...the obsessions that drove me into and then rapidly away from drama were those most beautifully summarized in a few thoughts of Marx: by mixing our labor with the earth, we change the external world and thereby change our own nature. In other words, abolition begins and ends with "groupings" of people struggling to end the stranglehold of racial capitalism on the earth and all of its life forms, and build a sustainable, equitable, and ethical world for all. Change over time does not explain the persistence of racialized poverty, violence, mass imprisonment, a system that leaves communities vulnerable to destruction, abandonment, and/or persistent structural racism—what Gilmore calls, by way of Amiri Baraka, "the changing same." Gilmore's approach to history as dialectical, dynamic, sedimented, syncretic, and always geographic is on display in her account of how prison construction, policing, and the Pentagon are a continuation of imperialism, and how the foundational violence of New Haven as a center of gun manufacturing converged with Yale's place in military research and development—processes obscured by narratives of the region's contribution to liberalism, political theory, and the like.