From plantation rebellion and Indigenous land theft to prison labor'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. In On Property, Rinaldo Walcott contextualizes the significance of riots as part of social change by outlining a history of property damage as located in plantation rebellion, arguing that at the nexus of the current discourse on policing and violence is the unavoidable fact that criminal codes value property more than human life-and thus change isn't possible until we rethink the very idea of private property itself.