists like Angela Davis (Are Prisons and Freedom), Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba had shifted a general common sense about the police and raised the real possibility of police and prison abolition as a goal (see also Kushner).But then what happened?In Detroit, we marched every day all summer, and there were many small victories.Yet, even in that relatively local situation, agreeing on a coherent set of demands proved challenging.In part, this was because we had neither a shared ideological orientation nor a common map of the social and political space.What, in fact, needed to be transformed in order to stop racist police violence?Would body cameras and mental health professionals make the difference?Or did we need to dismantle the police or, indeed, abolish capitalism itself?We knew what we wanted, but we didn't know how to go about getting it.The movement might have developed differently with leadership from a national organization with its own map of the overall situation and a clear set of demands-an