We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

“By design or necessity, Black people have focused on our collective rights over our individual liberties. This makes sense in a society where we don’t just assume individual Black guilt and suspicion; we are all guilty and we are all suspicious […]. In that context, individual liberties and rights take a back seat to a collective struggle for emancipation and freedom.”

In the United States, liberties are traditionally understood as belonging to individuals, such as the right to criticize one’s government or to bear firearms. For Black Americans, however, they have had to focus more on group rights because they have traditionally experienced oppression as members of a group. This compels them to take a more collective interest in the rights of Black people as a whole, because the violation of one Black person’s rights is not about them as an individual, but rather about the fact that they are a Black person, and so those violations are likely to have spillover effects for the entire community.

“What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.”

While abolitionists regard prisons as irredeemably corrupt and violent institutions, they are also careful to note that prisons themselves are not the problem. Rather, prisons are one institutional manifestation of a much broader societal rot, one where racism, sexism, capitalism, and other networks of oppression intersect to deprive certain groups of people of their humanity. Abolishing prisons is a way to challenge these broader social issues, but it must not end there.

“Mike Brown was described by his killer, Darren Wilson, as a ‘demon’ and called an ‘it.’ The Doctrine of preemptive killing and preventative captivity finds expression in the daily lives of all Black people in the United States. Black people are never ‘innocent.’ That language or concept doesn’t apply. We are always guilty until proven something less than suspect or dangerous.”

Kaba argues that the killing of Black people at the hands of the police is not a matter of “bad apples” or the intense pressures of policing, but are principally derived from racist assumptions about Black people and their supposed predisposition toward criminality. Even an unarmed teenager like Michael Brown is promptly rebranded as a potential criminal, deserving of violence because of the fear he provokes in a police officer merely by existing. Such tropes are so deeply rooted in the culture that they more often than not amount to a successful criminal defense.

“Cyntoia is not a cardboard cutout upon whom other adults can project their narratives of youth involvement in the sex trades. She is a young woman who has experienced horrible violence, but that is not all she is. She has her own story to tell, but by portraying her as a victim without agency some of Cyntoia’s advocates make it more difficult for her story of self-defense, her fight to survive, and her resistance to violence to be respected. We need to find a way to describe all of her realities—both as a survivor of violence with the right to defend herself and as a young woman who was doing her best to survive.”

An adversarial legal system, where the prosecution and defense each puts forth their idealized narratives, helps frame criminal cases as conflicts between good and evil. When a victim or witness is not unequivocally good, it is therefore easier to treat them as evil and interpret their behavior through the lens of their culpability. Kaba insists that individual stories are far too complex for such binary narratives, that we need to look at the social structures that produce behaviors rather than take those behaviors as signs of someone’s worthiness of empathy.

“We have to complicate this conversation around sexual violence and see all the different ways that it is used as a form of social control, across the board, with many different people from all different genders, all different races, and all different social locations. If we understand the problem in that way, we have a better shot at actually uprooting all of the conditions that lead to this and addressing all of the ways in which sexual violence reinforces other forms of violence.”

Kaba discusses Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood producer whose long history of sexual harassment and abuse helped spawn the #MeToo movement. In addition to being skeptical that Weinstein’s imprisonment would do much more than put one offender behind bars for a certain amount of time, Kaba also doubts that this kind of high-profile case with intense media scrutiny can be truly representative of the many people who suffer sexual violence. For the case to shed light on broader issues, Kaba contends that the conversation must take into account social structures and not just individual perpetrators.

“While self-defense laws are interpreted generously when applied to white men who feel threatened by men of color, they are applied very narrowly to women and gender nonconforming people, and particularly women and gender nonconforming people of color trying to protect themselves in domestic violence and sexual assault cases. Black women have been excluded from definitions of ‘respectable’ or ‘proper’ womanhood, sexuality, and beauty, influencing how their right to bodily autonomy—and agency—is viewed.”

It is widely assumed that all people are entitled to the same set of rights, but this overlooks the fact that rights are most often tested in a judicial context, where interpretation is key. In American society, certain kinds of people are deemed less worthy of exercising their rights than others, and so when they come before a judge or a jury, their actual rights matter less than their presumed worthiness, based primarily on race and gender but also on other social circumstances that define them as more or less respectable.

“The pattern after police killings is all too familiar. Person X is shot, and killed. Person X is usually Black (or less frequently brown). Community members (sometimes) take to the streets in protest. They are (sometimes) brutally suppressed. The press calls for investigations. Advocates call for reforms suggesting that the current practices and systems are ‘broken’ and/or unjust. There is a (racist) backlash by people who support the police. A very few people whisper that the essential nature of policing is oppressive and is not susceptible to any reforms, thus only abolition is realistic. These people are considered heretics by most.”

On the rare occasions when a police officer faces potential repercussions for violent actions against a Black person, it is tempting to celebrate their indictment or potential imprisonment as a minor victory, the chance for a family in agony to enjoy some modicum of justice. Kaba certainly does not oppose people such as Wilson (charged with the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014) facing consequences, and being stripped of the power to harm another person again. However, she contends that, barring a much more radical conversation on how people like Wilson are representatives of social structures, this case will go through the same familiar patterns as the previous ones, as will the many cases bound to follow in its wake.

“Even when the system snares a non-Black person, the prison-industrial complex remains a structurally anti-Black apparatus, firmly rooted in the United States’ ongoing reliance on the financial exploitation and social control of Black people. This can be seen in persistent disparities at all levels of the criminal legal system, from arrest through imprisonment.”

The case of Larry Nassar, a US Olympic team doctor ultimately convicted for years of sexual abuse, was popularly framed as successfully holding a powerful white person accountable. Thus, even those normally skeptical of the criminal justice system should support Nassar’s conviction, and to suggest otherwise would be to express sympathy for a serial rapist. Kaba, however, looks to less media-friendly cases to demonstrate the extent to which Nassar’s case lends legitimacy to the overall logic of incarceration. She suggests, therefore, that labeling Nassar’s conviction as an act of justice only reinforces the system that will swallow up Black and brown people, as it is explicitly designed to do.

“Why are we asking the police to stop being the police over and over again? Ultimately, calls for collective responses rooted in arrests and prosecution are likely to lead to dead ends and deep disappointments. But even if successful, the arrest, conviction, and sentencing of individual cops represent an exception to the rule: the rule is impunity. Focusing on arrests leaves the whole system intact. As the popular chant goes, ‘indict, convict, send the killer cops to jail, the whole damn system is guilty as hell.’”

Although Kaba’s goal is ultimately the abolition of the police, she does not object to proposals to reform the police; she rejects only the idea that the police can themselves be expected to be agents of that reform. Breonna Taylor’s murder was not an accident or an instance of someone exceeding their mandate. For Kaba, killing Black people with impunity is built into the logic of policing. There is accordingly little chance of the system itself developing a conscience when that would run contrary to its essential functioning. It might occasionally sacrifice one of its own, but only outsiders can challenge the system itself.

“While the US public education system has historically diverted nonwhite communities toward undereducation, non-living-wage work, participation in a permanent war economy, and/or incarceration, the development of the world’s largest prison nation over the last three decades has strengthened policy, practice, and ideological linkages between schools and prisons. Nonwhite, non-heterosexual, and gender nonconforming students are targeted for surveillance, suspended and expelled at higher rates, and are much more likely to be charged, convicted, and removed from their homes or otherwise to receive longer sentences.”

Here Kaba is discussing the ‘school-to-prison pipeline,’ where an increased police presence in schools simply creates one more space where Black and brown students can be harassed, brutalized, and arrested. Once it became possible for police to enter into schools under the guise of security, the police—in conjunction with other institutions—were able to expand the apparatus of control where it is already easiest to find and control young people.

“The problem with casting militarization as the problem is that the formulation suggests it is the excess against which we must rally. We must accept that the ordinary is fair for an extreme to be the problem. The policing of Black people—carried out through a variety of mechanisms and processes-is purportedly warranted, as long as it doesn’t get too militarized and excessive.”

The brutal response to the protests against George Floyd’s murder drew attention because the police were using military-grade equipment, making American cities look like warzones. As disturbing as this was, Kaba points out that this is a difference of degree, not kind, for most of Black America, whose cities have been treated as battlegrounds for many decades. The problem is that policing itself is a form of warfare, not only when it takes on a dimension that the rest of the country finds especially troublesome.

“I’d be interested to know how privacy advocates and some civil libertarians might discuss the concept of surveillance with young people like Marquise and Willy. What’s the meaning of data collection by the NSA to a young person who lives under constant scrutiny already? Would Marquize 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?”

As Kaba often points out, framing rights in terms of individuals is often a way to mask the realities of how power and privilege are distributed unequally. The person who has a problem with government surveillance likely regards their being surveilled as a breach of the norm but does not consider a person for whom surveillance is so thoroughly normalized that their entire life is swallowed up in various kinds of surveillance.

“I’m conflicted. I go back forth all the time. Is this possible? Aren’t the police and policing itself is too strong to allow any civilian body to control it? Don’t they have unions so powerful that they almost always cow civilian leadership?”

As an activist, Kaba deals mostly in setbacks and defeats, and so she frequently grapples with the fear that her cause is hopeless, that the powers arranged against them are too powerful for them ever to hope to overcome these powers. While she cannot help feeling this way as an individual, she draws strength from the community around her, who show resilience and endurance even in the face of overwhelming odds. If it is enormously difficult to break the power of the police, it is no less difficult to break the power of the people.

“At the same time as we organize behind specific and urgent issues, we must also develop and maintain an ongoing vision, and the theory following upon that vision, of why we struggle—of the shape and taste and philosophy of what we wish to see.”

There are two primary aspects to organizing: the specific, often local, cause that brings people out into the street demanding change, and the comprehensive vision that ultimately sustains them in the face of the many setbacks they are likely to face. In addition to justifying the hard work, the vision informs the particular nature of their work, what they do and who they include, so that the action itself becomes a small manifestation of that vision and helps, however incrementally, to make it a reality.

“In the absence of any clamor, politicians showed no interest. Reporters, hearing no complaint, conducted no investigations, and editorial writers launched no crusades. State and federal prosecutors, feeling no pressure from the press or the public, hearing no moral commentary from the religious quarter, prosecuted no one. Judges, seeing no officer indicated and hearing no officers speak against his comrades, could therefore comfortably dismiss claims of torture, and with few exceptions, they did.”

While Kaba focuses her efforts on police, prisons, and the other institutions that form an active part of the carceral state, she keeps in mind that these systems thrive because of the complicity, or at least indifference, of the general public. This is what makes activism so vitally important: Whether or not they succeed in accomplishing a particular objective, nothing happens without raising public awareness, and the only way to raise public awareness is to make noise, or else the powers that be will sweep the abuses under the rug.

“Defense campaigns are most effective as abolitionist strategies when they are framed in a way that speaks to the need to abolish prisons in general. The campaign cannot be framed by a message such as: ‘This is the one person who shouldn’t be in prison, but everyone else should be.’ Rather, individual cases should be framed as emblematic of the conditions faced by thousands or millions who should also be free.”

Kaba frequently expresses concern that even among her fellow abolitionists, there is a tendency to distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving and to frame abolition in terms of the idea that innocent people must be freed but the guilty can stay. Kaba refuses to make that distinction, because whether or not someone has in fact done what they are charged with, prison is a cruel punishment that serves no purpose other than to reify systems of social control.

“For myself, I say thank you to the #NoCopAcademy organizers. You have sustained my hope. I choose to emphasize the fact that you fought as a win because what we choose to emphasize determines our lives. Your protest, your refusal to be run over, your local actions, added to those of others the world over, will slowly tilt the world toward more justice. People will share the story of this campaign and be inspired by it to launch their own.”

Even though the protestors failed to prevent the construction of a police training facility, Kaba is immensely proud of their efforts, for having made a stand and forced the city to deal with the backlash for something they had hoped to do quietly without public oversight. They turned a local issue into a global cause celebré and inspired people to follow their example in both Chicago and elsewhere. The loss of having a training facility is offset by the gains of having new and dedicated members in the ranks of activists.

“Legal remedies such as restraining orders and criminal charges are the primary forms of redress offered to survivors of violence and harm. This limited range of remedies frequently forecloses our consideration of other possible ways to address sexual harm. Abolition is the praxis that gives us room for new visions and allows us to write new stories—together. But it is hard, hard work.”

One way the legal system stays alive is by making itself the only plausible avenue of reform. It argues that the only way to reduce harm is for the system itself to curb its own activities to one degree or another, or create new institutions with ostensibly more benign purposes, while staying firmly in control. The all-pervasive nature of the system makes it difficult to imagine concrete alternatives, and so abolition is in large part a frame of mind that one maintains while navigating through the world of the punishment system.

“If you are asking somebody to move to another place because they caused harm to the people living there: consequence. If you’re making it so that person can never have housing: punishment. Okay, so you have to just be able to see the difference between inflicting cruelty, pain, and suffering and being uncomfortable and losing some privileges—these are not the same things.”

Critics often allege that Kaba does not want anything done to offenders, and she responds by drawing a contrast between punishment and consequences. People who do harm need to answer for it, and that may very well involve doing things to them that they would prefer not to be done, especially in terms of stripping away their power to harm. This is a far cry from punishment, Kaba contends, because punishment simply aims to make a person’s life worse in ways that do not correspond with the actual harm they have done and so cannot possibly lay the groundwork for accountability.

“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.”

Specific practices of transformative justice are difficult to define when the punishment system remains in place, but its guiding principles are relatively clear. It centers the experience of victims, rejects cruelty or revenge, and seeks total independence from the state—an inherently coercive institution. Because it is rooted in the specific dynamics of a community, it refuses to prescribe rules for how things ought to be done, instead leaving it up to various peoples under different circumstances to find the form of justice that is appropriate for them.

“I worried about this place called Earth and decided that it must be a terrible place to breed such scared, mistrustful, and cruel people. I was glad to be living in SP and resolved to keep my distance from Earth.”

With its science fiction setting, the short story “Justice” offers a new way of understanding Kaba’s contention that what we perceive as normal is only what is familiar, an idea Kaba underscores in the narrative by portraying common institutions and practices of punishment as deeply disturbing to an outsider. The description of SP as an oasis of transformative justice does not necessarily make that vision more plausible, but it does help to show the world we do inhabit as a profoundly flawed place.

“The freaking tech folks and the people who are running the banks talk about failure all the time. They normalize that. It’s only on the other side of folks who are interested in social transformation and change where failure is not supposed to be spok

Kaba argues that critiques of protest movements often hypocritically dismiss these movements for failing while simultaneously embracing failure in mainstream institutions. These institutions have the power to paint everything they do in the best possible light; for a Silicon Valley company, failure is part of “creative destruction,” or a stepping stone toward genius. Contrary to what she sees as a double standard, Kaba argues that protests are about bringing people together and infusing them with purpose, and so unless they are doing nothing at all, they are not failing.

“I think about sites of struggle as just constant learning. I’m an incredibly curious person, and I feel like that’s a huge help in my work. It’s helpful to be super curious, come with what you know, be willing to learn, and to be willing to be transformed in the service of your work. Mary Hooks has that right—that you have to be willing to be transformed in the service of the work and the struggle. And if you’re coming to things in that way, then you know you’ll be welcome. If you’re not welcome, then you’ll make a place for yourself where you can be welcome.”

One of the many virtues of organizing is its radical commitment to inclusivity. While Kaba has core principles that need to inform the movement, and differences in perspective are inevitable, organizing is ultimately about bringing people together, especially those who would otherwise never meet and are lacking in other forms of social power. Because these movements are creative and constantly experimenting, they do not place their new members in predetermined spots. Those who come looking for a place cannot merely find one but instead make one for themselves.