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

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. 

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. 

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. 

We Do This Til We Free Us quotes

Join the club