“The Men of Attica Were Different Than Their Captors” Orisanmi Burton’s Tip of the Spear and Attica as Abolition

Content Notice: This episode contains discussions of sexual violence & rape

This is the conclusion of our discussion on Orisanmi Burton’s forthcoming book Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. This discussion was recorded on the same day as the previously released episode, so you may catch references back to that conversation or to others we’ve had with Burton over the last couple of years. We’ll link those in the show notes.

Here we largely move into discussion of Attica itself, but this is not the blow by blow rendition that you have likely heard elsewhere. We talk about Attica through George Jackson’s idea of the Black Commune, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Abolition Geography, we talk about how in the words of the Institute of the Black World “the men of Attica were different than their captors,” and we talk about the demand that prisoners be repatriated to a non-imperialist country. We also talk about Burton’s findings on the repression faced by the prisoners after the slaughter of 39 men 52 years ago today. While we don’t talk in graphic detail about all of that repression, a trigger warning is still necessary as we talk about sexual violence in that discussion. 

We close by talking about Burton’s work on the Black Liberation Army and how examining the prison as a site of struggle helped him develop a more capacious view of the BLA than what we find in most representations of who they were and what animated their activities.

We’re very grateful for the time that Orisanmi Burton has spent with us over the course of this interview and our other conversations over the past couple of years. We hope folks get as much out of these conversations as we do, and we strongly recommend that people pre-order Tip of the Spear if they haven’t already.

This is our 4th episode for the month of September. If you appreciate the work that we do, the best way to keep it coming is to join the amazing folks who make this show possible at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism by giving as little as $1 a month or $10.80 per year. 

Links:

pre-order Tip of the Spear

Part 1 of this discussion

Prior episodes with Orisanmi Burton