We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Abolitionist Papers Book 1)

by Mariame Kaba

The problem with casting militarization as the problem is that the formulation suggests it is the excess against which we must rally.

The idea that young Black people in particular are on some sort of inevitable march down the path of criminality gives license to surveil, to watch, to strike them down before they grow.

I think that one thing that remains constant for me is that the system—the prison-industrial complex—isn’t broken. The system of mass criminalization we have isn’t the result of failure.

somebody had to actually first imagine prisons and the police themselves in order to create them. Everything you see in the world—somebody thought of it first.

To transform this mind-set, 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, empathic relationships with others. You can have security without relationships but you cannot have safety—actual safety—without healthy relationships.

In the last few months, weeks, and days, I have found myself saying #BlackLivesMatter out loud at various times. It’s not that I don’t already know that they do. I think that I am trying to speak the words into existence.

Bresha and Marissa, a Black girl and a Black woman, are part of the US legacy of criminalizing survivors of violence for self-defense. This is particularly true for women and gender nonconforming people of color (especially Black people) who are inherently seen as threats, who are never vulnerable, who cannot be afraid, who are always the aggressors, and whose skin is weaponized, making it impossible for them to be considered victims of violence. Women and gender nonconforming people of color seem, under the law and in popular consciousness, to have no selves to defend.

As many as 94 percent of the population in some women’s prisons have a history of having been abused before being caged. Once incarcerated, many cis women, trans women, and gender nonconforming people experience sexual violence from guards and others.3

There is in fact a hierarchy of oppression as Black women and Black trans and gender nonconforming people have even less access to limited sympathy than do cis heterosexual Black men. To deny this is to be a liar.

No one enters violence for the first time by committing it.

Not only is it true that punishment doesn’t work, but also when you prioritize punishment it means that patriarchy remains firmly in place.

Very hard to think of what else to do when violence or harm occurs in the world but to punish. It permeates so much that when somebody chooses to do something else, we sometimes react violently toward that person who doesn’t choose to punish, who says actually I want to try a different way.

You don’t have to know all the answers in order to be able to press for a vision.

“I will no longer lightly walk behind a one of you who fear me: Be afraid. I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits and facial tics. I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore. I must become, I must become a menace to my enemies.”