Prison abolitionist and prison scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore coined the term "organized state abandonment" to describe how the continuous histories of colonial dispossession and descent into late-stage capitalism have led to racial capitalist states that are callous and purposefully neglectful to either all of or a subset (often a racialized subset) of their citizens. Disability Studies scholars have used the term state abandonment to encapsulate environmental racism and other disabling effects of White Supremacy on communities of color, especially Black communities, and how this ties to institutional ableism, institutionalization and the American history of "Ugly Laws" and other policies that abandoned and cast disabled Americans, especially disabled individuals of color, out of society.