Last year, 43-year-old Paul Jonathan Bittner punched an 11-year-old Black field trip student in the face, repeatedly shouting the N-word once detained by police.
Bittner must serve 41 months in prison, plus community custody, supervised release, and a 10-year no-contact order. He had previously been hospitalized for a schizoaffective disorder. “There’s not a number that we wanted thrown at [him],” says the child’s father, DeVante Blow, hoping “that ultimately Mr. Bittner and his state of mind were corrected more so than just throwing him to jail. That doesn’t solve the problem, so we need to solve the problem at the core.”
Blow’s perspective aligns with some abolitionist approaches to white terrorism. Incarcerating white supremacists may feel good—and can physically separate them from their Black victims. Still, many become even more radicalized behind bars, joining neo-Nazi gangs and terrorizing other incarcerated people.
Black Americans don’t have to compromise safety to rehabilitate white supremacists, though. Deradicalization programs, for example, use ex-white supremacists to convince others to leave extremist groups. And treating white supremacy as an institutional system —not “bad apples”—works.
DeVante Blow knows we deserve a just and safe future, and more than piecemeal consequences for a few white vigilantes. How can we build a world without white supremacist violence, and with community-based and institutional accountability?