{"id":51224,"date":"2021-02-23T16:59:19","date_gmt":"2021-02-23T16:59:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/radiofree.asia\/?guid=1573532e573326dc4db47c41255804b6"},"modified":"2021-02-23T16:59:19","modified_gmt":"2021-02-23T16:59:19","slug":"what-are-we-going-to-do-about-it-mariame-kaba-talks-abolition-in-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/23\/what-are-we-going-to-do-about-it-mariame-kaba-talks-abolition-in-action\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWhat Are We Going to Do About It?\u201d Mariame Kaba Talks Abolition in Action"},"content":{"rendered":"\"Black<\/a>

In the wake of the uprisings following the highly publicized murder of George Floyd, new attention has been paid to campaigns to defund and abolish police and policing, and imagine new ways of existing in a world where safety, justice and healing can — and should — exist independently of the carceral state. In this atmosphere of heightened excitement about abolition, Mariame Kaba has delivered the timely collection We Do This \u2018Til We Free Us<\/em>. A perennial organizer and prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionist, Kaba is renowned for founding and co-founding organizations like Survived and Punished, Project NIA, the Chicago Freedom School, Interrupting Criminalization, and many more. Her many publications, her blog Prison Culture, and her massive Twitter following have also garnered her well-deserved renown. Kaba\u2019s new book, created along with her friend and colleague Tamara Nopper, illuminates today\u2019s movement with new clarity. In this conversation, she offers poignant reflections from her book, describing her journey from the lessons learned from her father, who participated in the struggle for independence in Guinea, to her perspectives on the tasks for abolitionists in the wake of the 2020 uprising. She also offered her thoughts on what it means to push the limits of our imagination. <\/p>\n

Jindu <\/strong>Obiofuma<\/strong>: You’ve always been intentional about keeping attention away from yourself and shying away from the spotlight. Now you have this huge Twitter following and you’re writing books or publishing essays and articles and you’re quite public. What inspired this change? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Mariame Kaba:<\/strong> I spent most of my adult life working behind the scenes, doing work with people and in my communities. I was taught and mentored by people who would say: \u201corganizers in the background, leaders upfront.\u201d And so, I was mostly in the background. I’m an introvert by nature, and so I felt very comfortable there. It was actually a friend of mine who asked me a question at a certain point. We were working on a resource together and I was like, \u201cNo, we don’t need to put our names on it.\u201d And she said, how interesting that someone who’s like you, who’s been doing all this work for many years, but also spends a lot of time in the archives surfacing the histories of Black women that you admire — how interesting is it that you’ve erased yourself from history? And I was like, oh God, you know — it really hit me at the time. I changed by kind of reinserting myself into my own life. And then from there, people started paying attention to me because I posted my name on the things that I made. The main change that happened with me, frankly, was getting on social media. I never wanted to get on social media. It was a formerly incarcerated young person who got me on Twitter. He also got me to start a blog in 2010. He’s like, you have so many cool things to say; you should make a blog. And he was the one who taught me how to make Prison Culture. And the book came about because Haymarket’s been asking me to write a book for many years. I’ve always said no. And this summer, they came back to me after the uprisings in Minneapolis and they were like, we think you should do a book. How about working with Tamara Nopper? And, after thinking about it for about a week, I came back and said ok, let\u2019s do it.<\/p>\n

James Kilgore: Who did you write this for? As the renowned Black liberation fighter Ella Baker used to ask, \u201cwho are your people?\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n

My people are a defined group of folks who I’ve been in organizations with for most of my life. I’m thinking about folks who I have relationships with, who are part of various formations that I co-founded and started and currently do a lot of work with — folks like Survived and Punished, who I’m accountable to. And through Project NIA, I have people I’m accountable to. I believe in organization and in organizations and being grounded in that. I don’t see myself as somebody with people that I’m trying to spread the gospel to.<\/p>\n

I hope that people who maybe have never even heard of abolition before, but are curious and willing to be interested in maybe learning a little bit more, will appreciate the book. And I hope that this book provides them with a door to allow them to decide whether or not they want to walk in. And once they’ve walked in, maybe this will lead them to other people in other projects and other organizations that they would look into and deepen their analysis and then take action accordingly. I also hope that people who have been part of abolitionist organizing will find something useful in the book to inform their work and thinking.<\/p>\n

Kilgore: You wrote about how important your family’s participation in the liberation struggle in Guinea was, particularly your father. Things like anti-colonial struggles often feel far away to activists in the U.S. What can those of us in the U.S. learn from struggles in other parts of the world? <\/strong><\/p>\n

My father was a deeply realistic man, pragmatic. I didn’t know him when he was idealistic. I came along several decades after that. As someone who believed in socialist revolution and then saw what became of those ideas and of people who espoused those ideas, he would tell me that things in practice were always much messier and more difficult to implement than they are in your head. And that I should be wary of people who spend a lot of time in their heads only.<\/p>\n