Rambling

Book Thoughts: We Do This 'Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba

After I read a book, I generally email my thoughts or notes to a friend. I'm now copying these first emails to this blog since it's easier to revisit. The following may have a lot of quotes and random commentary. Commentary is marked in darker blue.

Original sent date: Dec 16, 2024

This book is a collection of some of Mariame Kaba's articles, interviews, speeches, and the like. I ended up copying a lot of things over because tbh I will probably forget the content very soon if I do not.

Sections are numbered for my navigation and do not reflect the structure of the book.

1. Police do not actually present any safety and the prison system is not justice and is very violent (we know this).

When you say, "What would we do without prisons?" what you are really saying is: "What would we do without civil death, exploitation, and state-sanctioned violence?" That is an old question and the answer remains the same: whatever it takes to build a society that does not continuously rearrange the trappings of annihilation and bondage while calling itself "free."

If you look at the history of all the different [urban] uprisings, going back to the early 1900s, all are sparked by police brutality.

The fact of the matter is that more than 50 percent of people who are harmed, very badly harmed by the way, never contact law enforcement at all in the first place. And so that means they prefer nothing at all, as my friend Danielle Sered says, from Common Justice. They prefer nothing at all rather than what we currently offer. That’s a huge number of people who are harmed but don’t seek any sort of redress from the state, the thing that is being offered as the end-all, be-all, the only way to transform any harm. So that’s already the case.

I’m always like, “Why are you upset? Why are you so invested in being upset with people who are trying something else in order to get the redress that they feel like they need, when more than 50 percent of the people don’t even avail themselves of the system that you’re fighting so hard to protect and that you’re fighting so hard to keep entrenched?”

So even of that list of 50 percent that do go in to the system, 50 percent of those folks don’t even make it to the point at which there would be a prosecutor sending their case on to petition in the court in any sort of way. They’re not even going to grand jury. And then by the time it goes to grand jury, another 50 percent are out. They’re not even going to be in a position to be able to go to a trial. And since we know that 98 percent of the people who are in a situation where they might want a trial are actually going to plead out and not go to trial, that’s 2 percent of the people in that list who actually go to trial.

↑ Thinking about this, if I were harmed in this way I also would not want to go to trial that's even scarier. You could even lose and it would be way worse. + social anxiety


2. Any solutions will have to be on an extremely case-by-case basis; there is no easy blueprint everyone can follow, just that you have to be connected to the people around you and follow the basic abolitionist principles.

Another list from later in the book ↓

• Women and gender nonconforming people are not only targets of interpersonal violence but also of state violence. Therefore, discussions of interpersonal violence without a critique of state power and capitalism are at best incomplete and at worst reifications of oppressive structures that are constitutive of interpersonal violence.
• The racial dimensions of gender-based violence must always be addressed.
• Mass criminalization is gendered, a facet that is too often ignored.
• It is important to use a politics of collective, mass defense to challenge the intersections of gendered violence and racialized criminalization.
• Women and gender nonconforming people’s rights to self-defense and self-determination must be won through popular support.
• Acts of self-defense are valid in order to affirm all women and gender nonconforming people’s rights to bodily autonomy.
• It is critical to assert and preserve marginalized people’s right to self-defense because we are both under-protected and targeted by the state and sometimes by our own communities.
• The violent/nonviolent offense binary is an insidious mirage, and we must fight for everyone’s freedom. Petitioning the state that is set up to kill us for help and protection can be untenable and therefore forces us to consider new ways of seeking some justice.
•Criminalization itself is sexual violence—a form of state enactment of gendered violence—which is an important reason to oppose it.
• We cannot focus on addressing vulnerabilities through criminalization, which is always racialized, classed, gendered, and heteronormed. So a focus on criminalized survivors of violence pushes us to ask, “How do we create safety outside of carceral logics?”

And from later: ↓

• Prison-industrial complex abolition calls for the elimination of policing, imprisonment, and surveillance.
• PIC abolition rejects the expansion in breadth or scope or legitimation of all aspects of the prison-industrial complex—surveillance, policing, sentencing, and imprisonment of all sorts.
• PIC abolition refuses premature death and organized abandonment, the state’s modes of reprisal and punishment.


3. Failing is a part of progress and it is unreasonable to expect everyone to have answers and everything be perfect and work immediately. What we know is that what we don't have works, so there's not much to lose to try something different.

Organizing is mostly about defeats. Often when we engage in campaigns, we lose. But any organizer worth their salt knows that it’s much more complex than a simple win-lose calculus.

↑ this kind of scares me btw but ok


4. A lot of abolitionist thought also has to do with unlearning the impulse for punishment and thinking of that as justice. Consequences =/= Punishment. Also you can't make anyone be accountable, it's something they have to decide for themselves.

Remember again, the systems live within us. The punishment mindset is very hard to get out of. And it’s normal and healthy often to want vengeance against people for causing you great harm. That’s not going to get addressed in an accountability process. If you are the one who is rushing after that and that’s really what you’re seeking, an accountability process really would not help. You’re always going to be feeling as though it’s “not working” because it’s not doing the thing that you really would like. And I really want to make people understand that. Not everything should be in an accountability process. Not everything can be resolved in an accountability process. Accountability processes often feel terrible to the people while they’re in it. It’s not a healing process. It might put you on the road toward your own personal healing.

While the person has to be willing to at least begin a process of taking accountability for their actions, they don’t need to necessarily be at the point where they’ve admitted harm. I think this is very important. Because what is the process for? It’s to get people to understand how they’ve harmed people. It’s to get them to sit with this harm that happened to this person and to be like, “Oh my god, I thought I was doing this right thing, and here’s this situation, and this is the person’s experience.” So I think often people think before we can even start a process people have to put out a statement. Well, no, the statement process writing thing might be part of the accountability process, but it’s not necessarily necessary for the beginning of it, in order to initiate it. So that’s very important for people to understand off the bat.

I want to say something also briefly about the concept of success and failure. In trainings that I do with my good friend Shira Hassan we read a very short piece that was written by Bench Ansfield and Jenna Peters-Golden about getting seduced by the idea of success and failure within processes, published in in Makeshift, a feminist magazine. And it’s really helpful. Failure and mistakes are part of a process. That feels counterintuitive because when people are in pain and have been harmed, you think you have to be perfect in order to protect that person from further harm. And what I always tell people is that as a survivor and as somebody who has been around survivors my entire life in my community, we are actually not fragile beings. We are incredibly, incredibly pragmatic. And very resilient. Because we’ve survived a lot of bullshit.

And so going into processes, if you go into it with an idea that the person you’re working with is a fragile China doll who is going to crack under any pressure, you can’t make a mistake—well, then you’re already set up for failure, in the sense of potential catastrophic hurt. Start off with the notion that our process allows for survivors to reclaim agency. That’s what you’re working toward. The binary of success/failure, get rid of that. That’s important, number one.

Number two, you have to know the goals of the process. A third thing is knowing whether or not you’re the right person to actually get into this. Do you have the support system that will help you navigate this? Are you facilitating this by yourself? Do you have a team of people? How are you going to end this process? Because it should not be something that goes on for ninety years. There should be an end to it. How will you know it is over? Having goals will help you in that. So those are all very critical important things to have at the outset or to be working out through the process. I think the failure parts or the places that will ensure ineffectiveness are not knowing whether or not you’re the right person to hold this.

It’s not having any goals. It’s the other side of the thing I just said are the ingredients that you need for a strong process. It’s really not being clear with people about what the wants and needs are. What do people really want? And you can’t get—people cannot get all their wants met in a process.

So, jumping to the question that you actually asked about healing, I think it’s such an important question. I’ve come to my understanding of this through being part of processes. Initially I thought that these processes were intended for healing. But it turned out that I wasn’t actually asking the people involved what their needs and wants were. And for many people it was not actually healing. They were not trying—their needs were not to heal within this particular space. Their needs were to have an acknowledgement of the harm that occurred, to insist that this person never do this again, to address issues around trust and figuring out how to trust people again. It was self-agency and self-accountability. There was a list of things. And healing almost never came up. So that sounds a bit counterintuitive. But I realized later on why that was. And it was because people were actually understanding that to heal, they needed a different kind of space to be in.

This stuff about the process not actually being healing automatically is not really something I had considered before. Also the idea of fucking up with it. Scary.

My friend Danielle Sered has said and written this thing that really made a difference for me. She’s lovely and runs this organization here in New York called Common Justice, which people should look up for multiple reasons. But she wrote a thing that stuck with me, which was that “no one enters violence for the first time by committing it.” No one enters violence for the first time by committing it. And it just—I was like—Jesus Christ. If that’s true, then all this shit that we talk about, these binaries about victims and perpetrators—that explodes it all.

This quote I've been thinking of and wondering if it's true. Is a 2-year-old biting another 2-year-old because they don't actually understand what's going on and they just feel angry enough to bite not violence? This is extreme hair-splitting but I'd like to know if that's like something we define as separate from violence.


5. On restorative vs transformative justice:

Over the years, people have focused very much on an individualistic model of addressing harm, using restorative justice modalities and restorative justice practices. Among those are people who will often say things like, “I’m running a circle, therefore I’m doing restorative justice.” That is ridiculous. It’s just a tool that people use within a larger framework of restorative justice, which asks people different kinds of questions. I like to not fall into binaries too much, like it’s this or this. It’s many different kinds of things to many different kinds of people who use it many different kinds of ways. How I came to focus on transformative justice really was that.

Transformative justice takes as a starting point the idea that what happens in our interpersonal relationships is mirrored and reinforced by the larger systems. If you can’t think all the time about the interplay between those spheres, you end up too focused on the interpersonal, and therefore you cannot transform the conditions that led to the interpersonal harm and violence that you’re dealing with at the moment. I like it because it feels like a more expansive framework and ideology than restorative justice as it’s currently being practiced. The histories of both frameworks are just different. They come from different places. They come out of different communities, even if there are overlaps. And I think it’s important always to think about where things come from and where things are rooted in order to understand what they are.

For me, transformative justice is about trying to figure out how we respond to violence and harm in a way that doesn’t cause more violence and harm. It’s asking us to respond in ways that don’t rely on the state or social services necessarily if people don’t want it. It is focusing on the things that we have to cultivate so that we can prevent future harm. Transformative justice is militantly against the dichotomies between victims and perpetrators, because the world is more complex than that: in a particular situation we’re victimized, and in other situations we’re the people that perpetrate harm. We have to be able to hold all those things together."

Not everyone has to be abolitionist. If you celebrate someone being sentenced in the system or killed etc.; you are not abolitionist. But that's okay.


6. Activism vs. Organizing

There is a difference between activism and organizing, where activism doesn't necessarily require other people but organizing does. Not everyone is doing both at the same time, but solely being an activist is pretty unsustainable because it feels like everything is riding on you specifically. But also any sustainable movement will need other people.

Movements are bigger than individuals but it's important to keep names on ideas and the like so people can trace the lines of thoughts and see themselves represented. But there's not much point in venerating someone in particular.

Everything worthwhile is done with other people.


7. On "Narratives":

Because I’m so uninterested in narratives. That word that gets used often. Narrative-building. People that want to be all about narrative-shifting, narrative-building.

I believe that when we are in relationship with each other, we influence each other. What matters to me, as the unit of interest, is relationships. The second thing that matters to me as a unit of impact is harm. I want to figure out how to transform harm in every possible context because I have been harmed, and I have harmed other people. My political commitments are to developing stronger relationships with people and to transforming harm. All those other things you mentioned—the ideas only matter to me to the extent that they impact both those commitments. For example, it is deeply offensive and hurtful to me that we have prisons because they break relationships and people. That’s how I feel about prisons—they are inherently made for isolation.


8. Prison is a reform

It's really important not to give in to just "reform", and to not let what seems impossible set your final goals. Prison itself is a reform from capital and corporal punishment, and a lot of reforms for prison, meant to be a little kinder than the system past, have grown in their own ways to become unique violences of themselves. I thought that was really interesting. As we know, the system isn't broken, it's doing what it was meant to do.

Between 1825 until the late 1960s, the prison population is stable and pretty low. In the late 1960s you’ve got all these scholars and activists talking about the end of prison. People are talking about the prison as being over. You have to think about how the United States went from the end of prison to, all of a sudden, the largest jailer in the whole world. And that’s because of a set of bipartisan policies, but really takes off with Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson wants to fight the war on poverty, and he gives in on creating a war on crime arm of the war on poverty. And what do the Republicans do, which they always do so well? They defund the poverty angle and keep the war on crime.

For example, let’s look at Bill Clinton and the 1994 crime bill. Clinton gives people an ideological basis to continue to do what they’ve been doing. He was one of the most destructive presidents for Black people, and we’re still trying to recover from his reign, including in terms of what he put into place around immigration and immigrant detention; a lot of people don’t think about that as Black, but the people who were most incarcerated within immigrant detention are disproportionately Black immigrants.

9. Other notes


All in all, my personal takeaways:

#books #nonfiction