The lives and conditions of Black women are inseparable from, and
inextricably linked to, all dimensions of social and political life.
Black Women Under State centres on the realities of Black
women, both in-process and theory, who are living at the
intersections of race, poverty, surveillance, and social services.
Abdillahi, who is uniquely positioned as a community organizer,
practitioner, public intellectual, and scholar, engaged twenty women
living at these life intersections in the greater Toronto area.
The text undertakes
a deep and studied inquiry into these women’s subjective
experiences of surveillance while on the province of Ontario’s
social assistance program Ontario Works and interrogates the
dimensional effects of those experiences. Offering a timely and
crucial contribution to the discourse around abolition, Abdillahi
makes explicit the ways in which social systems are made opaque so
that we don’t connect them to the carceral state; this concept of
carceral care talks to abolition as the broad concept that it is a
fully-embraced understanding that abolition dismantles systems of
policing that extend beyond the institution we call the police.
Three major themes
emerge through her inquiry: surveillance, poverty, and morality each
interconnected to a larger social and public policy discourse.
Abdillahi employs Critical Race Theory and Black Feminist Thought as
primary theoretical lenses as she animates the lives of these women,
alongside and in conversation with existing research, theory and
practice, revealing direct links among their experience, in order to
demonstrate the shared, longstanding, and ongoing historicity of the
interconnectedness of Black women’s experience globally.
The vast majority of
the book’s citations are from Black Canadians, giving the text its
own narrative around citational practice. Through a dynamic
interlacing of contemporary critical thought and lived experience,
Black Women Under State contributes to filling a gap in social
policy literature, which has typically disregarded the subjective
experiences of Black women or treated them as a mere addendum.