To understand and struggle against the current state of contemporary surveillance, as an abolitionist imperative, is to recognize that dismantling the prison is inseparable from disrupting the exchange and proliferation of the tools and mechanisms of a borderless, digitized captivity.
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Posted inRACE & PLACE
Carceral Labs: Surveillance, Repression, and Media in Palestine and New Orleans
The Zionist occupation operates like any carceral apparatus or manufactured humanitarian crisis—it is a profitable capitalist industry entrenched in a transnational, repressive, and technological dialogue between the Zionist leadership and the heads of Western hegemonic states they secure.
Posted inPOLITICS & THE PEOPLE
UNC expands its use of AI surveillance following spring encampments
The encampment, like the university, was a place of learning, as there were teach-ins on the injustices occurring in Gaza and on campus. It was also a place of inter-faith prayer and congregation, as Jews, Muslims, and Christians worshipped together in the space. It was a space of community, support, empathy, and care, the opposite of what UNC claimed it to be.
Posted inRACE & PLACE
AI Surveillance as a tool of state repression
Just as the weapons technology developed by EOTECH is used to do imperialist violence across the globe, surveillance technologies are used to suppress protest here in the so-called United States.
Posted inRACE & PLACE
Abortion bans and pregnancy surveillance: The body itself as a prison
The Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson was a disaster for abortion and health care in the South. The situation is even more horrific for incarcerated pregnant people subjected to additional reproductive abuse, neglect, and punishment by the state.
Posted inMEDIA, CULTURE, & MEANING
From SXSW to Ticketmaster to Spotify: Musicians organize against industry corporate overlords
What's happening at SXSW—caused by the festival's inability to stay away from collaborating with genocidal war profiteers—is just one example of many major issues plaguing the music industry and its workers today.
Posted inPOLITICS & THE PEOPLE
The FIFA World Cup and U.S. Southern Host Cities
World Cup events, fan venues, and open spaces, watch-parties, and team games are not the place for Border Patrol or any draconian measures that deteriorate from the spirit of the World Cup and the societal connection it renders.
Posted inRACE & PLACE
May Day: Exporting the Southern Plantocracy
The history of labor organizing in the South is distinct from other regions in the U.S. because of the history of antiBlackness which informs anti-worker, anti-union sentiments.
Posted inARTS & SOUL
Commentaries on Protection and Safeness
On September 7, 2022,
the Central Intelligence Agency
published quite the article:
Honoring Harriet Tubman:
A Symbol of Freedom and
an Intelligence Pioneer.
How strange.
Posted inMEDIA, CULTURE, & MEANING
The censorship of journalists is also violence
"…the work people set out to accomplish is vulnerable to becoming mission impossible under the […] structural prohibitions that situate grassroots groups […] in the shadow of the shadow state." Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in the shadow of the shadow state "Decolonization […] cannot be accomplished by a wave of a magic wand, a natural cataclysm, […]
Posted inRACE & PLACE
Bombing Iran: Crude Oil Gulf Extraction and Gulf South Petro-Devastation
The same logic that organizes the extraction of the Global South organizes the domestic South. The plantation did not disappear, and the Middle Passage lives on.
Posted inPOLITICS & THE PEOPLE
Let Us Explain: Body Fascism
Body fascism is not a relic of the past. It is an active feature of modern imperial regimes. Every time a government decides whose body must be protected and whose body must be erased for the sake of national imagery, this is body fascism.
Posted inMEDIA, CULTURE, & MEANING
Let Us Explain: Sportswashing
Sportswashing: the use of an athletic event by an individual or a government, a corporation, or another group to promote or burnish the individual's or group's reputation, especially amid controversy or scandal.
Posted inMEDIA, CULTURE, & MEANING
Wonder Man is autistic-coded and I love that for me
Throughout the season, the emotional beats of this struggle and significant insights into his character are marked by traits, experiences, and behaviors that reflect the realities of autistic masking and the psychological toll it takes.
Posted inRACE & PLACE
ICE OUT: A Scalawag Reading List
There is nothing else left for the masses to do except escalate our resistance to this genocidal entanglement.
Posted inPOLITICS & THE PEOPLE
Zohran Mamdani and the Sorcery of Soft Rebellion
Mamdani may appear to occupy the office, but the office actually occupies him.
Posted inMEDIA, CULTURE, & MEANING
Diddy's Trial Shows Why the Carceral System Will Never Deliver Justice
Achieving justice requires dismantling the very systems that perpetuate inequality and violence because as long as those hierarchies exist, the powerful will always find ways to skate by and the oppressed will always be the ones policed, punished, and left unprotected.
Posted inSCALAWAG UPDATES
South to South: A 2025 Scalawag Reading List
If there is to be an abolitionist future, the seeds of those chains' undoing are sewn across multiple Souths.
Posted inSCALAWAG UPDATES
Climate Resilience: A 2025 Scalawag Reading List
The South is a region that suffers from structural antiBlackness and the afterlife of the plantation's insistence on underdeveloping crucial infrastructures that protect against and speed recovery from extreme weather events.
Posted inSCALAWAG UPDATES
Abolitionist Politics and Incarcerated Perspectives: A Scalawag Reading List
As an Abolitionist publication, stories focused on the prison industrial complex—as well as all carceral social systems that discipline us into policing ourselves and one another—remain Scalawag's foremost publishing priority.
Posted inMEDIA, CULTURE, & MEANING
It's time for progressive philanthropy to commit to funding journalism
People have to hear about movements in order to join them. And they have to hear about them from sources that cover them accurately, accountably, and knowledgeably, imparting lessons that allow this work to be replicated and to grow.
Posted inRACE & PLACE
Remembering Imam Jamil al-Amin
From the South and beyond, we mourn the passing of Black Revolutionary and Islamic faith leader, Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, who transitioned in federal prison custody on November 23, 2025 at the age of 82.
Posted inRACE & PLACE
Black Memphis Residents Report Harassment by Trump's Police Task Force
Residents interviewed for this article said it was at times unclear which agencies' officers were stopping them. Across the city, reporters have witnessed officers patrolling without badges or uniforms that identify their agencies.
Posted inMEDIA, CULTURE, & MEANING
Haints and Sinners: A Southern Gothic and Hoodoo Media List
Decaying plantation houses, spectral forms in haunted dwellings, the past creeping into the present, and dark family secrets. Curses, mysteries, and hauntings. Taboo desires, religious fanaticism, and cultish devotion. Madness, paranoia, and profound despair. These motifs help define the Southern Gothic genre
Posted inPOLITICS & THE PEOPLE
Cool the Cell, Feed the Spirit: Abolition as Reproductive and Climate Justice
We call on our communities to recognize that abolition is not only about tearing down cages but also about building worlds expansive enough to hold our transitions, our elders, and our descendants.
Posted inPOLITICS & THE PEOPLE
The Furnace: Climate, Confinement, and the Cost of Reproductive Aging Behind Bars
This is medical neglect—a slow, deliberate act of violence against people the state considers expendable or 'criminal,' exploiting their bodies while letting them suffer or die—whether it takes the shape of forced prison labor or the denial of basic healthcare like menopausal treatment.
Posted inPOLITICS & THE PEOPLE
ICE and the IDF: The Transnational Nexus of State Control
These links illustrate both the ideological and practical ties between the two bodies, as both serve as means to increase the militarization of policing via the weaponization of surveillance technology.
Posted inRACE & PLACE
The Colonial History of Texas Rangers
The Texas Rangers police force was founded in 1823 to enforce colonial rule in a "for whites only" government.
Posted inPOLITICS & THE PEOPLE
Freak Generations: The Moral Panic Playbook from Crack Babies to Trans Kids
"We cannot defend trans youth without confronting the carceral, racialized, and reproductive logics that underpin this moment, nor can we treat gender-affirming care as separate from the broader struggle for bodily autonomy, housing, healthcare, and family dignity."
Posted inRACE & PLACE
Musk's Memphis xAI data center and the making of a 'Digital Delta'
A fierce political struggle is brewing in Memphis. On one side is the world's richest man, Elon Musk, whose company xAI quietly set up shop in an abandoned factory this past summer. On the other side is a broad cross-section of Memphis residents, led by the low-income, historically Black neighborhoods located nearby.