Mariame Kaba is a prison abolitionist and transformative justice advocate who may have come to many peoples’ attention through her June 12, 2020 New York Times op-ed, Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police. In it, she notes:
We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police….There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.
This op-ed is one of many essays and interviews included in her book We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, which provides an important window into the thinking of someone who’s been involved with prison abolition for decades. While it’s a topic that may be new to many readers (I count myself in that number), it is a movement that’s has many adherents.
Kaba echoes thinking that’s similar to what Robin DG Kelley proposed in Freedom Dreams, i.e., the need to focus not only on the systems that need to be torn down, but what will rise in their place:
Every vision is also a map. As freedom fighter Kwame Ture taught us, “When you see people call themselves revolutionary always talking about destroying, destroying, destroying but never talking about building or creating, they’re not revolutionary. They do not understand the first thing about revolution. It’s creating.” PIC [prison industrial complex] abolition is a positive project that focuses, in part, on building a society where it is possible to address harm without relying on structural forms of oppression or the violent systems that increase it.
More to the point:
Changing everything might sound daunting, but it also means there are many places to start, infinite opportunities to collaborate, and endless imaginative interventions and experiments to create. Let’s begin our abolitionist journey not with the question “What do we have now, and how can we make it better?” Instead, let’s ask, ““What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?” If we do that, then boundless possibilities of a more just world await us.
Later in the book, she puts the concept of hope in its proper context:
I always tell people, for me, hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism.
She adds:
The idea of hope being a discipline is something I heard from a nun many years ago who was talking about it in conjunction with making sure we were of the world and in the world. Living in the afterlife already in the present was kind of a form of escape, but it was really, really important for us to live in the world and be of the world. The hope that she was talking about was this grounded hope that was practiced every day, that people actually practiced all the time.
What’s equally powerful is her insistence on collaboration and building solutions collectively. In an introductory essay, Princeton’s Naomi Murakawa notes:
Kaba’s abolitionist vision burns so bright precisely because she refuses to be the single star, dazzling alone. Why be a star when you can make a constellation? And that’s what we see in this book-the brilliance that shines from Kaba and an entire constellation of co-organizers, cofounders, and coconspirators, together in an abolitionist practice of refusal, care, and collectivity. Refusal: because we cannot collaborate with the prison-industrial complex, as “only evil will collaborate with evil” (June Jordan). Care: because “care is the antidote to violence” (Saidiya Hartman). Collectivity: because “everything worthwhile is done with others” (Moussa Kaba, her father).
Kaba expounds further on this notion of “everything worthwhile is done with others” idea in a conversation with with Damon Williams and Daniel Kisslinger on the Airgo podcast:
Kaba: And I want to say that one of the things that I’ve learned over the vears or that I’ve cared about most over the years in terms of myself as a PIC abolitionist-I’ve always been interested in what we’re building. That’s been a big part of why I do the kinds of things I do and why I built the kinds of containers I’ve built over the years. It’s always interesting to me to think about the how of things, the strategy of how we get from where we are to where we want to go. I don’t feel extra pressure to give answers right now, but I feel a responsibility to have more people make more things. I’ve been talking to folks about the importance of us building a million different little experiments, just building and trying and taking risks and understanding we’re going to have tons of failure, and failure is actually the norm and a good way for us to learn lessons that help us–
Kisslinger: Part of the design.
Kaba: Part of it. The freaking tech folks and the people who are running the banks talk about failure all the time. They normalize that. It’s only on the other side of folks who are interested in social transformation and change where failure is not supposed to be a spoken about or a sign that you’re horrible or that your ideas don’t have merit. I just want us to be building a million different experiments. That’s what my energies are focused on in this moment. I read a tweet from someone a couple goes by ZenMarxist on Twitter. They wrote something like, “People want to treat ‘we’ll figure it out by working to get there’ as some sort of rhetorical evasion instead of being a fundamental expression of trust in the power of conscious collective effort” I thought that was so good. We’ll figure it out by working to get there. You don’t have to know all the answers in order to be able to press for a vision. That’s ridiculous. I hope people aren’t feeling that kind of pressure, but I do hope people are feeling a sense of wanting to make a bunch of things. I want to try a bunch of things. And maybe the resources will be there this time to actually make that work.
In fact, Kaba’s Project NIA has set up a site called One Million Experiments, designed to provide “snapshots of community-based safety strategies that expand our ideas about what keeps us safe”.
Interested in reading We Do This ‘Til We Free Us? Order your copy from Bookshop.
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