There’s a trafficking jam on the underground railroad: black abolitionist icons and anti-trafficking media

ABSTRACT

This article demonstrates how anti-trafficking media use the public memory of the Underground Railroad to racially legitimize US global policing regimes. From far-right paramilitary vigilante groups to liberal multicultural public history institutions, the anti-trafficking industry’s reverence for 19^th-century Black women abolitionist icons is mobilized, counter-intuitively, to build public support for carceral agendas. Through visual analysis of the media of two exemplar organizations—Operation Underground Railroad and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center—I unpack the racial dynamics of anti-trafficking’s carceral humanitarianism and the racial politics of anti-trafficking’s memory of transatlantic abolition. I argue that incorporating icons of radical Black freedom struggle, such as Harriet Tubman, into anti-trafficking’s neoliberal carceral agenda becomes a racial alibi for the perpetuation of ongoing racialized state violence in the name of abolition. US policing is thus racially legitimized as a set of freedom-granting institutions amid the ongoing Black women-led freedom struggles that name policing’s role in perpetuating antiblack state violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Carceral humanitarianism
• anti-trafficking
• slavery
• abolition
• racial politics

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Lyndsey P. Beutin

Lyndsey P. Beutin is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies & Media Arts at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her research focuses on the racial politics of communication, social justice, and the memory of slavery. Her first book, Trafficking in Antiblackness: Modern-Day Slavery, White Indemnity, and Racial Justice (forthcoming with Duke University Press in 2023), explores how campaigns against human trafficking use the memory of transatlantic slavery to reproduce antiblackness in the name of ending so-called “modern-day slavery.” She earned her PhD in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School for Communication and was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at University of Virginia. Her research has been published in Cultural Studies, Surveillance & Society, and Anti-Trafficking Review. E-mail: [email protected]