Interrogating Industries of Violence: Queering the Labor Movement to Challenge Police Brutality and the Prison Industrial Complex

On June 5, 2011, CeCe McDonald, a black transgender woman, and four of her friends were walking home from a grocery store in Minneapolis when they were verbally assaulted by a white man, Dean Schmitz, and two other white women, outside of a bar. According to testimony, McDonald and her friends tried to walk away from the harassers who were shouting racist and transphobic slurs, but one of the women broke a glass bottle and used it to cut McDonald’s face. An altercation ensued, ending with Schmitz getting stabbed in the chest and ultimately bleeding to death. After stating that Schmitz ran into her scissors,¹ McDonald was tried for murder. During the pretrial, Judge Daniel Moreno made several decisions that McDonald supporters found unfair, including dismissing evidence of Schmitz’s swastika tattoo and history of domestic violence, and also permitting a motion to impeach McDonald’s testimony because of a past conviction for writing a bad check. On June 4, 2012, Moreno sentenced McDonald to 41 months in a men’s prison.²

McDonald’s story is symptomatic of a pandemic of the criminalization of queer and transgender people. According to a recent study conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality, 16 percent of transgender people have been incarcerated, compared to 2.7 percent of all adults. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth are also disproportionately targeted by the criminal punishment system: “while an estimated 4–8% of youth are LGBT, a major study of youth in juvenile detention found that as many as 13–15% are LGBT.”³ Human rights and social justice organizations, activists, and scholars have documented case after case of the horrific living conditions experienced by LGBT and queer prisoners. The situation is even graver for queer people of color. As Michelle Alexander⁴ makes clear, people of color are disproportionately targeted by the police and the prison-industrial complex (PIC). In both overlapping and unique ways, white queer people and queer people of color are also caged and warehoused at unequal rates relative to the general population. This reality demonstrates the urgent need to interrogate the criminal punishment system in the United States and suggests that it is of particular importance to the LGBTQ community.

Outrage about and resistance to the targeting and treatment of queer and transgender prisoners has been largely relegated to the confines of a relatively small group of community organizers and activists, and an even smaller number of radical queers and prison abolitionists within the academy.⁵ These organizations and individuals, who have worked tirelessly in defense of imprisoned queer and transgender people, have publicly criticized the mainstream gay rights movement for ignoring an issue that affects the most marginalized members of the LGBTQ community in favor of issues like marriage, which appear to have a greater impact on privileged LGBTQ people.⁶ Without the kind of critical and well-funded base that bolsters the marriage movement, movements dedicated to fighting against injustice experienced by poor, working-class queers, and/or queers of color remain relatively weak.

However, there is already a mass movement dedicated—knowingly or not—to this exact demographic: the labor movement. At first glance, this pairing—union members and “deviant” queers—may seem like nothing more than strange and awkward bedfellows. Although there is a history of racism, sexism, and xenophobia in the U.S. labor movement, most contemporary unions have largely embraced the diversity of their membership, which is now made up mostly of women, people of color, and immigrants.⁷ In other words, the poor and working-class queers of color who are targeted by the police and PIC are often the same group of people mainstream labor hopes to organize. Because of this, I contend that it would strengthen both the labor movement and movements for queer justice if union leaders publicly challenged the entities that harm their queer working-class constituents, including police and prisons.

In this article, I argue that the labor movement could and should be advocates for the dramatic reform, if not abolition...