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Romans 8:22–27
On a street corner halfway between our homes in south Minneapolis, the final groanings of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 turned the world on its head. The viral video later catalyzed another wave of protests in Minneapolis and across the world. George Floyd’s final groans and gasps embodied the bondage to sin, death, and decay in which the whole of creation is held. As Silvia C. Keesmaat and Brian J. Walsh write in Romans Disarmed: Resisting Empire, Demanding Justice, “…creation is groaning for the same reason that believers groan: because it is suffering under the exploitative economic practices and violent militarism of Roman imperial rule.”
George Floyd’s groans amplified the groans of all that suffer under the exploitative economic practices and violent militarism created and reinforced by policing and the rest of the prison industrial complex. The toil, suffering, and death perpetuated by policing has been revealed in different ways since George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis Police Department and this city, and cities everywhere, rose up in the largest protest movement our country has yet seen.
In the wake of property damage during protests, the city of Minneapolis became a showroom of plywood. Windows were boarded up to replace glass that had been broken or to prevent glass from being broken and those stretches of plywood became canvasses for artists across the area. As Toni Cade Bambara said, “[t]he role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible” and the revolutionary shift toward abolition became newly irresistible for many of us. Muralists painted prophetic images of a world without police, introducing many people to the idea of abolition for the first time. The murals told us that we could defund the police, that we could abolish the police, that we could break out of the endless cycles of police violence and cries for reform and blowback and repression and more police violence.
Abolition is both a horizon of the future that we strive toward and a practice of hopeful lament that exists in the tension between what is seen and what is unseen. Keesmat and Walsh write, “Lament is an act of hope. In fact, it is an act of ‘passionate expectation.’” In the streets and parks, in organizing meetings, in political education sessions, in our demands of the powerful across this land, we lament the violence of the prison industrial complex in all its forms. We lament the ways it fails to offer interruption, healing, restoration, or transformation of interpersonal events and cycles of harm and violence. But as abolitionists, we don’t offer these laments without hope, or with an empty hope that these systems can reform themselves, that only the systems we see now are possible. We offer a disciplined, practiced hope that, as Mariame Kaba writes, “there’s always a potential for transformation and for change.”
George Floyd’s groans were those of suffering and death at the hands (or knees) of violent Empire. The groans that we carry forward in organizing, protest, and other abolition work are more akin to the groans of new birth.
The same street corner that bore witness to George Floyd’s final groans has become a place in which the community has been birthing new ways of practicing safety, meeting needs, and dealing with harm. Over the past year, George Floyd Square has become a hub for community practice, community mourning, and mutual aid. People bring objects to the community run greenhouse; they bring their kids to the community bookshelf or the clothing closet, they walk the labyrinth marked by flowers and photos or they walk the streets that are closed to cars but filled with the names of people taken from us by policing across this country. Signs of what abolitionists and others seek to reject are everywhere, as are signs of what we believe is possible instead. At least three organizations have been birthed out of this space that didn’t exist before: the group that runs the “autonomous zone,” the group that caretakes the memorial space, and protest medics who have supported movement across the region. Beyond the confines of George Floyd Square, the caretaking work of memorial and spacemaking has grown to include a new memorial space where Daunte Wright was killed in nearby Brooklyn Center in April 2021.
George Floyd Square is a lab of sorts, creating and experimenting with what can be, rather than what has been. As Mariame Kaba said in a recent interview, “I don’t know what the end result is going to look like. But it’s part of a long legacy, what we call la longue durée.” We don’t always know how to create these things, and many things happen at once rather than the single narrative of progress many people would want to tell, but we learn as we build together.
God’s Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. Abolition is one of the ways, one of the most broad and deep reaching ways available in our time, that the Spirit intercedes and helps us in our weakness. Abolition is one of the ways we reach out with hope for something we’ve never seen. It is one of the ways the Spirit is offering us to deal with human weakness and pain, not by continuing to perpetuate harm but by creating conditions where we can live otherwise.
We don’t always know how to articulate what abolition will look like; it is always a horizon that is in front of us even as we create it. We are invited to stay grounded in the groanings and longings and hope that the Spirit gives, through individual spiritual practice, through communal spiritual practice, and through organizing toward a new world.
Rev. Dana Neuhauser is the Racial Justice Organizer for the Minnesota Annual Conference of the UMC and Minister of Public Witness at New City Church in Minneapolis.
Jonathan Stegall is a faith-rooted organizer with Reclaim the Block, and a user experience designer, in Minneapolis.