On Property

From plantation rebellion to prison labour's super-exploitation, Walcott examines the relationship between policing and property. That a man can lose his life for passing a fake $20 bill when we know our economies are flush with fake money says something damning about the way we've organized society. Yet the intensity of the calls to abolish the police after George Floyd's death surprised almost everyone. What, exactly, does abolition mean? How did we get here? And what does property have to do with it?

In On Property, Rinaldo Walcott explores the long shadow cast by slavery's afterlife and shows how present-day abolitionists continue the work of their forebears in service of an imaginative, creative philosophy that ensures freedom and equality for all. Thoughtful, wide-ranging, compassionate, and profound, On Property makes an urgent plea for a new ethics of care. (From Biblioasis)

Rinaldo Walcott is a professor at the University of Toronto, where he is the director of women and gender studies and teaches at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

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Interviews with Rinaldo Walcott

Rinaldo Walcott on the problem with police and politicians taking a knee

4 years ago

Duration 1:30

University of Toronto Professor Rinaldo Walcott tells The Current’s Matt Galloway about the “two kinds of knees that exist out there right now.”