Abolitionist Podcasting: Amplifying Queer and Trans Activists of Color
Erin Green, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
In 2021, it was announced that a prison training facility would be constructed in Atlanta, Georgia. Since then, activists and organizers have mobilized against it, marking the beginning of a series of arrests and police violence. Stop Cop City is the abolitionist movement working to stop the construction of the police training facility called Cop City. My dissertation project involved producing a podcast to document the Stop Cop City movement. My podcast—titled The True Harm Podcast—focuses on the harm inflicted on queer activists of color and amplifies the procedures of organizers leading this social movement (Green, 2025). The True Harm Podcast counters the propagandized narratives about abolition activists by amplifying the people fighting for a carceral-free future and by humanizing the people who have been murdered by the carceral state. This article, then, synthesizes the major themes of The True Harm Podcast: multiple approaches to organizing, carceral violence as a spectrum, and queer-of-color-led social movements.
This reflective article considers the impact of this community-engaged project and what more can be done to amplify the work of queer and trans activists of color. In addition to synthesizing the research participants’ perspectives, I also reflect on my process of conceptualizing, theorizing, and producing The True Harm Podcast, as well as the dangers of doing so as a Black transgender woman. This article begins by defining the prison-industrial complex, or the main oppressive system that abolitionists seek to dismantle. Next, I explain why abolition and counterstory are the theoretical frameworks utilized in this project. After describing the project’s frameworks, I then explain the methods I used to produce The True Harm Podcast, focusing on podcasting as multimodal composition and community-engaged writing. Last and most importantly, I offer a reflection on the three major themes from the podcast. My reflection integrates audio clips from The True Harm Podcast episode focusing on the Stop Cop City movement. I find this organization to be the most rhetorically effective for this abolitionist project because understanding what abolition and the prison-industrial complex are before arriving at the reflections will allow readers to critically engage with the story after already having a comprehension—even if brief—of the necessary theories needed to dismantle the carceral state.
Cop City and the Prison-Industrial Complex
Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization dedicated to abolition founded by abolitionist scholars Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, defines the prison-industrial complexas “the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social, and political problems” (“What Is the PIC?,” n.d.). Examples of these overlapping interests can include politicians, the government, developers and construction companies, private prison companies, investment banks, and law enforcement. Critical Resistance argues that forces like racism, sexism, capitalism, xenophobia, or a combination of them can empower interests, like the ones mentioned above: politicians, private prison companies, or investment banks. Empowered by those forces, interests use tools like prisons, police, courts, surveillance, media, and social control to respond to social, political, and economic problems (e.g., poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, violence, and political dissent). Doing so disproportionately targets people of color, women and femmes, the LGBTQ+ community, disabled people, immigrants, poor people, political dissenters, and people who exist in multiple demographics (e.g., queer and transgender women of color). These communities are often targets of white supremacy, racial capitalism, colonialism, and cis-heteropatriarchy—all forces of the prison-industrial complex. The prison-industrial complex results in broken communities; a lack of public resources for healthcare, education, and housing; hatred; fear, further marginalization and discrimination; environmental racism; more violence; human rights violations; and war.
Next, I explain how Cop City exists within the prison-industrial complex. The interests of Cop City include politicians, the government, private carceral companies, developers, construction companies, and law enforcement. Former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and current Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens (politicians) partnered with Dave Wilkinson, the CEO of the Atlanta Police Foundation (a private police company). Terracon, an engineering consultation firm (developers), is working with the Atlanta Police Foundation. Brasfield & Gorrie, Brent Scarborough & Co., DaVinci Development Collaborative, HGOR, and LS3P Architects (construction companies) have assisted in contracting and designing the police training facility (American Friends Service Committee, 2023). Bank of America (investment bank) has reportedly donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Atlanta Police Foundation and other private prison companies. All of these efforts are made in the service of the Atlanta Police Department (law enforcement). This collective effort to construct a police training facility, when abolitionist scholars and activists have made clear the history and impact of carceral violence, is another means to control and punish multiply-marginalized communities.
From an abolitionist perspective, police play central roles in maintaining the prison-industrial complex. The police originated from runaway slave patrols during the era of chattel slavery in the United States (Acheson, 2022; NAACP, n.d.). The FBI targeted Black power movements and attempted to eliminate their leaders through infiltration, surveillance, and assassinations (United Press International, 1969). Recently, the FBI has compiled a list of Black Lives Matter activists and labeled them as extremists (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2017; German, n.d.). Bill Clinton signed the 1994 Crime Bill, which resulted in placing 100,000 new cops on the street, providing $9.7 billion in funding for prisons, and restructuring the court systems to be harsher (Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, 1994). Police tactics like broken window policing, so-called community policing, and stop-and-frisk practices are all specifically designed to surveil and oppress communities of color (Acheson, 2022). Police commit sexual violence on and off the clock (Kaba & Ritchie, 2022). The police’s sexual violence inflicted on Black women and women of color is still largely invisible to the public eye (Ritchie, 2017). Increased law enforcement, alongside other factors, has led to mass incarceration (Alexander, 2020). Angela Davis (2003) has reported on the sexual assault of incarcerated women, and Mogul et al. (2011) have reported on the sexual violence inflicted on incarcerated transgender people. The Mapping Police Violent Report found that even though Black people only made up about 12% of the U.S. population, they were about 25% of all police killings (Campaign Zero, 2025). The carceral violence that cops inflict on people is only heightened when considering multiply-marginalized identities such as Black women, women of color, queer and trans people of color, disabled people of color, and queer immigrants of color.
Part of this project’s purpose is not just to humanize the death of an organizer and to amplify the Stop Cop City movement, but also to counter the dominant narrative that the police keep us safe and that they prevent crime. The True Harm Podcast subverts the mythology that mainstream media—television, film, and the news—has created that distorts the true legacy of policing, one that is built on chattel slavery and continues to terrorize, assault, and kill multiply-marginalized people. The True Harm Podcast, through the stories of the people involved in Stop Cop City, advocates for abolition because abolition is the only political vision and tool capable of dismantling the prison-industrial complex and replacing it with life-affirming alternatives.
Abolition as Theory and Method
Abolition is the central theoretical framework for this project because it is the only way to dismantle the oppressive nexus that is the prison-industrial complex. Critical Resistance defines prison abolition as “a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment” (“What Is the PIC?,” n.d.). Abolitionists see abolition as both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal (“What Is the PIC?,” n.d.). Defunding and demilitarizing the police are steps toward abolitionist futures. Defunding involves reducing police department budgets—which for many are huge—and reallocating those funds to public resources like education, housing, public health, social services, and food security. Demilitarization involves removing military-grade weaponry that many police departments have received through the 1033 Program. Most importantly, abolition involves understanding how carceral logics have guided our society to respond to issues through punishment and violence and collectively working toward dismantling both those logics and tactics. This praxis accomplishes those efforts through grassroots organizing, community accountability, and civic engagement. From the scholarship to the on-the-ground work, queer and transgender people of color have been the pioneers of theorizing abolition and putting it into action.
This podcast project documenting the activism within the Stop Cop City movement is inspired by counterstory, a CRT methodology “for minoritized people to intervene in research methods that would form “master narratives” based on ignorance and assumptions about minoritized people” (Martinez, 2020, p. 21). Counterstories are necessary for social justice because of their grounding in the CRT tenets of unique voices of color, intersectionality, and antiessentialism. I argue that using counterstory as the methodology for my podcast is necessary, as I am countering the dominant narratives about Cop City made possible by cop propaganda. The True Harm Podcast seeks to counter the dominant narratives about victims of police violence that reduce them solely as victims without a life before the police murdered them. This podcast seeks to humanize victims of police violence and the organizers mobilizing for abolition.
This podcast features five interviews with journalists and activists who are heavily involved in a queer-led movement, and how their experiences of police violence have shaped their organizing work. While my use of the term “participant” may conflict with counterstory epistemologies, I describe these journalists and activists as such because they participated in research interviews that required IRB approval from my institution. They could also very well be called storytellers since I synthesized their interview responses into a story. I conducted these interviews on Zoom, and all participants were given the same interview questions:
1. Can you tell me a little bit about how you got involved in the Stop Cop City movement? What kind of work have you done for the movement?
2. Can you describe some of the violence you've seen inflicted on Stop Cop City organizers? What has been your experience?
3. What have you seen in the media, on TV, or on social media about police brutality and police violence?
4. How do you define justice? Do you think justice has been served for victims of police violence (e.g., Tortuguita)? If so, how, if not, why not?
5. What conditions, such as class, race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, ability and/or education—lead people to become victims of police violence?
6. How do you think we can end or minimize police violence in America?
During the interviews, some participants were asked follow-up questions. For these interviews, I wanted to know about their specific involvement in the Stop Cop City movement. I wanted to know what carceral violence they had seen inflicted on people, especially the people they worked with. Many of them also talked about their own police violence. I wanted to see how they were seeing their movement portrayed in mainstream media versus independent or community news sources or zines. Since this podcast also discusses restorative justice and transformative justice, I wanted to know what justice looked like to them as someone who had been involved in this movement. Last, I wanted to inquire about their feelings about prison abolition.
Multiple Approaches to Organizing
In the podcast, research participants describe how they got involved in the Stop Cop City movement. Two of them were journalists who had been integral in documenting the movement. The other participants included an art activist, a community organizer, and a digital organizer. My participants stressed that no specific organizing method would accomplish their goal and that an abolitionist movement like Stop Cop City necessitated multiple approaches. These approaches included protests and demonstrations; political education teach-ins; entertainment festivals; mutual aid; canvassing; and counterinsurgency.
Relying on one organizing strategy is one way to stall an abolitionist movement, or any social movement. When I think about successful social movements in the past, many of them utilized a range of strategies to enact social change, and I believe Stop Cop City is no different. As I listened to many of my research participants talk about their involvement in the movement, I was also made privy to how other organizers and activists sustained Stop Cop City and the contention around certain strategies. For example, people wanting to organize via the referendum and other electoral means were almost antithetical to the counterinsurgent methods utilized by some activists. This is because activists wanting to end Cop City with a referendum wanted to dismantle the system with the system’s own tools, whereas the counterinsurgents wanted to physically destroy the entire system. While these strategies were at odds with one another, they both contributed to the Stop Cop City movement in their own ways. The contention between different social movement strategies reminded me of conversations about whether Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence approach or Malcom X’s more revolutionary approach would secure civil rights and protection for Black Americans. Both arguably had the same goal, but different paths to achieving it, and Stop Cop City is no different.
Within the Stop Cop City movement, the end goal is stopping the construction of the police training facility, but the different paths toward that include getting signatures for the legislature, coordinating teach-ins to educate people about abolition, leading protests and rallies to demonstrate their activism, mutual aid to sustain the movement and the members within it, entertainment festivals to find moments of joy as a form of resistance, and counterinsurgency to vandalize the very tools and equipment being used to build the police training facility. None of these will singlehandedly bring about abolition, but each approach can serve as an incremental step to an abolitionist future.
Carceral Violence is a Spectrum
The podcast introduces the events leading up to Tortuguita’s murder. In May 2022, a multi-agency SWAT raid arrested five people with domestic terrorism charges for alleged counterinsurgency. In December 2022, there was a second, and more violent, multi-agency SWAT raid—leading to more arrests of environmental and abolitionist activists. In January 2023, Georgia State Patrol raided a Stop Cop City encampment where they murdered Tortuguita. The County Medical Examiner’s Office found 57 gunshot wounds in Tortuguita. Vigils and protests were held across the country days after. In late January that year, a protest turned uprising led to arrests for counterinsurgency. In March 2023, police raided the South River Music Festival and detained 35 people, 23 of whom were later charged with domestic terrorism. In September, Georgia’s attorney general indicted 61 people under the Georgia Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act, also known as the RICO Act, as a way to cease their fundraising efforts. By October 2023, approximately 100 people faced some kind of charge for participating in the Stop Cop City movement.
The participants underscored that the carceral violence being inflicted in Atlanta was a spectrum. While my project originally centered on the death of an organizer, I was informed that carceral violence also included the RICO charges against organizers, the demonizing of mutual aid, the state’s political efforts to block a referendum, and the many organizers and protestors who were physically harmed. Tortuguita’s murder has certainly been highlighted in the movement, but many others have suffered as well. As I was in Atlanta conducting research, I learned about the ATL 61—sixty-one activists indicted under the RICO Act. I was shocked to find out that a Ph.D. candidate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison named Hannah Kass had been arrested and charged with felony criminal property damage and felony terroristic threats. Kass was attending a protest via a research method called “participant observation.” Her research focuses on the relationship between carceality in struggles for food, land, and abolition.
I remember sitting in my hotel room after discovering this, thinking about this graduate student who had traveled to Atlanta—just two years before I did—to research the Stop Cop City movement, and now she was essentially being charged as a domestic terrorist and banned from entering the state of Georgia. I began to reflect on my own safety as a researcher. I reflected on what I already knew about how the criminal justice system treated transgender women of color. I thought about this as I, a Black transgender woman who was not a Georgia resident, wanted my research trip to include upcoming protests and rallies and a visit to the the Cop City space and other spaces where people had been arrested; and more importantly, I thought about the potential violence I could endure as a Black transgender woman such as police brutality, state-sanctioned murder, incarceration, or criminal charges.
On the other hand, I knew that this movement, and other abolitionist movements, had been led by queer and trans people of color. This was a movement that I deeply cared about, regardless of its contribution to my research. At the same time, I was asking myself: “How the hell you gon’ finish a dissertation and go on the job market while you’re prepping for a criminal trial in a jail cell?” While a lot of the mainstream media had focused on the murder of Tortuguita, during my time researching Stop Cop City, I had reaffirmed my understanding of carceral violence as a spectrum and that there were people who had not been killed, but were victims of the prison-industrial complex.
Queer-of-Color-Led Social Movements
The participants informed me that this social movement had many different political ideologies—abolitionism, anarchism, communism and socialism, feminism, and environmentalism—but that Stop Cop City was a movement that had been led by queer and trans activists of color. In every space of the movement, queer and trans activists of color were on the front lines and investing themselves in the cause. And while my participants were proud to say that this community was leading their movement, this unfortunately also meant that they were primary targets for brutality and murder.
One of the reasons that I’ve found such genuine community within abolitionist movements is its ability to understand intersectionality. Most of the movement can be traced back to queer women of color: Angela Davis, Patrisse Cullors, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy. As a Black trans woman, I see abolition as the organizing strategy and political vision necessary to dismantle the systems of oppression that seek to surveil, police, and punish queer people of color. For me, I see abolition as a movement that inherently values examining oppression through the lens of intersectionality. Just as Black women critiqued antiracist movements for their sexism and feminist movements for their racism, I too critique these movements. In contemporary feminist discourse, I witness trans-exclusionary ideology, where rhetorical moves craft messages like “protect women’s spaces.” In LGBTQ+ discourses, cisgender gays, lesbians, and bisexuals encourage a removal of queer and trans people with “LGB community” messaging. And in Black liberation spaces, many Black people have been persuaded by anti-trans rhetoric from politicians to vote for conservative policies—policies that simultaneously end up harming them as well. In all of these movements predicated on progressive ideology, many people who claim to believe in equity, justice, and liberation police transgender people’s gender expression; they exile our contributions to these movements that we have been a part of; and they support the erasure of transgender people from public life. These practices are all grounded in carceral logics, and for me, abolition is the praxis for addressing these instances of harm.
Conclusion
Composing at the intersections necessitates a Black feminist understanding of identity politics, as it was conceptualized by the Combahee River Collective. It requires an understanding that “the most profound and potentially radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression” (Taylor, 2017, p. 19). The Combahee River Collective—a group of Black feminist lesbians—understood how interlocking systems of oppression impacted their livelihood and recognized that by ending their own oppression under racial capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism, and cis-heteropatriarchy, they would be liberating all oppressed people. Abolitionists and people working to stop Cop City advocate a similar thinking. This podcast project amplifies the activism of queer and trans organizers of color fighting to end their own oppression from carceral violence, and by doing so, creates a carceral-free society that offers liberation and justice to all oppressed people.
Rhetoric informs policy, meaning that the media and reformist discourse that spreads cop propaganda actively forecloses our imaginations for an abolitionist future. These arguments have material effects as they actively continue the construction of a police training facility, they allow police to avoid accountability when they inflict harm, they support surveillance technology, and they encourage the incarceration of political dissenters—many of whom happen to be people of color and people from the LGBTQ+ community. Furthermore, the purpose of this podcast was to address the cop propaganda-informed media around the Stop Cop City movement that misrepresents the movement and its activists. Our communities are unable to achieve an abolitionist future if we continue to allow arguments that support carceral harm and violence against queer and trans people of color to inform our decisions around policy and public safety.
When social movements are misrepresented by mainstream media, the activists and organizers within them are targeted even more, and their consequences (e.g., fines, imprisonment) might be worsened. Policing and surveillance might be heightened. As noted earlier in my article, Black Lives Matter activists were labeled as extremists by the FBI, and most recently, the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project—a right-wing nonprofit using Freedom of Information Act requests to target diversity, equity, and inclusion—has urged the FBI to classify the transgender community as “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violence and Extremism” (GLAAD, n.d.). This desire to label us, transgender people, as a threat to public safety comes after years of anti-trans rhetoric. This is no different than mainstream media mischaracterizing Black Lives Matter as a violent movement calling for increased surveillance around protestors and justifying police brutality and murder against Black people.
Abolitionist rhetoric advocates for a more socially, politically, and economically just future, but right-wing rhetoric and cop propaganda sustain a discourse that stalls abolition. Additionally, this discourse encourages and justifies carceral harm inflicted on marginalized communities like queer and trans people of color. The True Harm Podcast is a multimodal project working to reconfigure cop propaganda and reformist discourse. By doing so, my podcast amplifies the work of queer and trans abolitionist activists of color by accurately characterizing their community organizing efforts. The True Harm Podcast also humanizes and memorializes Tortuguita, a queer activist of color who was murdered by law enforcement. The podcast repositions the Atlanta 61 as not domestic terrorists, as the mainstream media has reported them, but instead as activists who were incarcerated because they support liberation and freedom. And most importantly, it operates as another rhetorical agent detailing how the prison-industrial complex is harming us, with hopes to persuade legislators to stop Cop City and for others to join the Stop Cop City movement.
References
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Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, H.R.3355, House of Representatives Judiciary Committee 103rd Congress (1994).
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