On Mariame Kabe
Notes on We Do This ‘Till We Free Us
“We live with death and it is ours”. Ossie Davis
“There are not single-issue struggles because we do not live single-issue lives”. Audre Lorde
“Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within”. Ruha Benjamin
“Care is the antidote to violence”. Saidiya Hartman
“The stories we tell about our suffering define what we can imagine doing about it”. Aurora Levins Morales
“Abolition is the praxis that gives us room for new visions and allows us to write new stories- together. But it is hard, hard work.” Mariame Kabe
“My feminism does not drive me into the arms of the state, but even further from it”. Susan Saxe
I recently just finished this collection of essays, interviews, and transcribed speeches and I knew immediately that I had to write a blog post on it. Kabe has a way with language that is both didactic and accessible. And that style of teaching is necessary when talking about abolition (which is what this book is about). In fact, the full title of her work is We Do This 'Till We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. I’m sure that this text belongs right in the canon alongside Angela Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete?
Here are all the parts of the book that I highlighted, underlined, and chewed over. I recommend you pick up this book yourself!!
From “So You’re Thinking About Becoming An Abolitionist” (Level, October 2020)
“Every vision is also a map……..PIC abolitionism 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” (pg.2)
I think this idea of vision as a map is crucial. I think of Ma’Khia Bryant who had her life taken away for her because she was yielding a knife. And while some of you were asking “well what would you expect if it was your kid who had a knife taken out on them?” the rest of us were asking “why are there no other well-resourced options to address harm without increasing it?” and “why is the answer to a 15-year-old holding a knife……..ending her life?”. In this essay Kabe brilliantly explains that abolitionism is about possibility and imagination- what is the world that we want to live in and how do we achieve that??
“A world without harm isn’t possible and isn’t what abolitionist vision purports to achieve. Rather, abolitionist politics and practice contend that disposing of people by locking them away in jails and prisons does nothing significant to prevent, reduce, or transform harm in the aggregate……At the same time, it allows us to avoid our own responsibilities to hold each other accountable, instead delegating it to a third party- one that has been built to hide away social and political failures” (pg. 4)
Abolitionism requires interdependence and community- and we know that that is a struggle in a country that prefers individual success and greed over community well-being. A system of capitalism over regenerative economics. How much will abolitionist practice require people to finally get to know their neighbors’ names and to be intentionally close to one another? To strategize as a community how we keep each other safe in times of harm? Prisons don’t change policy. And it doesn’t change minds. We know that the stigma of even serving time keeps people from fully changing their lives. It’s time for a reckoning.
“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” (pg. 5)
Dream it!!! Envision it!!! MLKJ had a dream and it moved mountains. Imagine what we can achieve if we dreamed together.
From “The System Isn’t Broken” (The New Inquiry, June 2015)
“On the way to abolitionism, we can take a number of intermediate steps to shrink the police force and to restructure our relationships with each other. These include:
Organizing for dramatic decreases of police budgets and redirecting those funds to other social goods (defending the police).
Ending cash bail.
Overturning police bills of rights.
Abolishing police unions.
Crowding out the police in our communities.
Disarming the police.
Creating abolitionist messages that penetrate the public consciousness to disrupt the idea that cops = safety.
Building community-based interventions that address harms without relying on police.
Evaluating any reforms based on these criteria.
Thinking through the end of the police and imagining alternatives.” (pg.13)
From “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police” (The New York Times, June 2020)
“History is instructive, not because it offers us a blueprint for how to act in the present, but because it can help us ask better questions for the future” (pg. 15)
From “A Jailbreak of the Imagination: Seeing Prisons for What They Are and Demanding Transformation” w/ Kelly Hayes (Truthout, May 2018)
“….restoring our awareness of the humanity of prisoners is a crucial step toward undoing the harms of mass incarceration” (pg. 20)
“As prison abolitionists, grassroots organizers, and practitioners of transformative justice, our vision for 2018 is one of clear-eyed awareness and discussion of the horrors of the prison system- and the action that awareness demands. As a society, we have long turned away from any social concern that overwhelms us. Whether it’s war climate change or the prison-industrial complex, Americans have been conditioned to simply look away from profound harms. Years of this practice have now left us with endless wars, dying oceans, and millions of people in bondage and oppressively policed. It is time for a thorough, unflinching examination of what our society has wrought and what's have become. It is time to envision and create alternatives to the hellish conditions our society has brought into being” (pg. 20)
I highly recommend this essay as it breaks down the harmful image that has been created around how prisons and jails work, while also breaking why and how prisons have been sensationalized, and why hang on to the false image and hope and “safety” that these oppressive systems claim to have. This essay implores us to look in!
“When dealing with oppressive systems, cynicism is a begrudging allegiance, extracted from people whose minds could otherwise open new doors, make new demands, and conjure visions of what a better world could look like. ………the inability to offer a neatly packaged and easily digestible solution does not preclude offering critique or analysis of the ills of our current system…….Erica Meiners suggests: “Liberation under oppression is unthinkable by design.” It’s time for a jailbreak of the imagination in order to make the impossible possible” (pg. 20)
From “ Free Marissa and All Black People” (In These Times, 2014)
“Black skin is a repellent to empathy, which makes it difficult to seek redress in courts of law and public opinion. If we can’t generate empathy in others, then the humanity that is denied to us is always out of reach” (pg. 32)
From “Me Too” to “All of Us”: Organizing to End Sexual Violence Without Prisons”- Interview by Sarah Jaffe with Mariame Kabe and Shira Hassan (In These Times, January 2017)
We have to build up the skills of being able to ask questions like: What does it mean to actually center a survivor who is harmed? What does it mean to actually support people who have caused harm? What does it mean to take responsibility for saying, “We refuse in our community to condone when this happens?” One of the things that is so important is that harm causes wounds that necessitate healing. That is what so many people are looking for a way to begin to heal? Again, this will not necessarily be accomplished through compulsory confession in a public way. But how do we hold that people that have been harmed deserve an opportunity for that harm to be addressed in a real way? Often, that is all people want, a real acknowledgment that “I was hurt. Somebody did it. I want them to know that they did it. I want to see that they have some remorse for having done it, and I want them to start a process by which they will ensure to themselves, at least, and be accountable to their community, for not doing again. That is what I am trying to get as a survivor.” I think there is hope in that. (pg 48)
From “Black Women Punished for Self-Defense Must Be Free from Their Cages” (The Guardian, January 2019)
“Sociologist Beth Richie has suggested that a key to responding to women in conflict with the law is understanding their status as crime victims. Multiple studies indicate that between 71% and 95% of incarcerated women have experienced physical violence from an intimate partner. In addition, many have experienced multiple forms of physical and sexual abuse in childhood and as adults. This reality has been termed the abuse to prison pipelines….These numbers are high because survivors are systematically punished for taking action to protect themselves and their children while living in unstable and dangerous conditions. Survivors are criminalized for self-defense, failing to control abusers’ violence, migration, removing their children from situations of abuse, being coerced into criminalized activity, and securing resources needed to live life day to day while suffering economic abuse” (pg. 51)
From “Whether Darren Wilson is Indicted or Not, the Entire System is Guilty” (In These Times, November 2014)
“If we are to take seriously that oppressive policing is not a problem of individual “bad apple” cops, then it must follow that a singular indictment will have little to no impact on ending police violence” (pg. 55)
no kidding……could the same not be said about the Derek Chauvin Trail?? 6 years later?
From “The Sentencing of Larry Nassar Was Not “Transformative Justice.” Here’s Why.” with Kelly Hayes (The Appeal, February 2018)
“Transformative justice ……is a community process developed by anti-violence activists of color, in particular, who wanted to create responses to violence that do what criminal punishment systems fail to do: build support and more safety for the person harmed, figure out how the broader context was set up for this harm to happen, and how that context can be changed so that this harm to happen, and how that context can be changed so that this harm can never happen again” (pg. 59)
From “We Want More Justice for Breonna Taylor than the System That Killed Her Can Deliver” with Andrea J. Ritchie (Essence, July 2020)
“We can’t claim the system must be dismantled because it is a danger to Black Lives and at the same time legitimatize it by turning to it for justice. As Angela Y. Davis points out, “we have to be consistent” in our analysis and not respond to violence in a way that compounds it. We need to use our radical imaginations to come up with new structures of accountability beyond the system we are working to dismantle” (pg. 65)
“We are demanding a bold and expansive version of justice in her name” (pg. 67)
From “A People’s History of Prisons in the United States” Interview by Jeremy Scahill (Intercepted, May 2017)
“Prison itself is a reform. I think that’s something most people don’t think about. Prisons haven’t always existed. They came into being, especially in the United States, because people were reacting against capital punishment and corporal punishment, which were seen at the time, particularly by Quakers, as incredibly inhumane. Initially, the reform was not meant to be a brutalizing thing but isolation itself is actually brutal” (pg. 72)
“Early before the Civil War, most people who were locked up were not actually Black people, because almost every Black person in the country was enslaved. Immediately after emancipation, all of a sudden, the literal complexion of prisons changed, and Black people became hyper-targets of that system as we created new laws like the Black codes” (pg. 73)
From “Arresting the Carceral State” with Erica R. Meiners (Jacobin, February 2014)
“In 2013, the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU” published a listicle on Buzzfeed highlighting the egregious ways young people have been criminalized in American schools. “Eleven Students Whose Punishments We Wish Were Made Up”.....less a pipeline than a nexus or a swamp, the school to prison pipeline is generally used to refer to interlocking sets of structural and individual relationships in which youth, primarily of color, are funneled from schools and neighborhoods into under- or unemployment and prisons” (pg. 76)
“A 2007 study estimated that for each potential dropout who completed high school, the U.S could save $209,000 in prison and other costs. Why not shift budgets from cops in schools to counselors, from building prisons to opening up additional spaces in free public colleges and universities? Instead of more militarized borders, why not ensure all youth have access to meaningful, discipline-building co-curricular activities such as music, drama, art, and sports?” (pg. 80)
From “Itemizing Atrocity” with Tamara K. Nopper (Jacobin, August 2014)
“The mind-numbing images and numbers keep coming. And shock and awe often greet their arrival. Both the pictures and statistics become the stuff of (at times hard-fought) headlines, reports, social commentaries, and “teachable moments”. Sadly, their circulation seems to demonstrate, as Frank Wilderson puts it, that “taxonomy can itemize atrocities but cannot bear witness to suffering.” (pg. 85)
“The problem is not just the excess. Yet one gets the sense that the only way to generate a modicum of concern or empathy for Black people is to raise the stakes and to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the violations and the suffering. To circulate repeatedly the spectacular in hopes that people consider the everyday. It’s a fool’s errand because it often doesn’t garner the response desired or needed. And it leaves Black people in the position of having to ratchet up the excess to get anyone to care or pay attention…..To the point: spectacle as the route to empathy means the atrocities itemized need to happen more often or to get worse, to become more atrocious each round in hopes of being registered” (pg. 85)
From “I Live in a Place Where Everybody Watches You Everywhere You Go”, remarks at the Scholar and Feminist Conference, “Subverting Surveillance: Strategies to End State Violence”, Barnard College, New York, February 2018
“Finally, an abolition politic interrogates the root causes of violence that are masked by the carceral state. My friend, scholar, and activist Erica Meiners says that liberation under oppression is unthinkable by design. So an abolition politic insists that we imagine and organize beyond the constraints of the normal. Beyond mass criminalization, which is an entire system of harassment, violence, and surveillance that keeps really oppressive gender, class, and racial hierarchies in place. Our charge is to make imagining liberation under oppression completely thinkable, to really push ourselves to think beyond the normal in order to for us to be able to address the root causes of people’s suffering. That’s the politics we should be focused on, a politics that attends to the grievances that people have in their day-to-day life. The everyday. The mundane. Not the spectacular or the excess” (pg. 92)
From “Toward the Horizon of Abolition” interview by John Duda (Next System Project, November 2017)
“The idea that cops equal security is difficult to dislodge. To transform this mindset, where cops equal security, means we have to actually transform our relationships to each other enough so that we can see that we can keep each other safe. You cannot have safety without strong empathetic relationships with others. You can have security without relationships but you cannot have safety- actual safety- without healthy relationships. Without getting to really know your neighbor, figuring out when you should be intervening when you hear and see…..part of what this necessitates is that we have to work with the members of our communities to make violence unacceptable” (pg. 98-99)
From “Moving Past Punishment” Interview by Ayana Young (For the Wild, December 2019)
A good one to read to understand the difference between restorative justice and transofrmative justice. They are used interchangeably but they are not the same thing.