White Property, Black Trespass - (Religion and Social Transformation) by Andrew Krinks

About the Book

"White Property, Black Trespass traces the eurochristian, settler colonial, racial capitalist history and present of police power, re-narrating the mass criminalization of Black and economically dispossessed peoples as a religious project that "saves" the pseudo-sacred order of whiteness and property by exiling those who trespass against it to carceral hell"--

Book Synopsis

Uncovers the inherently religious structure of the criminalization of Black, Indigenous, and dispossessed peoples

Most popular critical accounts of mass criminalization interpret police and prisons as purely social or political phenomena. While such accounts have been indispensable in moving millions into collective action and resistance, the carceral state remains as pervasive as ever.

White Property, Black Trespass argues that understanding why we have police and prisons, and building a world of safety and abundance beyond them, requires that we acknowledge the inherently religious function that criminalization fulfills for a colonial and racial capitalist order that puts its faith in cops and cages to save it from the existential threat of disorder that its own structural violence creates.

The story of criminalization, Krinks shows, begins with the eurochristian aspiration to become God at the expense of all others--an aspiration that gives rise to the pseudo-sacred powers of whiteness and property, and, by extension, the police power that exists to serve and protect them. Tracing the historical continuity and religiosity of the color line, the property line, and the thin blue line, Krinks reveals police power as the pseudo-divine power to exile nonwhite and dispossessed trespassers to carceral hell.

At once incisive and expansive, this groundbreaking work deepens understanding of racial capitalism and mass criminalization by illuminating the religious mythologies that animate them. It concludes with thoughts on what might be entailed in a religion rooted in rejection of the religious idolatry of mass criminalization--a religion of abolition.

Review Quotes

"[Krinks] challenges the idea of faith as merely a means for control, instead emphasizing the religious nature of abolition and how its spiritual and transformative practices empower us to resist and dismantle oppressive systems."--Daven McQueen, Inquest

"A brilliant and profound analysis of mass criminalization as a religion, charting new territory in our understanding of this social injustice. This account of eurochristian desire for God-like power in the world constituting an unholy trinity of whiteness, property, and policing that criminalizes the disinherited and dispossessed deserves the widest possible reading...A gift for those looking to understand the persistence of mass criminalization as well as a compelling invitation to build a world beyond it."--Christophe Ringer, author of Necropolitics: The Religious Crisis of Mass Incarceration in America

"Andrew Krinks is a committed and passionate organizer and organic intellectual immersed in the world of abolitionism. In this eloquent, compelling book, he investigates the conceptual foundations of our current prison culture. Weaving sophisticated accounts of racial, economic, gender, and political domination together with the history of Christianity, Krinks successfully makes the case that we ought to understand mass incarceration as a distinctively religious phenomenon. He also makes justice-seeking resources of religion available to everyone affected by mass incarceration as we work toward a world free of human caging."--Vincent Lloyd, co-author of Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons

About the Author

Andrew Krinks is an independent scholar, educator, and movement builder based in Nashville, Tennessee.