July 28, 2021 • 49 mins
Abolitionist Mariame Kaba is the founder of Project NIA and the author of the New York Times bestseller, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. Kaba and Dr. Kendi have a profound discussion on why mass surveillance, police, punishment, and incarceration will never create a safe society—and what will. For further reading, resources, and a transcript of this episode visit https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/be-antiracist-with-ibram-x-kendi.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin abolition is not just about a reaction to the
prison industrial complex. We want to make sure that these
(00:35):
institutions are not normalized facets of our society anymore. That's
the work. In nineteen ninety five, political scientist John Deulio
predicted that a wave of adolescent superpredators would soon corrupt
our streets and fill American prisons. A superpredator is a
(00:59):
young juvenile criminal who is so impulsive, so remorseless, that
he can kill, rape, name without a giving it a
second thought. Diulio wrote that on the horizon are tens
of thousands of severely morally impoverished juvenile super predators. They
(01:20):
are perfectly capable of committing the most heinous acts of
physical violence for the most trivial reason. They fear neither
the stigma of arrest nor the pain of imprisonment. They
live by the meanest code of the meanest streets. He wrote,
nothing else matters to them, so for as long as
their youthful energies hold out, they will do what comes naturally. Murder, rape,
(01:46):
rob assault, burglarized, deal deadly drugs, and get high. Diulio
was not talking about adults. He was talking about teams
middle schoolers more than high schoolers. He was talking about
people like me. I was thirteen years old in nineteen
(02:07):
ninety five. Was I a superpredator or was I fearing
the superpredator? I'm Abramax Kendy, and this is be anti racist.
Being a black man in America isn't easy. The hunt
(02:33):
is on and you're the prey. Menace to society came
out in nineteen ninety three, and by the time the
nineteen ninety four crime Bill was passed, crime rates had
already started falling. We together are taking a big step
(02:54):
toward bringing the laws of our land back in the
line with the values of our people and beginning to
restore the line between right and wrong. Today, pundits and
politicians talk about a wave or a violent crime wave
in American cities, but many crimes, from larcenese to robberies
(03:17):
to rape dropped during the pandemic and continued to fall
in twenty twenty one. Only homicides have increased as other
crimes fell. But the increase in homicides beginning in twenty
twenty happened across cities and towns of all sizes, from
small towns with fewer than ten thousand residents to cities
(03:39):
with more than one million. Diulio later recanted his own
thesis that superpredators who looked like me were going to
overrun this nation with crime. The superpreditor idea was wrong
once it was out there. Though it was out there,
there was no realing it. In the old racist caricature,
(04:01):
preyed on black people as dangerous animals. In the racist imaginary,
the root cause of crime and in black neighborhoods is
the blackness of the people. To be black, in this
view is to be an animal, and the way to
control those animals is with the surveilling, policing, profiling, arresting,
(04:22):
and punishing power of the state. Our state, the United States,
has the largest incarcerated population in the world, and only
the US and Chinese militaries cost more than American policing.
For a long time, in this country, the preyed upon
have been considered dangerous. Indigenous people were considered dangerous, not
(04:46):
the settlers and armies waging landstealing wars and massacres. My
enslaved ancestors were considered dangerous, not the enslavers subjugating them
through violence. Immigrants have been considered dangerous, Not the nativists
harassing and attacking and exploiting them. Teens playing with toy
(05:06):
guns or walking home from the store snacking on skittles
have been considered dangerous, not the cops and want to
be cops who murdered them. Black communities are considered dangerous,
not the communities of politicians depriving those areas of resources
and opportunities. Not the gangster capital exploiting those communities, Not
(05:29):
the police officers brutalizing Black people like we are predators.
When will the American people redirect their fear. Welcome to
Be Anti Racist an action podcast where we discuss how
to diagnose, dismantle, and abolish racism, how to save humanity
(05:50):
from the divisiveness of racist ideas and the destructiveness of
racist power and policy, How to free humanity through the
unity of anti racist ideas and the constructiveness of anti
racist power and policy. On Be Anti Racist, we discuss
how to make them possible, possible, and how to bring
(06:11):
into being what modern humans have never known, a just
and equitable world. You ready, let's roll. The criminal legal
(06:35):
system focuses on individuals who have done harm, while abolitionists
consider the larger social economic and political context in which
the harm occurs. These are the words of one of
America's most influential abolitionist, Miriam Kaba. She is the founder
of Project Nia, an organization that aims to end the
(06:58):
incarceration of children and young adults by promoting restorative and
transformative justice practices. She is the author of the New
York Times bestseller We Do Till We Free US Abolitionists
Organizing and Transforming justice. If you want to understand the
perspective of those Americans calling for the defunding and abolishing
(07:20):
of the police, I encourage you to read this book.
While other Americans are committed to feeling secure, Kaba is
committed to being safe. We discussed why she doesn't believe
a society of mass surveillance, policing, punishment, incarceration will ever
allow us to build a safe society, and what will.
(07:45):
I've been looking forward to our conversation for quite some time.
I admire your work, and of course you've been in
this struggle for years. Well, thanks for inviting me to
be part of this conversation. I appreciate your work, so
it's a pleasure. What's fascinating about your work is your
precise and critical attention to terminology, and I share that,
(08:11):
so I'm always trying to be quite precise in the
words that I use and the definitions that I utilize.
So to give an example, you don't use the term
criminal justice system. Why, Yeah, I started using the term
criminal punishment system. I don't know, probably about fifteen years ago.
(08:36):
The term really for me was important because it is
what the system actually is. It is what the system
actually does. Why do we incarceerate people? We've heard that
it is deterrence. All people who believe in empirical science
(08:56):
tell us that actually, incarceration doesn't deter anybody from anything.
There's a lot of euphemistic talk, in particular as it
relates to issues of incarceration and issues of policing. It's
actually really very intentional in many ways, because when you
obscure the actual material impacts of institutions, you really can
(09:19):
do anything to people. You can justify anything. We have
been told that incarceration is for quote rehabilitation. Well, we
know for a fact that incarceration is criminogenic, which means
that people who actually enter the first time are more
likely to enter over and over and over again than
(09:42):
they are to quote. Get well, if you hear stories
of people who say prison really saved my life, those
are very much exceptions. And when you ask those people, okay, well,
what else could have saved your life, you know, prior
to ending up behind bars, they will tell you a
million different things that could have actually prevented them from
(10:02):
getting in the first place. And if you gave them
a choice between using that versus going to prison, they
always will tell you the preventative stuff would have been
much better. People are much more comfortable using words that
don't implicate them in the harms that are occurring under
our name and with our money and with our support,
(10:23):
whether it's public opinion support, whether it's our silence, which
is tacit support. So I started using the term criminal
punishment system for that purpose. You use the term cage
regularly people being cage. And let me just tell you,
I went to graduate school at Temple and so I
(10:43):
spent a lot of my years in North Philadelphia. I
would hit up this barbershop close to my house. There's
a working class, working poor area in North Philly, and
I never forget waiting for my haircut. Dude was taken
forever and the brother in the chair. The barber of
course asked him, oh, you know, what's been good with you?
(11:04):
How have you been doing? And he said, I just
got out of boundage. I just got out of my cage.
Until did use of that term cage? Why that term? Well,
actually that I got from incarcerated friends, and I got
from comrades on the inside. It's not something I invented.
When I started writing to incarcerated people, like twenty five
(11:25):
years ago, they would talk about being in a cage.
It was a politicized term they created to convey what
they wanted me to understand about enclosure and about capture
and about dehumanization that was occurring for them on a
regular basis. So I just have gone with what the
(11:48):
people I'm in community and relationship with have told me
about their own experience, using their own language. The people
who are locked up are constantly fighting against their dehumanization
by reclaiming and insisting on their humanity. It's a description
that feels apt, at least to the people that I
(12:09):
know and care about. Another term, of course, is the
term abolitionist. And so if you could just shared what
it means to you, I've always tried to define abolition
as a vision of a restructured society and world, a
world where we have everything we need to live dignified vives,
(12:29):
food and shelter and education and health and beauty and
art and clean water and everything else. Abolition is not
just about a reaction to the prison industrial complex, so
that's a central aspect of it. It's really a commitment
to making the conditions that would lead to people feeling
(12:53):
those institutions are necessary impossible. That's the work. We want
to make sure that these institutions are not normalized facets
of our society anymore, at least for me. That's prison
industrial complex abolition. It pushes us to break with the
current order. It pushes us to say not this, while
(13:13):
simultaneously forging new ground and building a different world. I'm
a PC abolitionist in its simplest terms because I want
to dismantle a system that is predicated on premature death
and as doctor Ruth Wilson Gilmour teaches us on organized abandonment,
(13:35):
and I want instead to build one that is focused
on life and true safety at bottom at its crux.
That's why I'm a prison industrial complex abolitionist. What I
have found in my conversations with people trying to get
them to imagine that different type of world is. They
(13:59):
get caught up typically in a term that you also
don't use, and that's the term bad people. And it
reminds me of teaching and Jula Davis is our prisons
absolute in a graduate course, and everybody was okay with
people who commit drug crimes and your non violent offenses.
(14:20):
But then when it was like, oh, what are we
going to do with the bad people, meaning the serial
rapists and killers? That that's where everyone got hung up.
What are we going to do with them if we
don't have prisons and police and mass surveillance. How do
you typically respond to that? Always say, tell me a
little bit about what it is that you're concerned about.
(14:42):
I'm not going to engage you in a conversation about
the quote unquote bad people. I think there are people
who do bad things. That's my inclination. As somebody who
is steeped in the ideas of transformative justice. I get that,
but I try not to spend all my time getting
caught up in people's law and order vision, like television
(15:04):
vision of the serial rapists in the bushes. So I'll
lost people like, are you asking me how you're going
to keep yourself safe? Is that the question? And they
might say, well, yeah, I guess, And I'll say, well,
how are you doing that now? In this world that
we have, where there are prisons and policing and surveillance
and billions and billions of dollars afforded to those institutions,
(15:28):
How do you keep yourself safe today? How often do
you rely on the criminal punishment system? Within that conceptualization,
right like have you called the cops in the last year,
the last five years, the last ten when you've been harmed?
Have any of the people who've harmed you ended up
behind bars? The questions actually help people to pinpoint what
(15:50):
it is they're fearful about and work on that. Let's
figure out how to create the spaces and the institutions
and what it is we need to feel safe in
our communities. That is at the bottom of what abolitionists
care about. We care about harm, which is why we
(16:11):
purposely don't use the term crime because a lot of
things that are criminal are not harmful to many other people,
and a lot of things that are harmful are not criminalized.
So what are we really talking about here, we're talking
about harm, and once that becomes clear to people, people
are much more open to hearing out ideas for other
ways of thinking about how we make safety for ourselves
(16:35):
and for our communities. As we're making a different world,
we will come to other answers for how we handle
various kinds of things. The answers provided now don't work
and don't actually do what it is that people say
they want to have done. Yeah, and that can be
proven empirically. Yeah, so let's do something else. You also
(16:56):
talk about that people have been indoctrinated by the idea
that these institutions are holding that harm at bay, or
that we solve problems of harm through these institutions. Right.
You wrote that the hegemony of the police is so
complete that we often can't begin to imagine a world
(17:18):
without the institution. It is actually the case in my
experience that people are more likely to be able to
imagine a world without prisons than they are a world
without police and policing. There are lots of reasons for that.
As you were growing up, when did you first come
to consciousness about the existence of a police officer? Probably
(17:39):
what eight or nine years old? Yeah, so eight or nine,
and I would push even further and say, you probably
played games like Cops and Robbers when you were even smaller, probably,
and you probably had some sort of toys that also
spoke to the issue of cops. The cops are literally,
(18:00):
for us in the United States and now around the world,
like the weather. They are so part of our day
existence that often we don't even think about them, and
you don't question, You just don't. You just don't question
that they should exist. For many people, their lives are
(18:20):
structured in a way where the cops only exist when
they are called, hardly ever seen in the landscape of
their communities, never in their schools. And they are able
to live that way because the cops are enforcing violence
on all these other communities. They are surveilling all these
other communities, they are quote policing all these other communities.
(18:43):
It comes from a socialization that is so deeply rooted
within our culture so as to not even allow us
to be able to think outside of it. The television
shows and the billboards when you're driving sometime long distance.
Look at how many advertisements in billboards speak to policing
(19:06):
in some way. It's a miracle frankly, if some of
us come to consciousness and we begin to question their
existence and we begin to say, why does it have
to be this way? Actually? And then there's a personalization.
My uncle Johnny's a good cop, right, like, I'm not
talking about your uncle Johnny. Police and policing. Yes, So
(19:27):
I think that that's really where all these things live,
in real ways that have impacts on our ability to
actually be able to even conceptualize a different way. And
anything you offer that would be a different way gets
interpreted through the lens of a very personalized affront to
your belief system. Or there's just no other option. This
(19:51):
is all inevitable. It's always been this way. And I
love the quote by David Graber. We made the world
and we can just as easily make it different. It's
a terrible paraphrase of his words, but that was something
that gave me so much power and an ability to
be like, well, yes, the world is organized this way
because we've organized it this way. It doesn't have to
(20:13):
be exactly. Of course, different things can happen. They've always happened.
I'm Mariam Tava and you're listening to be anti racist
with Debram X can. I think the indoctrination has created
(20:37):
this simple formula that when you have less police in prisons,
there's more quote unquote crime, and correct me if I'm wrong,
But what you're ultimately stating is that when you have
more police in prisons, you're actually going to have more harm.
(21:00):
To me, that's true on its face, because they are
inherently violent institutions that cause harm. They don't just exist
in a neutral capacity. They're in the way, right. So
that's one thing. But I think the second thing I
want to push back on that the Academy and the
researchers and all these crime industrial complex folks have conflated
(21:22):
things that I'm not sure go together. So, for example,
I constantly get told prisons have an impact on quote
crime rates, and I always have to ask, which crimes
are you talking about? Supposedly, how do you empirically know
this to be true? The Academy of Sciences did this
massive literature review of all these experimental and empirical studies
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and found that incarceration actually had a very negligible impact
on supposed crime rates. If the relationship you're making between
the prisons and crime it's actually very little, what might
it look like not to have them causing harm in
the communities, we may actually get further because we would
have all these resources that we could appropriate into communities
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to actually take care of people's needs, therefore making it
even less likely that people would have to quote turn
to crime to be able to actually sustain a life.
Yet the notion of these institutions being criminal enterprises themselves
that gets pushed aside. Yes, what about the studies that
show how much police contribute to homicide rates. I'm seeing
(22:34):
those They're killing a thousand people a year. Why does
that just get taken out and not treated as part
of this notion. If you say that your issue is
to eradicate violence, I'm actually anti prison, anti policing, and
anti surveillance because I'm anti violence. Yes, And when you
believe that prisons, surveillance, and police are going to reduce
(23:01):
harm and violence, you're going to fund them. Yeah. The
combined cost of US policing is more than not only
every other police force in the world, but every other
military in the world, aside from the Chinese and US military.
And then what are you not going to fund? Right?
And then how will that lack of funding for healthcare
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for jobs, for education, for housing, for mental health services,
then lead to harm and violence. It seems to us
to be as clear as day. Why isn't as clear
as day for other people? You know, I think it
is clear as day to many people. But I think
a lot of people just don't want to engage that
because of racism, because of classism, because of all the
(23:47):
forces of oppression that make it so that some people
benefit from having the status quo and others don't. And
to me, if you're doing pretty well in your community,
you don't care how much is being spent on the costs.
You got what you need. Yeah, your kids going to college,
You've got healthcare when you need it. You are in
(24:09):
a position of not wanting to lock the boat to
the point where you might actually lose in your mind.
Some status is that you feel like you actually need
to be able to live the life you want to leave.
And I think we can't get away from the fact
that some people are actually benefiting from the current status quo,
(24:31):
and those people it's in their interests to continue to
paint the rest of us as naive, radical, homicide loving
people because they are comfortable in this current circumstance. They
don't get the vagaries and the tragedies. They don't experience
it in the ways that other people do, and so
(24:53):
it becomes easier to deal with that. I love this
quote by Bill Ayers, which I use all the time. Policing,
surveillance in prison are the last entitlements, while every social
need and priority is hollowed out or eliminated, and the
occupying police forces are brought in to manage the predictable crisis.
So you defund everything else, you leave everybody in destruction alley.
(25:17):
Those folks are desperate, They're not going to just go
down without a fight. They're going to try to survive
by any means necessary, and then you use the police
force to quell those people's rebellions. Because we all know
by not giving people what they need, we are actually
encouraging the crisis exactly we know it, and so I
(25:38):
think part of our work is to constantly bring this
up to people. It's to constantly challenge the status quo.
It's to constantly ask better questions. You write that the
criminal punishment system focuses on individuals who've done harm, while
abolitionists consider the larger social, economic, and political context in
(26:00):
which the harm occurs, and part of the reason for
that is because you just don't want to focus on
that single person who was harmed. You want to eliminate
the harm itself, and you don't believe in the concept
that this person is inherently bad, so there must be
conditions that must be changed. The beauty and gift that
(26:23):
p I c Abolition as a vision and ideology and
a practical organizing strategy gave me was to move me
out of the quote personal responsibility narrative that I had
grown up around, that I had imbibed as someone who
lived in a world that was filled with a bunch
(26:43):
of liberals, where everything was about individual rights and individuals
and people and choices. But I was living in New
York City growing up in the seventies and eighties, seeing
the actual destruction that was being wrought by policies that
my friends had no role in creating. But they were
getting swept up into rikers, they were dying of aids.
(27:06):
There was all this stuff going on that had no
thing to do with their personal responsibility, but had everything
to do with the fact that policies could have actually
made a difference in their lives kept them alive. Given
them what they needed to survive. And if this pandemic
we've all gone through has not made that crystal clear
to you as a human being in this country, that
(27:28):
policy has a huge impact on whether or not you
can thrive and survive, then I don't know what it's
going to take to shift your consciousness. The fact that
the government opened up the coffers and just throw money
at a bunch of businesses, that it just said, okay,
we're going to make the vaccine free, that it could
add money to your unemployment so that you could actually
(27:51):
make a living wage. The fact that all of that
could be done on a dime, like the spicket could
be opened that way. Should that not tell you something
about the difference between focusing on the individual for everything
and making a systemic choice to support people with the
resources they need to be able to live. It made another,
which is case for us in some ways right it
(28:11):
was curtailed. There were contestations. One of the reasons the
right wing was so freaked out and wanting to throw
aside the masks and force everybody back to work is
because they know what I just told you is true.
Exactly when the right started pushing for the right and
the freedom to open back up. I ended up writing
(28:35):
this piece in The Atlantic that basically argued that we're
still in a slaveholder's republic. And what I argued was
that the slaveholder, the individual, wanted the freedom to enslave.
There's no difference between that and the individual saying I
should have the freedom to infect people, I should have
(28:56):
the freedom to kill and exploit and harass and terrorize
and enslave people had a different philosophy Instead of the
individual too, it was the community from So how do
we as a community gained freedom from slavery, from oppression, or,
in the case of the coronavirus, from infection. I think
(29:16):
we have to stop claiming innocence and ignorance about things
we deeply within ourselves know. Why do we want to
send people who we despise to jail? You don't send
people that you like to places that are horrors and
torture chambers. One thing I do want to point out
(29:38):
about the analogy of enslavement. Enslaved people were abolitionists. They'd
already figured out that it was immoral, unjust, and wrong
to keep other people in bondage. How did they know
that they didn't have schooling. You'd think George Washington, with
all his erdiction, did not know that enslavement was wrong.
(29:59):
Of course, he knew it was wrong, because he wouldn't
trade places with own a judge his slave. That means
he knew what she was dealing with in terms of
her capture, enclosure, violence, all of that stuff. They knew.
And the same thing is true today. We know what
the PC is doing to people. Stop pretending you don't
know about the violence of policing and the violence of prisons.
(30:23):
You know that basically, when we send people to prison,
we're sentencing them to judicial rate. You're aware of that
enough at twelve years old to make jokes about people
getting locked up and getting raped. People know. People know,
and we can't pretend constantly to be surprised and to
(30:43):
say reform is the answer when you know it hasn't
done that. One of the most difficult aspects to me
of thinking as an abolitionist, in acting and pushing and
challenging is one is overcoming the punishment mindset. Oh, overcoming
(31:03):
this mindset when somebody harms you or harms someone you
love us. Yeah, some people just want revenge, and that's
why they do send people to prisons knowing it's horrible,
and so how do we overcome this punishment mindset which
you write about is in many ways at the core
of the criminal punishment system. Obviously, absolutely, I don't know
(31:29):
is the answer. It's the honest answer, and it has
been the work of a lifetime for me to try
to figure out how to do that with people, including myself.
One of the things about punishment that I think we
have a hard time talking about publicly is that punishment
is seductive because it actually gives some kind of pleasure
(31:51):
to the person enacting the punishing. It also gives a
sense of satisfaction because you did something back to the
people who hurt you. That's real. That's a real, visceral
feeling that we get, and that's really hard to give up.
The other thing about punishment is that it's easy. Punishment
(32:12):
is something that you enact and the person that you're
punishing doesn't have to do anything. They're just passive. They're
receiving whatever your punishment is. Accountability is something totally different,
because you can't actually hold anybody accountable. You can only
hold space for people to take accountability. It's an active thing.
So it's much harder than punishment because it means that
(32:34):
people have to figure out deciding that what they did
was wrong, deciding that they want to make it right,
and then acting on that. That's freaking hard. Punishment it's
so easy, right, you don't have to do any of that,
So how do you compete with that? Are you trying
to say, we'll all loki sociopaths and we want I don't, No,
(32:56):
I'm discussing if I think it's societally legitimated. Yeah, right, Like,
this is how we're supposed to handle things. This is
how the world is. It's naturalized. I've been trying to
work it through and think it through now for you know,
twenty years, and I still am constantly struggling and struggling
(33:17):
within my own self. When harm occurs to people I
love or myself, I have to consciously stop myself and
be like, Okay, Mariam, it's okay to feel your feelings
and you don't get to act on them. It seems
to me, when we're harmed, another feeling we have is
(33:38):
we want that person to acknowledge that they harmed us,
and we want that person to not harm anyone else again.
It also seems this criminal punishment system has failed completely
in getting people to acknowledge its systematically is not set
up to do that. But transformative justice, what you've advocated for,
(34:03):
is a replacement community process which prioritizes hearing repair or
an accountability, is indeed set up to do that. Yeah,
I love to think with people about transformative justice. I
want to say really importantly and clearly to folks that
(34:23):
I don't see transformative justice as the alternative to prisons, policing,
and surveillance, because I don't think we can have one
alternative to policing, prisons, and surveillance. These institutions exist in
this monolithic way, and there are so many different kinds
of harms, and that's part of why we are in
the mess we're end today. But a lot of abolitionists
(34:47):
have other ideas about the frameworks and politics that they
embrace in their work. Abolitionists have different politics. All the
different kinds of political frameworks that people have for making
sense of the world exist within abolitionist thought and framing.
One way that I have tried over the years to
(35:08):
help people who have caused harm to try to figure
out a way to acknowledge that they did it, try
to figure out a way to repair harm to the
extent that it can be repaired. It's never going to
be erased, and then to figure out ways to try
not to do it again. But we're all human people
are always going to fall back. We have to give
(35:29):
ourselves some grace and give each other more grace around that,
and understand that that's not a failure, that's life and
we have to be okay with that. You had a
piece that really laid out the quote reforms people should
oppose and support, while also stating that you don't know
anybody who's an abolitionist who does it support some reforms,
(35:52):
It depends on the type of reform. I want to
just quickly go through some of these to give people
a very concrete way of understanding what they could be
opposing and what they could be supporting. Specifically about policing,
and so you asked the question, is the reform allocating
more money to the police. Is the reform advocating for
(36:13):
more police? Is the reform technology focused or is the
reform about individual dialogues with individual cops? And you say,
if it is, then you should oppose it. Yeah. Why,
our job is to think about whether we are trying
to enhance freedom or enhance policing, and these questions help
(36:33):
us to figure out whether we're in the right track.
If you're giving more money to police and policing, it
means that you're actually increasing the legitimacy of the institution
and that you're helping the institution continue to exist and grow.
You definitely would not want to be doing that as
an abolitionist. We're trying to shrink the power of the institution.
(36:56):
The question that we have about engaging in one on
one dialogue with cops well goes back to my point
about your uncle Johnny not being the problem. Do you
know what I mean. We are not trying to make
it so that the cops will be nicer to young
black men. We want the power of policing diminished so
(37:16):
that that power doesn't crush those young people. Many years ago,
I was taught a lesson by a young person who
I was working with. He was navigating a case. He
was a young sixteen year old, and I started talking
with him about this idea that our organization was going
to facilitate these talking circles between cops in the community
(37:39):
and the young people in the community because we wanted
to preempt what always happened in the summer, which was
our young people being highly harassed, told to get off
the street, corners arrested for no reason. So in our
mind at the time, it was like, well, if the
cops knew these kids in a different kind of way,
then perhaps they would have a different sense of empathy
(38:00):
and be able to work different And this young man
said to me, Miss Kaba, the problem isn't that these
cops don't know us, or that we don't know them.
The problem is they know us too well and have
all the power to crush us. And I was like,
what was I thinking? This is me talking about this
(38:22):
young person sitting in a circle with Officer Johnny and
thinking that that was going to make a real difference
in getting targeted on a daily basis by this cop.
The cop in fact, does know his name, has arrested
him many times, harassed him, beating his door down. This
it already happened, and the cops still had all the
power to do that after that conversation. So that's an
(38:44):
example of why that wouldn't be a reform you should
be supporting in any logical way. The technology is like
in twenty fourteen, I and others kept screaming body cameras
are not the answer to this. Giving more and more
technologies to the cops so that now we can see
them killing people is not going to fundamentally shift the
(39:05):
power that police have to kill people truly, of dollars
more being put into that institution, legitimizing it further, and
still being in a position where people are still dying
at a thousand people a year for the last two decades.
In the interim, on our way to creating a different
type of society, you say, the reforms we should support.
(39:27):
Our proposals and laws that offer reparations to victims of
police violence and their families, Proposals and laws that decrease
and redirect policing in prison funds to other social goods.
We talked about education, healthcare, and laws and proposals for
elected independent civilian police accountability boards with the power which
(39:51):
is a keyword to investigate, discipline, fire police officers and
administrators with some caveats, proposals and laws to disarm the police,
to simplify the process of dissolving existing police departments, like
what I understands happening in Ithaca, New York. Laws for
data trains insparency, so we know the data on who's
(40:11):
being stopped, who's being arrested, the budgets, the weaponry that
police officers have. So your thoughts on those things that
people should consider supporting in their local communities. Yeah, I
believe that people have to have things to do. I
don't believe that we can just tell people everything's terrible,
everything's bad, and then not offer ways that people can
(40:33):
be involved in transforming their conditions so that things change.
So it's a good thing to know which cops in
particular communities have had nineteen complaints against them, because the
next time there's some complaint and people are like, oh, look,
officer Johnny has nineteen million complaints against them. Not shocking
that they would end up shooting and killing all these
(40:54):
other people, right, But before it gets to that point,
what are the mechanisms to get rid of officer Johnny
with nineteen million complaints? You can use data to support
changing certain things that will make a material difference in
people's lives and perhaps say lives. So these are the
kind of things that I think people can be pushing
in a policy way in their local communities. After all,
(41:16):
the criminal punishment system really operates at the state and
municipal levels. Federal stuff is there, but it's not the
main driver of what is going on. I know that
despite the scale of American policing and surveillance and prisons,
despite the number of people who whenever they see a
(41:37):
black face, they see danger, despite how much we've defunded
schools and social service nets, despite three people per day
who are dying from the police. You talk about hope
as a discipline that we have to practice every single day.
Can you speak to what you mean by a discipline? Yeah.
(42:01):
For me, the discipline of hope is choosing on a
daily basis to look at the situations that are in
one of us, confront them realistically, not in a pretend
kind of way, and still say yes, I'm still going
to choose to struggle. But I also want to say
something that I hope people really think about as well.
(42:23):
Elizabeth Alexander said years ago. Bad things proliferate in different ways,
but that's not all the news. Every single day, I'm
amazed at what people do for each other and with
each other despite the most difficult, horrific circumstances. Back to
(42:45):
our pandemic life. What we saw was horrible, rapacious greed
alongside beautiful mutual aid projects that people created on the
fly to save each other's lives. And I can choose
to look at the depressing, greedy vultures, or I could
(43:07):
choose to focus on the mutual aid of ordinary, regular
people who kept each other alive to the extent that
they could under such repressive and difficult circumstances. And I
choose to look at that other side. I choose to
put my energy and my hope as a discipline in
all the other people who are doing all these incredible
(43:30):
things to sustain life. That's where that comes from me.
And I'm lucky because I've had such great teachers in
life who make me understand that struggle is critical to living.
Struggle as a way to work with others to make
(43:51):
more joy and to make life worth living. That's how
I see that, and I could not be more grounded
in reality. And that's why I'm committed to struggle, and
that's why I'm committed to hoping as a discipline. Well,
I share the same perspective of Indeed, I decided very
(44:11):
consciously to move to Boston because I wanted to walk
the same streets of people like Mariah Stewart and David
Walker who imagined that we could build a nation without
the terror of chattel slavery, and people thought they were crazy.
People thought they were out of their mind. Yeah, but
(44:32):
they were like, no, I'm not crazy. Slavery is crazy.
I'm you know, we're not crazy exactly like we know,
we exactly experienced this, we know what is going on here.
And I love the fact that you said that you
wanted to go to walk in the spaces where they walked,
because I think there's something about embodiment here that people
(44:55):
really don't pay that much attention to walking the streets
that people who came before us walked, and that they
were there understanding without any evidence at all that things
were going to be different. In fact, all evidence in
front of them pointed to the fact that these systems
were entrenched, intractable, and probably inevitable. Yes, and yet in
(45:19):
the midst of that, they were like, Nope, not happening.
In the midst of it, I see fragments of different
possibilities today, and I believe that people I don't know
my grandchildren's grandchildren's life is going to be different than mine.
I'm going to fight for it, and I'm going to
refuse to take people's supposed realistic solutions as the only
(45:42):
way to be able to make that happen. I love it.
Mariam Kabba. Thank you for your commitment to struggle, your
discipline to hope. It was a pleasure to be able
to sit down and talk with you and learn from you.
Thank you so much for your work, Thank you for
having me, and thank you for your work. Of course,
(46:09):
Miriam Kabba's term the criminal punishment system has really stuck
with me. It highlights just how much punishment is at
the center of the quote unquote criminal justice system, and
as Kaba said, punishment is the easy but harmful response
to violence. There's disinformation circulating that to be anti racist
(46:32):
is to ignore crime, or what Kaba aptly terms harm,
that those anti racist abolitionists calling for alternatives to prisons
and police somehow don't care about the rising homicide rates.
Nothing could be further from the truth. We are not
ignoring crime, we just have a different perspective on the
(46:55):
origins of harm. Think about it this way, are not
the people searching for and striving to eliminate the roots
of harm and violence. The very people most committed to
safe communities are not the people ignoring the roots of
harm and violence, the very people allowing for its continuation.
(47:16):
Many people desire all these heavily armed police and prisons
to contain all these evil and bad people. But what
if there's no such thing as bad people? What if
there are people who do bad things? And what if
people are more likely to do bad things under durests
and in despair. What if we dramatically reduced societal durests
(47:38):
and despair by investing in communities and institutions. And what
if when people still caused harm and violence, we figured
out a way to respond that doesn't cause more violence
and harror to quote Kaba, to my mind, the people
working to address the root causes of violence are actually
(47:59):
the hardest on violence. Proponents of the criminal punishment system
are not hard on crime. They're hard on people they
deem criminals, and criminals in their mind are black. They're
hard on thirteen year olds like me in nineteen ninety five,
calling me a super predator when racism keeps praying on
(48:21):
my life and livelihood, but imagining anew with abolitionist organizers
like Miriam Kaba fills me with hope. Hope for a
future that's focused on dangerous conditions rather than dangerous people's.
Hope for a future prioritizing community investment and restorative justice
(48:43):
over punishment and condemnation. Hope for a future in which
crimes of desperation lead forcefully to accountability and a remedy.
Hope for a safe future. But to get there, we
must be anti racist. Were Anti Racist is a production
(49:09):
in the Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia. It is written and
hosted by doctor Ebram x Kindy and produced by Alexandra Garratton,
but associate producer Britney Brown. Our engineer has been Talliday,
Our editors Julia Barton and our show runner Sasha Mathias.
Our executive producers all the time, Wilad and Me and Lobell.
Many thanks to Tammy Win and doctor Heather Sandford at
the Center for Anti Racist Research at Boston University for
(49:30):
all of the help at Pushkin. Thanks to Heather Fame,
Carly mcgliori, John Schnarz, and Jacob Wiseberg. You can find
doctor Kendy on Twitter at d r Ebrahm and on
Instagram at ebram XK. You can find Pushkin on all
social platforms at Pushkin pods, and you can sign up
our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. Find more Pushkin podcast
listen on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
(49:53):
wherever you like to listen
Pushkin abolition is not just about a reaction to the
prison industrial complex. We want to make sure that these
(00:35):
institutions are not normalized facets of our society anymore. That's
the work. In nineteen ninety five, political scientist John Deulio
predicted that a wave of adolescent superpredators would soon corrupt
our streets and fill American prisons. A superpredator is a
(00:59):
young juvenile criminal who is so impulsive, so remorseless, that
he can kill, rape, name without a giving it a
second thought. Diulio wrote that on the horizon are tens
of thousands of severely morally impoverished juvenile super predators. They
(01:20):
are perfectly capable of committing the most heinous acts of
physical violence for the most trivial reason. They fear neither
the stigma of arrest nor the pain of imprisonment. They
live by the meanest code of the meanest streets. He wrote,
nothing else matters to them, so for as long as
their youthful energies hold out, they will do what comes naturally. Murder, rape,
(01:46):
rob assault, burglarized, deal deadly drugs, and get high. Diulio
was not talking about adults. He was talking about teams
middle schoolers more than high schoolers. He was talking about
people like me. I was thirteen years old in nineteen
(02:07):
ninety five. Was I a superpredator or was I fearing
the superpredator? I'm Abramax Kendy, and this is be anti racist.
Being a black man in America isn't easy. The hunt
(02:33):
is on and you're the prey. Menace to society came
out in nineteen ninety three, and by the time the
nineteen ninety four crime Bill was passed, crime rates had
already started falling. We together are taking a big step
(02:54):
toward bringing the laws of our land back in the
line with the values of our people and beginning to
restore the line between right and wrong. Today, pundits and
politicians talk about a wave or a violent crime wave
in American cities, but many crimes, from larcenese to robberies
(03:17):
to rape dropped during the pandemic and continued to fall
in twenty twenty one. Only homicides have increased as other
crimes fell. But the increase in homicides beginning in twenty
twenty happened across cities and towns of all sizes, from
small towns with fewer than ten thousand residents to cities
(03:39):
with more than one million. Diulio later recanted his own
thesis that superpredators who looked like me were going to
overrun this nation with crime. The superpreditor idea was wrong
once it was out there. Though it was out there,
there was no realing it. In the old racist caricature,
(04:01):
preyed on black people as dangerous animals. In the racist imaginary,
the root cause of crime and in black neighborhoods is
the blackness of the people. To be black, in this
view is to be an animal, and the way to
control those animals is with the surveilling, policing, profiling, arresting,
(04:22):
and punishing power of the state. Our state, the United States,
has the largest incarcerated population in the world, and only
the US and Chinese militaries cost more than American policing.
For a long time, in this country, the preyed upon
have been considered dangerous. Indigenous people were considered dangerous, not
(04:46):
the settlers and armies waging landstealing wars and massacres. My
enslaved ancestors were considered dangerous, not the enslavers subjugating them
through violence. Immigrants have been considered dangerous, Not the nativists
harassing and attacking and exploiting them. Teens playing with toy
(05:06):
guns or walking home from the store snacking on skittles
have been considered dangerous, not the cops and want to
be cops who murdered them. Black communities are considered dangerous,
not the communities of politicians depriving those areas of resources
and opportunities. Not the gangster capital exploiting those communities, Not
(05:29):
the police officers brutalizing Black people like we are predators.
When will the American people redirect their fear. Welcome to
Be Anti Racist an action podcast where we discuss how
to diagnose, dismantle, and abolish racism, how to save humanity
(05:50):
from the divisiveness of racist ideas and the destructiveness of
racist power and policy, How to free humanity through the
unity of anti racist ideas and the constructiveness of anti
racist power and policy. On Be Anti Racist, we discuss
how to make them possible, possible, and how to bring
(06:11):
into being what modern humans have never known, a just
and equitable world. You ready, let's roll. The criminal legal
(06:35):
system focuses on individuals who have done harm, while abolitionists
consider the larger social economic and political context in which
the harm occurs. These are the words of one of
America's most influential abolitionist, Miriam Kaba. She is the founder
of Project Nia, an organization that aims to end the
(06:58):
incarceration of children and young adults by promoting restorative and
transformative justice practices. She is the author of the New
York Times bestseller We Do Till We Free US Abolitionists
Organizing and Transforming justice. If you want to understand the
perspective of those Americans calling for the defunding and abolishing
(07:20):
of the police, I encourage you to read this book.
While other Americans are committed to feeling secure, Kaba is
committed to being safe. We discussed why she doesn't believe
a society of mass surveillance, policing, punishment, incarceration will ever
allow us to build a safe society, and what will.
(07:45):
I've been looking forward to our conversation for quite some time.
I admire your work, and of course you've been in
this struggle for years. Well, thanks for inviting me to
be part of this conversation. I appreciate your work, so
it's a pleasure. What's fascinating about your work is your
precise and critical attention to terminology, and I share that,
(08:11):
so I'm always trying to be quite precise in the
words that I use and the definitions that I utilize.
So to give an example, you don't use the term
criminal justice system. Why, Yeah, I started using the term
criminal punishment system. I don't know, probably about fifteen years ago.
(08:36):
The term really for me was important because it is
what the system actually is. It is what the system
actually does. Why do we incarceerate people? We've heard that
it is deterrence. All people who believe in empirical science
(08:56):
tell us that actually, incarceration doesn't deter anybody from anything.
There's a lot of euphemistic talk, in particular as it
relates to issues of incarceration and issues of policing. It's
actually really very intentional in many ways, because when you
obscure the actual material impacts of institutions, you really can
(09:19):
do anything to people. You can justify anything. We have
been told that incarceration is for quote rehabilitation. Well, we
know for a fact that incarceration is criminogenic, which means
that people who actually enter the first time are more
likely to enter over and over and over again than
(09:42):
they are to quote. Get well, if you hear stories
of people who say prison really saved my life, those
are very much exceptions. And when you ask those people, okay, well,
what else could have saved your life, you know, prior
to ending up behind bars, they will tell you a
million different things that could have actually prevented them from
(10:02):
getting in the first place. And if you gave them
a choice between using that versus going to prison, they
always will tell you the preventative stuff would have been
much better. People are much more comfortable using words that
don't implicate them in the harms that are occurring under
our name and with our money and with our support,
(10:23):
whether it's public opinion support, whether it's our silence, which
is tacit support. So I started using the term criminal
punishment system for that purpose. You use the term cage
regularly people being cage. And let me just tell you,
I went to graduate school at Temple and so I
(10:43):
spent a lot of my years in North Philadelphia. I
would hit up this barbershop close to my house. There's
a working class, working poor area in North Philly, and
I never forget waiting for my haircut. Dude was taken
forever and the brother in the chair. The barber of
course asked him, oh, you know, what's been good with you?
(11:04):
How have you been doing? And he said, I just
got out of boundage. I just got out of my cage.
Until did use of that term cage? Why that term? Well,
actually that I got from incarcerated friends, and I got
from comrades on the inside. It's not something I invented.
When I started writing to incarcerated people, like twenty five
(11:25):
years ago, they would talk about being in a cage.
It was a politicized term they created to convey what
they wanted me to understand about enclosure and about capture
and about dehumanization that was occurring for them on a
regular basis. So I just have gone with what the
(11:48):
people I'm in community and relationship with have told me
about their own experience, using their own language. The people
who are locked up are constantly fighting against their dehumanization
by reclaiming and insisting on their humanity. It's a description
that feels apt, at least to the people that I
(12:09):
know and care about. Another term, of course, is the
term abolitionist. And so if you could just shared what
it means to you, I've always tried to define abolition
as a vision of a restructured society and world, a
world where we have everything we need to live dignified vives,
(12:29):
food and shelter and education and health and beauty and
art and clean water and everything else. Abolition is not
just about a reaction to the prison industrial complex, so
that's a central aspect of it. It's really a commitment
to making the conditions that would lead to people feeling
(12:53):
those institutions are necessary impossible. That's the work. We want
to make sure that these institutions are not normalized facets
of our society anymore, at least for me. That's prison
industrial complex abolition. It pushes us to break with the
current order. It pushes us to say not this, while
(13:13):
simultaneously forging new ground and building a different world. I'm
a PC abolitionist in its simplest terms because I want
to dismantle a system that is predicated on premature death
and as doctor Ruth Wilson Gilmour teaches us on organized abandonment,
(13:35):
and I want instead to build one that is focused
on life and true safety at bottom at its crux.
That's why I'm a prison industrial complex abolitionist. What I
have found in my conversations with people trying to get
them to imagine that different type of world is. They
(13:59):
get caught up typically in a term that you also
don't use, and that's the term bad people. And it
reminds me of teaching and Jula Davis is our prisons
absolute in a graduate course, and everybody was okay with
people who commit drug crimes and your non violent offenses.
(14:20):
But then when it was like, oh, what are we
going to do with the bad people, meaning the serial
rapists and killers? That that's where everyone got hung up.
What are we going to do with them if we
don't have prisons and police and mass surveillance. How do
you typically respond to that? Always say, tell me a
little bit about what it is that you're concerned about.
(14:42):
I'm not going to engage you in a conversation about
the quote unquote bad people. I think there are people
who do bad things. That's my inclination. As somebody who
is steeped in the ideas of transformative justice. I get that,
but I try not to spend all my time getting
caught up in people's law and order vision, like television
(15:04):
vision of the serial rapists in the bushes. So I'll
lost people like, are you asking me how you're going
to keep yourself safe? Is that the question? And they
might say, well, yeah, I guess, And I'll say, well,
how are you doing that now? In this world that
we have, where there are prisons and policing and surveillance
and billions and billions of dollars afforded to those institutions,
(15:28):
How do you keep yourself safe today? How often do
you rely on the criminal punishment system? Within that conceptualization,
right like have you called the cops in the last year,
the last five years, the last ten when you've been harmed?
Have any of the people who've harmed you ended up
behind bars? The questions actually help people to pinpoint what
(15:50):
it is they're fearful about and work on that. Let's
figure out how to create the spaces and the institutions
and what it is we need to feel safe in
our communities. That is at the bottom of what abolitionists
care about. We care about harm, which is why we
(16:11):
purposely don't use the term crime because a lot of
things that are criminal are not harmful to many other people,
and a lot of things that are harmful are not criminalized.
So what are we really talking about here, we're talking
about harm, and once that becomes clear to people, people
are much more open to hearing out ideas for other
ways of thinking about how we make safety for ourselves
(16:35):
and for our communities. As we're making a different world,
we will come to other answers for how we handle
various kinds of things. The answers provided now don't work
and don't actually do what it is that people say
they want to have done. Yeah, and that can be
proven empirically. Yeah, so let's do something else. You also
(16:56):
talk about that people have been indoctrinated by the idea
that these institutions are holding that harm at bay, or
that we solve problems of harm through these institutions. Right.
You wrote that the hegemony of the police is so
complete that we often can't begin to imagine a world
(17:18):
without the institution. It is actually the case in my
experience that people are more likely to be able to
imagine a world without prisons than they are a world
without police and policing. There are lots of reasons for that.
As you were growing up, when did you first come
to consciousness about the existence of a police officer? Probably
(17:39):
what eight or nine years old? Yeah, so eight or nine,
and I would push even further and say, you probably
played games like Cops and Robbers when you were even smaller, probably,
and you probably had some sort of toys that also
spoke to the issue of cops. The cops are literally,
(18:00):
for us in the United States and now around the world,
like the weather. They are so part of our day
existence that often we don't even think about them, and
you don't question, You just don't. You just don't question
that they should exist. For many people, their lives are
(18:20):
structured in a way where the cops only exist when
they are called, hardly ever seen in the landscape of
their communities, never in their schools. And they are able
to live that way because the cops are enforcing violence
on all these other communities. They are surveilling all these
other communities, they are quote policing all these other communities.
(18:43):
It comes from a socialization that is so deeply rooted
within our culture so as to not even allow us
to be able to think outside of it. The television
shows and the billboards when you're driving sometime long distance.
Look at how many advertisements in billboards speak to policing
(19:06):
in some way. It's a miracle frankly, if some of
us come to consciousness and we begin to question their
existence and we begin to say, why does it have
to be this way? Actually? And then there's a personalization.
My uncle Johnny's a good cop, right, like, I'm not
talking about your uncle Johnny. Police and policing. Yes, So
(19:27):
I think that that's really where all these things live,
in real ways that have impacts on our ability to
actually be able to even conceptualize a different way. And
anything you offer that would be a different way gets
interpreted through the lens of a very personalized affront to
your belief system. Or there's just no other option. This
(19:51):
is all inevitable. It's always been this way. And I
love the quote by David Graber. We made the world
and we can just as easily make it different. It's
a terrible paraphrase of his words, but that was something
that gave me so much power and an ability to
be like, well, yes, the world is organized this way
because we've organized it this way. It doesn't have to
(20:13):
be exactly. Of course, different things can happen. They've always happened.
I'm Mariam Tava and you're listening to be anti racist
with Debram X can. I think the indoctrination has created
(20:37):
this simple formula that when you have less police in prisons,
there's more quote unquote crime, and correct me if I'm wrong,
But what you're ultimately stating is that when you have
more police in prisons, you're actually going to have more harm.
(21:00):
To me, that's true on its face, because they are
inherently violent institutions that cause harm. They don't just exist
in a neutral capacity. They're in the way, right. So
that's one thing. But I think the second thing I
want to push back on that the Academy and the
researchers and all these crime industrial complex folks have conflated
(21:22):
things that I'm not sure go together. So, for example,
I constantly get told prisons have an impact on quote
crime rates, and I always have to ask, which crimes
are you talking about? Supposedly, how do you empirically know
this to be true? The Academy of Sciences did this
massive literature review of all these experimental and empirical studies
(21:46):
and found that incarceration actually had a very negligible impact
on supposed crime rates. If the relationship you're making between
the prisons and crime it's actually very little, what might
it look like not to have them causing harm in
the communities, we may actually get further because we would
have all these resources that we could appropriate into communities
(22:11):
to actually take care of people's needs, therefore making it
even less likely that people would have to quote turn
to crime to be able to actually sustain a life.
Yet the notion of these institutions being criminal enterprises themselves
that gets pushed aside. Yes, what about the studies that
show how much police contribute to homicide rates. I'm seeing
(22:34):
those They're killing a thousand people a year. Why does
that just get taken out and not treated as part
of this notion. If you say that your issue is
to eradicate violence, I'm actually anti prison, anti policing, and
anti surveillance because I'm anti violence. Yes, And when you
believe that prisons, surveillance, and police are going to reduce
(23:01):
harm and violence, you're going to fund them. Yeah. The
combined cost of US policing is more than not only
every other police force in the world, but every other
military in the world, aside from the Chinese and US military.
And then what are you not going to fund? Right?
And then how will that lack of funding for healthcare
(23:24):
for jobs, for education, for housing, for mental health services,
then lead to harm and violence. It seems to us
to be as clear as day. Why isn't as clear
as day for other people? You know, I think it
is clear as day to many people. But I think
a lot of people just don't want to engage that
because of racism, because of classism, because of all the
(23:47):
forces of oppression that make it so that some people
benefit from having the status quo and others don't. And
to me, if you're doing pretty well in your community,
you don't care how much is being spent on the costs.
You got what you need. Yeah, your kids going to college,
You've got healthcare when you need it. You are in
(24:09):
a position of not wanting to lock the boat to
the point where you might actually lose in your mind.
Some status is that you feel like you actually need
to be able to live the life you want to leave.
And I think we can't get away from the fact
that some people are actually benefiting from the current status quo,
(24:31):
and those people it's in their interests to continue to
paint the rest of us as naive, radical, homicide loving
people because they are comfortable in this current circumstance. They
don't get the vagaries and the tragedies. They don't experience
it in the ways that other people do, and so
(24:53):
it becomes easier to deal with that. I love this
quote by Bill Ayers, which I use all the time. Policing,
surveillance in prison are the last entitlements, while every social
need and priority is hollowed out or eliminated, and the
occupying police forces are brought in to manage the predictable crisis.
So you defund everything else, you leave everybody in destruction alley.
(25:17):
Those folks are desperate, They're not going to just go
down without a fight. They're going to try to survive
by any means necessary, and then you use the police
force to quell those people's rebellions. Because we all know
by not giving people what they need, we are actually
encouraging the crisis exactly we know it, and so I
(25:38):
think part of our work is to constantly bring this
up to people. It's to constantly challenge the status quo.
It's to constantly ask better questions. You write that the
criminal punishment system focuses on individuals who've done harm, while
abolitionists consider the larger social, economic, and political context in
(26:00):
which the harm occurs, and part of the reason for
that is because you just don't want to focus on
that single person who was harmed. You want to eliminate
the harm itself, and you don't believe in the concept
that this person is inherently bad, so there must be
conditions that must be changed. The beauty and gift that
(26:23):
p I c Abolition as a vision and ideology and
a practical organizing strategy gave me was to move me
out of the quote personal responsibility narrative that I had
grown up around, that I had imbibed as someone who
lived in a world that was filled with a bunch
(26:43):
of liberals, where everything was about individual rights and individuals
and people and choices. But I was living in New
York City growing up in the seventies and eighties, seeing
the actual destruction that was being wrought by policies that
my friends had no role in creating. But they were
getting swept up into rikers, they were dying of aids.
(27:06):
There was all this stuff going on that had no
thing to do with their personal responsibility, but had everything
to do with the fact that policies could have actually
made a difference in their lives kept them alive. Given
them what they needed to survive. And if this pandemic
we've all gone through has not made that crystal clear
to you as a human being in this country, that
(27:28):
policy has a huge impact on whether or not you
can thrive and survive, then I don't know what it's
going to take to shift your consciousness. The fact that
the government opened up the coffers and just throw money
at a bunch of businesses, that it just said, okay,
we're going to make the vaccine free, that it could
add money to your unemployment so that you could actually
(27:51):
make a living wage. The fact that all of that
could be done on a dime, like the spicket could
be opened that way. Should that not tell you something
about the difference between focusing on the individual for everything
and making a systemic choice to support people with the
resources they need to be able to live. It made another,
which is case for us in some ways right it
(28:11):
was curtailed. There were contestations. One of the reasons the
right wing was so freaked out and wanting to throw
aside the masks and force everybody back to work is
because they know what I just told you is true.
Exactly when the right started pushing for the right and
the freedom to open back up. I ended up writing
(28:35):
this piece in The Atlantic that basically argued that we're
still in a slaveholder's republic. And what I argued was
that the slaveholder, the individual, wanted the freedom to enslave.
There's no difference between that and the individual saying I
should have the freedom to infect people, I should have
(28:56):
the freedom to kill and exploit and harass and terrorize
and enslave people had a different philosophy Instead of the
individual too, it was the community from So how do
we as a community gained freedom from slavery, from oppression, or,
in the case of the coronavirus, from infection. I think
(29:16):
we have to stop claiming innocence and ignorance about things
we deeply within ourselves know. Why do we want to
send people who we despise to jail? You don't send
people that you like to places that are horrors and
torture chambers. One thing I do want to point out
(29:38):
about the analogy of enslavement. Enslaved people were abolitionists. They'd
already figured out that it was immoral, unjust, and wrong
to keep other people in bondage. How did they know
that they didn't have schooling. You'd think George Washington, with
all his erdiction, did not know that enslavement was wrong.
(29:59):
Of course, he knew it was wrong, because he wouldn't
trade places with own a judge his slave. That means
he knew what she was dealing with in terms of
her capture, enclosure, violence, all of that stuff. They knew.
And the same thing is true today. We know what
the PC is doing to people. Stop pretending you don't
know about the violence of policing and the violence of prisons.
(30:23):
You know that basically, when we send people to prison,
we're sentencing them to judicial rate. You're aware of that
enough at twelve years old to make jokes about people
getting locked up and getting raped. People know. People know,
and we can't pretend constantly to be surprised and to
(30:43):
say reform is the answer when you know it hasn't
done that. One of the most difficult aspects to me
of thinking as an abolitionist, in acting and pushing and
challenging is one is overcoming the punishment mindset. Oh, overcoming
(31:03):
this mindset when somebody harms you or harms someone you
love us. Yeah, some people just want revenge, and that's
why they do send people to prisons knowing it's horrible,
and so how do we overcome this punishment mindset which
you write about is in many ways at the core
of the criminal punishment system. Obviously, absolutely, I don't know
(31:29):
is the answer. It's the honest answer, and it has
been the work of a lifetime for me to try
to figure out how to do that with people, including myself.
One of the things about punishment that I think we
have a hard time talking about publicly is that punishment
is seductive because it actually gives some kind of pleasure
(31:51):
to the person enacting the punishing. It also gives a
sense of satisfaction because you did something back to the
people who hurt you. That's real. That's a real, visceral
feeling that we get, and that's really hard to give up.
The other thing about punishment is that it's easy. Punishment
(32:12):
is something that you enact and the person that you're
punishing doesn't have to do anything. They're just passive. They're
receiving whatever your punishment is. Accountability is something totally different,
because you can't actually hold anybody accountable. You can only
hold space for people to take accountability. It's an active thing.
So it's much harder than punishment because it means that
(32:34):
people have to figure out deciding that what they did
was wrong, deciding that they want to make it right,
and then acting on that. That's freaking hard. Punishment it's
so easy, right, you don't have to do any of that,
So how do you compete with that? Are you trying
to say, we'll all loki sociopaths and we want I don't, No,
(32:56):
I'm discussing if I think it's societally legitimated. Yeah, right, Like,
this is how we're supposed to handle things. This is
how the world is. It's naturalized. I've been trying to
work it through and think it through now for you know,
twenty years, and I still am constantly struggling and struggling
(33:17):
within my own self. When harm occurs to people I
love or myself, I have to consciously stop myself and
be like, Okay, Mariam, it's okay to feel your feelings
and you don't get to act on them. It seems
to me, when we're harmed, another feeling we have is
(33:38):
we want that person to acknowledge that they harmed us,
and we want that person to not harm anyone else again.
It also seems this criminal punishment system has failed completely
in getting people to acknowledge its systematically is not set
up to do that. But transformative justice, what you've advocated for,
(34:03):
is a replacement community process which prioritizes hearing repair or
an accountability, is indeed set up to do that. Yeah,
I love to think with people about transformative justice. I
want to say really importantly and clearly to folks that
(34:23):
I don't see transformative justice as the alternative to prisons, policing,
and surveillance, because I don't think we can have one
alternative to policing, prisons, and surveillance. These institutions exist in
this monolithic way, and there are so many different kinds
of harms, and that's part of why we are in
the mess we're end today. But a lot of abolitionists
(34:47):
have other ideas about the frameworks and politics that they
embrace in their work. Abolitionists have different politics. All the
different kinds of political frameworks that people have for making
sense of the world exist within abolitionist thought and framing.
One way that I have tried over the years to
(35:08):
help people who have caused harm to try to figure
out a way to acknowledge that they did it, try
to figure out a way to repair harm to the
extent that it can be repaired. It's never going to
be erased, and then to figure out ways to try
not to do it again. But we're all human people
are always going to fall back. We have to give
(35:29):
ourselves some grace and give each other more grace around that,
and understand that that's not a failure, that's life and
we have to be okay with that. You had a
piece that really laid out the quote reforms people should
oppose and support, while also stating that you don't know
anybody who's an abolitionist who does it support some reforms,
(35:52):
It depends on the type of reform. I want to
just quickly go through some of these to give people
a very concrete way of understanding what they could be
opposing and what they could be supporting. Specifically about policing,
and so you asked the question, is the reform allocating
more money to the police. Is the reform advocating for
(36:13):
more police? Is the reform technology focused or is the
reform about individual dialogues with individual cops? And you say,
if it is, then you should oppose it. Yeah. Why,
our job is to think about whether we are trying
to enhance freedom or enhance policing, and these questions help
(36:33):
us to figure out whether we're in the right track.
If you're giving more money to police and policing, it
means that you're actually increasing the legitimacy of the institution
and that you're helping the institution continue to exist and grow.
You definitely would not want to be doing that as
an abolitionist. We're trying to shrink the power of the institution.
(36:56):
The question that we have about engaging in one on
one dialogue with cops well goes back to my point
about your uncle Johnny not being the problem. Do you
know what I mean. We are not trying to make
it so that the cops will be nicer to young
black men. We want the power of policing diminished so
(37:16):
that that power doesn't crush those young people. Many years ago,
I was taught a lesson by a young person who
I was working with. He was navigating a case. He
was a young sixteen year old, and I started talking
with him about this idea that our organization was going
to facilitate these talking circles between cops in the community
(37:39):
and the young people in the community because we wanted
to preempt what always happened in the summer, which was
our young people being highly harassed, told to get off
the street, corners arrested for no reason. So in our
mind at the time, it was like, well, if the
cops knew these kids in a different kind of way,
then perhaps they would have a different sense of empathy
(38:00):
and be able to work different And this young man
said to me, Miss Kaba, the problem isn't that these
cops don't know us, or that we don't know them.
The problem is they know us too well and have
all the power to crush us. And I was like,
what was I thinking? This is me talking about this
(38:22):
young person sitting in a circle with Officer Johnny and
thinking that that was going to make a real difference
in getting targeted on a daily basis by this cop.
The cop in fact, does know his name, has arrested
him many times, harassed him, beating his door down. This
it already happened, and the cops still had all the
power to do that after that conversation. So that's an
(38:44):
example of why that wouldn't be a reform you should
be supporting in any logical way. The technology is like
in twenty fourteen, I and others kept screaming body cameras
are not the answer to this. Giving more and more
technologies to the cops so that now we can see
them killing people is not going to fundamentally shift the
(39:05):
power that police have to kill people truly, of dollars
more being put into that institution, legitimizing it further, and
still being in a position where people are still dying
at a thousand people a year for the last two decades.
In the interim, on our way to creating a different
type of society, you say, the reforms we should support.
(39:27):
Our proposals and laws that offer reparations to victims of
police violence and their families, Proposals and laws that decrease
and redirect policing in prison funds to other social goods.
We talked about education, healthcare, and laws and proposals for
elected independent civilian police accountability boards with the power which
(39:51):
is a keyword to investigate, discipline, fire police officers and
administrators with some caveats, proposals and laws to disarm the police,
to simplify the process of dissolving existing police departments, like
what I understands happening in Ithaca, New York. Laws for
data trains insparency, so we know the data on who's
(40:11):
being stopped, who's being arrested, the budgets, the weaponry that
police officers have. So your thoughts on those things that
people should consider supporting in their local communities. Yeah, I
believe that people have to have things to do. I
don't believe that we can just tell people everything's terrible,
everything's bad, and then not offer ways that people can
(40:33):
be involved in transforming their conditions so that things change.
So it's a good thing to know which cops in
particular communities have had nineteen complaints against them, because the
next time there's some complaint and people are like, oh, look,
officer Johnny has nineteen million complaints against them. Not shocking
that they would end up shooting and killing all these
(40:54):
other people, right, But before it gets to that point,
what are the mechanisms to get rid of officer Johnny
with nineteen million complaints? You can use data to support
changing certain things that will make a material difference in
people's lives and perhaps say lives. So these are the
kind of things that I think people can be pushing
in a policy way in their local communities. After all,
(41:16):
the criminal punishment system really operates at the state and
municipal levels. Federal stuff is there, but it's not the
main driver of what is going on. I know that
despite the scale of American policing and surveillance and prisons,
despite the number of people who whenever they see a
(41:37):
black face, they see danger, despite how much we've defunded
schools and social service nets, despite three people per day
who are dying from the police. You talk about hope
as a discipline that we have to practice every single day.
Can you speak to what you mean by a discipline? Yeah.
(42:01):
For me, the discipline of hope is choosing on a
daily basis to look at the situations that are in
one of us, confront them realistically, not in a pretend
kind of way, and still say yes, I'm still going
to choose to struggle. But I also want to say
something that I hope people really think about as well.
(42:23):
Elizabeth Alexander said years ago. Bad things proliferate in different ways,
but that's not all the news. Every single day, I'm
amazed at what people do for each other and with
each other despite the most difficult, horrific circumstances. Back to
(42:45):
our pandemic life. What we saw was horrible, rapacious greed
alongside beautiful mutual aid projects that people created on the
fly to save each other's lives. And I can choose
to look at the depressing, greedy vultures, or I could
(43:07):
choose to focus on the mutual aid of ordinary, regular
people who kept each other alive to the extent that
they could under such repressive and difficult circumstances. And I
choose to look at that other side. I choose to
put my energy and my hope as a discipline in
all the other people who are doing all these incredible
(43:30):
things to sustain life. That's where that comes from me.
And I'm lucky because I've had such great teachers in
life who make me understand that struggle is critical to living.
Struggle as a way to work with others to make
(43:51):
more joy and to make life worth living. That's how
I see that, and I could not be more grounded
in reality. And that's why I'm committed to struggle, and
that's why I'm committed to hoping as a discipline. Well,
I share the same perspective of Indeed, I decided very
(44:11):
consciously to move to Boston because I wanted to walk
the same streets of people like Mariah Stewart and David
Walker who imagined that we could build a nation without
the terror of chattel slavery, and people thought they were crazy.
People thought they were out of their mind. Yeah, but
(44:32):
they were like, no, I'm not crazy. Slavery is crazy.
I'm you know, we're not crazy exactly like we know,
we exactly experienced this, we know what is going on here.
And I love the fact that you said that you
wanted to go to walk in the spaces where they walked,
because I think there's something about embodiment here that people
(44:55):
really don't pay that much attention to walking the streets
that people who came before us walked, and that they
were there understanding without any evidence at all that things
were going to be different. In fact, all evidence in
front of them pointed to the fact that these systems
were entrenched, intractable, and probably inevitable. Yes, and yet in
(45:19):
the midst of that, they were like, Nope, not happening.
In the midst of it, I see fragments of different
possibilities today, and I believe that people I don't know
my grandchildren's grandchildren's life is going to be different than mine.
I'm going to fight for it, and I'm going to
refuse to take people's supposed realistic solutions as the only
(45:42):
way to be able to make that happen. I love it.
Mariam Kabba. Thank you for your commitment to struggle, your
discipline to hope. It was a pleasure to be able
to sit down and talk with you and learn from you.
Thank you so much for your work, Thank you for
having me, and thank you for your work. Of course,
(46:09):
Miriam Kabba's term the criminal punishment system has really stuck
with me. It highlights just how much punishment is at
the center of the quote unquote criminal justice system, and
as Kaba said, punishment is the easy but harmful response
to violence. There's disinformation circulating that to be anti racist
(46:32):
is to ignore crime, or what Kaba aptly terms harm,
that those anti racist abolitionists calling for alternatives to prisons
and police somehow don't care about the rising homicide rates.
Nothing could be further from the truth. We are not
ignoring crime, we just have a different perspective on the
(46:55):
origins of harm. Think about it this way, are not
the people searching for and striving to eliminate the roots
of harm and violence. The very people most committed to
safe communities are not the people ignoring the roots of
harm and violence, the very people allowing for its continuation.
(47:16):
Many people desire all these heavily armed police and prisons
to contain all these evil and bad people. But what
if there's no such thing as bad people? What if
there are people who do bad things? And what if
people are more likely to do bad things under durests
and in despair. What if we dramatically reduced societal durests
(47:38):
and despair by investing in communities and institutions. And what
if when people still caused harm and violence, we figured
out a way to respond that doesn't cause more violence
and harror to quote Kaba, to my mind, the people
working to address the root causes of violence are actually
(47:59):
the hardest on violence. Proponents of the criminal punishment system
are not hard on crime. They're hard on people they
deem criminals, and criminals in their mind are black. They're
hard on thirteen year olds like me in nineteen ninety five,
calling me a super predator when racism keeps praying on
(48:21):
my life and livelihood, but imagining anew with abolitionist organizers
like Miriam Kaba fills me with hope. Hope for a
future that's focused on dangerous conditions rather than dangerous people's.
Hope for a future prioritizing community investment and restorative justice
(48:43):
over punishment and condemnation. Hope for a future in which
crimes of desperation lead forcefully to accountability and a remedy.
Hope for a safe future. But to get there, we
must be anti racist. Were Anti Racist is a production
(49:09):
in the Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia. It is written and
hosted by doctor Ebram x Kindy and produced by Alexandra Garratton,
but associate producer Britney Brown. Our engineer has been Talliday,
Our editors Julia Barton and our show runner Sasha Mathias.
Our executive producers all the time, Wilad and Me and Lobell.
Many thanks to Tammy Win and doctor Heather Sandford at
the Center for Anti Racist Research at Boston University for
(49:30):
all of the help at Pushkin. Thanks to Heather Fame,
Carly mcgliori, John Schnarz, and Jacob Wiseberg. You can find
doctor Kendy on Twitter at d r Ebrahm and on
Instagram at ebram XK. You can find Pushkin on all
social platforms at Pushkin pods, and you can sign up
our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. Find more Pushkin podcast
listen on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
(49:53):
wherever you like to listen
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