Abolition: For Your Consideration

pop justice takes on the 2022 74th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards

pop justice is Scalawag's newsletter exploring the intersection of popular culture and justice—namely through abolition. Sign up here.

Scalawag launched pop justice to reckon with the way copaganda distorts our understanding of our criminal-legal system and ultimately stalls abolition. The slate of television shows up for nomination at the 2022 74th Primetime Emmy Awards are no exception. In this special edition of pop justice, we've invited writers to call out potentially award-winning copaganda of the last year—and to highlight abolitionist storylines lurking in our favorite shows.

Watch this space during and after TV's biggest night of the year for even more reviews and critiques of the nominees.

How to do away with copaganda: Three Emmy-nominated shows to watch with an abolitionist lens

As we wind down from the 2022 Emmys, we're examining how Barry, Under the Banner of Heaven, Arcane missed—and met—the mark.

"I hope there's someone in the writers' room with an abolitionist mindset. Because I know how the cop closure ending goes. We all do. We've seen it. What else is possible?"

by Kaitlin Fontana, Rebecca Bodenheimer and Naa Djama Attoh-Okine September 16, 2022September 16, 2022

Only Murders in the Building exemplifies the lies in 'true' crime

From true-crime encouraging neighbors to police each other to the liberal lie that Black cops mean progress, two critics reflect on the Hulu series' portrayal of true-crime obsessions.

by Adedoyin "Ade" Adeniji and Bria Massey September 16, 2022September 16, 2022

The Dropout dramatizes Elizabeth Holmes' fraudulent rise. Endless military funding is also a scam.

A Black woman in tech reflects on the rise of Elizabeth Holmes, arguing that the Theranos founder got as far as she did because of her commitment to advancing the military and prison industrial complex under the guise of "technology for social good."

by Bria Massey September 13, 2022September 13, 2022

Yellowjackets shows a world without police as disorderly. Abolitionists aren't buying it.

Instead of depicting and sensationalizing a post-disaster world home to teenage girls turned cannibals, an abolitionist from the U.K. asks fellow organizers about the promise of building a new society.

by Molly Lipson September 13, 2022September 16, 2022

RuPaul's Drag Race visibilizes queerness—and the police state

We need to talk about the police officers RuPaul keeps inviting into a world where they don't belong—especially as real-life cops continue to endanger queer Black lives in particular.

by Sezin Koehler September 12, 2022September 16, 2022

The White Lotus is supposed to be satire. Hawaiians deserve the last laugh.

Even if The White Lotus tries to be an indictment of white privilege and settler colonialism, its use of policing and stereotypes make a mockery of existing systemic harm.

by Mariah Rigg September 12, 2022September 16, 2022

Abbott Elementary and the promise of schools without cops

Without cops or school resource officers roaming the hallway, Abbott Elementary invites us into a world that's possibility-laden, imaginative, and abolitionist.

by Eteng Ettah September 12, 2022September 16, 2022

more in pop justice:

How Tina Turner's trauma remains a hip-hop trope—and why we need to abolish it

Fully reckoning with Turner's legacy forces us to confront an uncomfortable fact: her trauma has often been mocked in the pop landscape that she helped create.

In their lyrics, rappers and hip-hop artists have long reduced Tina Turner's abuse to a metaphor for violence, aggression, and dominance. Erasing the nuance of her lived experience stalls our collective understanding of domestic violence and abolition.

by Justin A. Davis

Night Court: New(ish) Sitcom, Same Copaganda

A criminal-legal reporter ventures into Night Court—the cringy sitcom reboot and the real courtroom in Manhattan.

Unlike the NBC show, real life night court "is a place you can go to see that as a society we don't care about poor people. You're in this microcosm of all the institutions that failed our clients."

by Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg

We're Queer, 'We're Here,' and We're Fighting Back

HBO's Drag Race spinoff 'We're Here' finally waded into politics targeting LGBTQ+ rights, making it the most important season yet, as drag bans pop up in statehouses.

The show's account of Florida's neo-Nazis and proto-fascists are sickening—and not in the fabulous drag way.

by Sezin Koehler

Everything (Queer) Everywhere All At Once

Although the film focuses on queerness and alternative universes, the awards season darling still props up the nuclear family and agents of the state—even as the constructs fail the Wangs.

Despite its villainization in Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's box-office hit, queerness thwarts the story's central themes of limitations under capitalism and xenophobia.

by mónica teresa ortiz