"We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice," by Mariame Kaba

This one has been on my list a while — two years, to be exact, since it was published — and I have just now gotten around to reading it after I treated myself to a new paperback copy at Bluestockings (“Fuck Amazon” reads the cooperative bookstore’s placard sign out on the sidewalk, every time I visit).

There are no surprises in this marvelous collection of essays and interviews, most of which are written or spoken, at least in part, by Kaba. Each offering is a juicy hunk of scholarship, organizing strategy, political theory or campaign rally cry. Together, the chapters do not so much offer a roadmap to making change but, rather, a syllabus of educational materials that novices to the issue and seasoned decarceral advocates alike can use for inspiration and to build their own knowledge base.

As I write this, I am sitting on a bench in Prospect Park, the book in my backpack beside me. It’s a blustery September day, about 80 degrees and sunny, and the park is nearly empty. Extraordinarily peaceful here, the only real sounds are the wind tearing through the shimmering leaves, the occasional dingle of a dog leash, the cooing of a baby in the stroller that a woman has parked a few benches away. It’s difficult in places like these to remember that there are tens of thousands of people locked in cages in this city, right now. Or that in school buildings for miles in any direction from where I sit, professional teachers and principals are vigilantly watching teenagers as they twitch in their seats, looking for one good reason to label them bad, eject them, and teach their peers that disobedience is unacceptable, that state authority is absolute. Or that, if I was sitting on a different bench in a different part of the city, I might be looking at a squadron of police standing in pairs against a building, all along the block, comparing each passerby with the fears they’ve faithfully installed into their imaginations. I’m sorry to ruin my own bucolic moment by typing these words.

I wonder what I would have said if someone had uttered “Abolish the police” in my presence when I was younger, say, in high school. I was a wry, insecure yet overconfident kid, rebellious in some ways, especially against my parents, but conformist elsewhere. In school, for example, I sometimes pretended to be the rebel, but all in all I was a rule follower, a high achiever, a teacher-pleaser. I wanted to be liked and I wanted to protect my status.

Abolish the police? I probably would have laughed and made a snide, impertinent remark. I did not think much about the police or about prisons except to say I felt a mild, irrelevant fear toward both. They looked intimidating — I could see unfortunate, painful consequences if I followed my imagination to its farthest projections of delinquency, with which I had no experience whatsoever — but the police also had no interest in me based on how I looked and acted. The most trouble I had ever been in was once, when the metal shop teacher kicked me out of class because I was being disruptive, correctly sensing that I had no respect for his methods of teaching. I got a brief, restrained lecture from the dean of the school, who was also the varsity soccer coach (I was JV), and then I was sent on my way, the disciplinary event a microscopic blemish on my record.

Cops? I could tell they were ridiculous in their superciliousness and their robotic seriousness. I also assumed they were vital to our society in making sure that people like me could keep fucking around with impunity. That is to say, I never questioned police and prisons the way I questioned other institutions, like school and synagogue, because I did not feel controlled or hampered by them. In retrospect, even this insight is dubious. The prison-industrial complex controlled my mind as much as anyone’s.

The easy answer, then, as to why I was not consciously critical of cops is that I benefitted from their existence. I still do, of course. But I have long since changed my tune.