Mariame Kaba

A reflection on prison industrial complex abolition and a vision for collective liberation from organizer and educator Mariame Kaba.

Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

We Do This Til We Free Us

Krys C

My friend scholar and activist Erica Meiners says that liberation unded 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 for us to be able to address the root causes of people's suffering. 

As Kwame Ture often said: "We need each other. We have to have each other for our survival." Take this admonition seriously. We should use the occasuon of the indictment announcement to gather and to continue to build power together. This is how we will win. 

This, to me, is the work we have to do.  We have to make community members understand whst sexual harm looks like, what it feels like, why it is unacceptable. We have to make violence unthinkable in our culture. We have to make interpersonal violence unthinkable. That is the place that we have to work from if we are really going to transform this into something where it isn't the survivors or the victims who have to carry the load all the time. 

Important ideas, excellently argued. The structure as an anthology of essays and interviews led to a lot of repetition  

Boothby

Amazing book. A simple series of essays and interviews that are easy to read and understand. This is such a wonderful way to get one thinking about the abolition mindset that is like listening to a friend you've known a long time. The topics aren't easy - every essay and interview mentions the trauma of one or more specific people who've been harmed by the prison industrial complex. But it's a necessary read. 

Stephanie Ridiculous

This is an excellent look at abolition work, theory, and thought. Whether it's a new topic to you or you're looking to deepen your understanding, this is a great book to start on what abolition is, why it's needed, and how to start going about it.

Arwa El

„We do this ‘til we free us“ by Mariama Kaba is one of the most important essay bands I have read recently. If we look at social movements in the past two years, it is irrelevant if we‘re talking about USA, Nigeria, Austria, or Thailand: it comes down to the same structural problems; police, military, and the prison industry complex do not exist in order to change a society to the better. They create more poverty, more violence, more injustice. This has no longer been a secret, but at the latest since George Floyd, SARS, or even the Arab Spring, we have been witnessing this reality day by day.

But how can we imagine a society past police, military, and prison industries? Who will keep order? What do you do with r*pists and mu*derers? How do you seek revenge, when someone hurts your most beloved? How do we seek justice in cases such as R. K*lly or H*rvey We*nstein? Especially, when our first instinct is to wish for someone to rot in prison until their end? 

Read this book. To understand the concept of Abolishment better and why we desperately need to radicalize our society. Read it to understand why we don‘t need to reform a police system but to actually move away from policing and surveillance and focus more on community-centered accountability.

„[…] liberation under oppression is unthinkable by design.“

Along with this book, I‘d recommend:
* Angela Davis (duh!) - Are Prisons Obsolete?
* Bryan Stevenson - Just Mercy
* Patisse Khan-Cullors - When they call us a terrorist

#pic #prisonindustrialcomplex #surveillance #politicalreads #wedothistillwefreeus #mariamakaba




„Abolition is not about your fucking feelings“ Mariama Kaba repeats so often throughout the collection of her essays.

Liyah 🤎

Elena Kuran

nona

Cindy

Penelope

“Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you’re going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to.” What if social transformation and liberation isn’t about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle. With chapters on seeking justice beyond the punishment system, transforming how we deal with harm and accountability, and finding hope in collective struggle for abolition, Kaba’s work is deeply rooted in the relentless belief that we can fundamentally change the world. As Kaba writes, “Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone.”

We Do This Til We Free Us Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

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