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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mariame Kaba
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December 19, 2021 - January 7, 2022
White supremacy does not thrive in spite of the menacing infrastructure of US criminalization and militarism—it thrives because of it.
We live in the age of human sacrifice, says Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and our prison and military machinery normalizes industrialized killing.
As public health expert Kenyon Farrow has noted, the US federal government’s mendacious response to the Covid-19 crisis is nothing short of genocide.
“You can’t talk about criminalization in this country without understanding the history of Blackness and Black people in this country. Politicians have used us as the fuel to make things happen. We’re always the canaries in the coal mine.”
“Hope is a discipline.”
While some people might think of abolition as primarily a negative project—“Let’s tear everything down tomorrow and hope for the best”—PIC abolition is a vision of a restructured society in a world where we have everything we need: food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water, and more things that are foundational to our personal and community safety.
“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.”
regularly engage in organizing campaigns and mutual aid efforts that move us closer to our goals. We must remember that the goal is not to create a gentler prison and policing system because, as I have noted, a gentler prison and policing system cannot adequately address harm.
Enough. 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.
What about rape? The current approach hasn’t ended it.
“Liberation under oppression is unthinkable by design.” It’s time for a jailbreak of the imagination in order to make the impossible possible.
Your timeline is not the timeline on which movements occur. Your timeline is incidental. Your timeline is only for yourself to mark your growth and your living.”
I don’t believe in the self in the way that people determine it here in this capitalist society that we live in. I don’t believe in self-care: I believe in collective care, collectivizing our care, and thinking more about how we can help each other.
while the system as a whole is unjust, in some individual cases legal victories can be achieved.
Justice is benefiting from state protection rather than suffering from state violence.
Will this renewed focus on Cyntoia serve to improve the lives of all young people in the sex trade and street economies? Or will the current attention and the framing of her as a victim of sex “slavery” or trafficking serve to further marginalize them by silencing their voices and complexities in service of pursuing a perfect-victim narrative, one that Black women are routinely excluded from?
The consequences for young women who don’t fit the perfect-victim narrative are significant—both in terms of being harshly punished for self-defense and being framed as “traffickers” themselves and then threatened with long sentences under new laws ostensibly passed for their own protection.
Prosecuting and incarcerating survivors of violence puts courts and prisons in the same punitive role as their abusers, which compounds and prolongs victims’ experience of ongoing trauma and abuse.
Is an adult, twenty-nine-year-old Black woman an unsympathetic victim? If so why? Acknowledging trauma and resilience are often ignored in favor of the driving desire by the media and public to support only a perfect victim.
How are you going to be an anti-rape advocate or organizer and still be pressing for people to be put into rape factories?
Prison isn’t feminist, because it re-creates the same sexual violence and the same fear, the same kinds of oppression.
Even though it feels good to wear the “kill the rapists” T-shirt, that isn’t the thing that is actually going to get us the world we want to live in.
But how do we hold that people who have been harmed deserve an opportunity for that harm to be addressed in a real way? Often, that is all people want, a real acknowledgement 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 it again. That is what I am trying to get as a survivor.” I think there is hope in that.
In 2014, according to the Sentencing Project, Black non-Hispanic females had an imprisonment rate over twice that of white non-Hispanic females.
Multiple studies indicate that between 71 percent and 95 percent of incarcerated women have experienced physical violence from an intimate partner.
change that is long overdue. Yet when that system ensnares people we loathe, we may feel a sense of satisfaction.
The reparations framework outlines five elements—repair, restoration, acknowledgment, cessation, and nonrepetition.
technology is more likely to be turned against the public than it is to be used against cops.
Would Marquise be surprised or disturbed that the cops are looking for new ways to more easily access cell phone information when his cell phone is already being demanded without cause and his mother is being told to give up his password?
Some reforms end up reproducing the system in another form.
Foundations are not perfect, of course. They’re part of maintaining the status quo, therefore the handmaidens of capitalism in their own right.
“Thank you for believing us and for refusing to forget,”
the US legacy of criminalizing survivors of violence for self-defense.
“The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.”
I often remind others of the importance of lifting up the choir, of ensuring that those who do show up know that we are grateful for and value them.
Mistaking emotional satisfaction for justice is also not abolitionist.
Transformative justice is a framework that can only be applied responsibly in relationship to the specific context in which it is being practiced. It’s not a one-to-one replacement for criminal legal punishment and should not be thought of as a stand-in.
the very systems that we’re working to dismantle live inside us.
Note that I said support them in taking accountability for their actions. I’m not able to actually force anybody into taking accountability. It has to be a voluntary process through which somebody decides to do that. You can never actually make anybody accountable. People have to be accountable.
“Vengeance is a lazy form of grief.”
much of the discomfort with that experimentation, the idea of we need a product to sub in for this other product, is this very capitalist mind-set around it, of this is not about process. We hide the process; we hide the labor of it.
“You have a responsibility to live in this world. Your responsibility is not just to yourself. You are connected to every one.”
That image of her going to that meeting, and Harriet Tubman was there, and Ida giving her son to Harriet Tubman, and Harriet Tubman raising the son and calling him the movement’s baby?
be generous with ourselves and understanding with others.
you have to be willing to be transformed in the service of the work and the struggle.
“They need to know that I was here.”
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.”
