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For the politics book club we decided to read Mariame Kaba’s We Do This Til We Free Us, a collection of articles, essays, and interviews about prison abolition and transformative justice. I had bought this back when it came out and wanted to do more reading about said subjects.
It’s hard for me to separate out my thoughts on the actual merits of the book from all the psychic damage I’ve taken in my years as an organizer. I’m trying to not do the thing where I react to things people didn’t say because it hits a raw spot about shit completely different people did another time, if only because it drives me fucking bananas when other people do that and I don’t want to be part of the problem. But I do end up feeling like it was a bit of an own goal for me to suggest this book, because it is an overall pretty solid book that nevertheless pitched me head-first back into series of emotional rabbit holes that don’t even have the decency to be about, like, prison and police violence and all the really serious stuff that the book is about.
Some of this is because I made the mistake of not just reading the book, but also of reading other people’s reviews of the book, which started off my brain’s usual lamentations about the dysfunctional State of the Discourse. I am 0% here for any criticisms of admonition that “Abolition is not about your fucking feelings” and I am even less than 0% here for any criticisms that rely on fundamentally misunderstanding the word “about” because you’re too deep in your feelings to hear simple words clearly (which I sympathize with, even though I hate it, because I am currently struggling not to be so deep in my feelings that I can’t hear simple words clearly). The thing I find myself wanting to criticize is that I think Kaba was too nice in some of her writings about abolition not being about your fucking feelings, even though given the reaction to what she did say, I cannot actually think it would have gotten through to anyone if she were harsher.
A quick example. When reading the Table of Contents, I saw that one of the essays was titled “The Sentence of Larry Nassar Was Not ‘Transformative Justice.’ Here’s Why.” My first thought was, Did anyone say it was? I know Kaba’s a prolific Twitter user, and people on Twitter will say any batshit thing, but that doesn’t mean you have to respond to them. The dumbest thing I could remember anyone saying on Twitter when Nasser was sentenced was proposing exiling him to Wyoming, as if Wyoming weren’t a real state that still has schools and sports and teenage girls and a general public. More than half a million people live in Wyoming and they don’t deserve Larry Nasser any more than the people of Michigan do.
It turns out that I had stone cold forgotten the actual worst Nasser take, which was published in once-respectable mainstream magazine The Atlantic, where someone actually did try to argue that Nasser’s prison sentence was “transformative justice,” apparently on an understanding that “transformative justice” just means “justice with some syllables tacked on the beginning to signal that I am politically on-trend.” I think my brain blocked this out to protect myself, because since rediscovering this information it has been wallowing in a black pit of despair at the Sisyphean impossibility of keeping political terms tethered anywhere close to their meanings. Anyway, seeing as how this Humpty-Dumptying nonsense was in a headline in the motherfucking Atlantic, Kaba and Kelly Hayes felt this required a rebuttal, and wrote one. Over the course of six pages, they define what “transformative justice” means, outline what a transformative justice approach to sexual assault committed by an authority figure would involve, and reiterate a simple, eloquent, beginner-friendly version of basic abolitionist talking points about how the criminal justice system (which Kaba calls the “criminal punishment system,” because that’s what it actually does) occasionally convicts someone who did bad things, but is never really just.
It was a good piece that set out what it did to do, and did so with grace and patience, acknowledging that people have retributive feelings toward people like Nasser with very good reason. Personally, I hated every word of it, because my retributive feelings were in full swing–toward whoever wrote, greenlit, and edited that stupid piece at the Atlantic. Using language to try to create and communicate meaning, instead of to wantonly destroy it, is one of my big things, and I yearned for the emotional satisfaction of a response like: The sentencing of Larry Nasser wasn’t transformative justice because it was a prison sentence, and prison sentences aren’t transformative justice in approximately the same way they aren’t a wheel of cheese, i.e, because words have definitions. “Transformative justice” isn’t just extra syllables added to the term “justice” and you can’t use the terms completely interchangeably when having a values debate over whether such-and-such a thing constitutes justice. If you think Nasser’s sentencing was justice, fine, you can think that, but it’s still regular-ass criminal justice because it went through the regular-ass criminal justice system and not a transformative justice process. The criminal justice system does not deliver transformative justice any more than it delivers pizza. It delivers prison sentences, which are a different thing. That isn’t a statement of values; it’s a factual claim. Learn what words mean before using them in magazine articles, for the love of Christ.
(This is why Kaba is a well-respected public political educator and I am not.)
Anyway, “abolition is not about your fucking feelings” is one of the best lines in the book, as far as I’m concerned. The other bits that stuck with me the most are ones that I haven’t seen anyone else bring up:
“I think that people are new to these ideas. They’re trying to make sense of them in real-time, and they’re projecting the meanings they want and need onto these ideas… Oftentimes when you encounter something for the first time, it raises so much within you, it makes you grasp for familiar things to explain the thing you may not quite understand.” (p.190)
This quotation, as you can see from the paragraphs above, called me out. I think this is a really astute and compassionate way to explain why people do That Thing That Drives Me Absolutely Bugfuck Insane, why it’s so easy for sensible people to fall into butchering political terminology, why there’s so much talking past each other, why the discourse turns into an unintelligible slurry of radical terminology papered over thoroughly moderate unexamined assumptions. And things like prison abolition and transformative justice are probably particularly susceptible to this because a pretty good chunk of what they mean doesn’t seem like it should be that radical–stuff like “asking ‘how did this happen, and what can we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again?’ instead of fixating on figuring out who is The Bad Guy and making them Sorry” is just considered regular old maturity and problem-solving when encountered in contexts outside criminal law. How much of prison abolitionist theory and organizing is frankly just the basic morally defensible position once you get some of the facts about how the prison and policing systems actually work can easily obfuscate the parts of prison abolition that really are radical and that likely require more faith in humanity’s ability to do difficult things than, quite likely, most of actually have.
I have thoughts on this. I will keep the most uncharitable ones to myself, because Posting Discipline, but let’s just say I combined this thought with her discussion about movements, not individual people, being the timeline on which things happen, and say I have made peace with the notion that it’s more important that the organizations I belong to be principled abolitionist orgs than that I personally be 100% abolitionist. Let’s say I’m 90% abolitionist and I hope the day where I actually get to find out who’s right about that last 10% happens within my lifetime. I would love to get to the point where that last bit about to what degree we can eliminate the idea of “people too dangerous to have around anyone” stops being purely philosophical and becomes an actual thing that we’re working to solve, because right now, it’s academic.
In “Everything Worthwhile Is Done with Other People,” an interview with Eve Ewing in the “Show Up and Don’t Travel Alone” section of the book, we get some really tantalizing tidbits about what I consider the real Hard Questions in an immediate, practical sense. In discussing the recent popularization of these ideas, they mention “the consequence of what happens when people are learning about concepts primarily through–” “Reading.” There are old, old questions about the relationship between theory and praxis that leftists have been wrestling with for the entire history of the left, which I think in our current political moment are exacerbated by the double-edged sword of social media and our current punditocracy culture to obfuscate the differences between political hobbyism, activism, and organizing. One of the critiques leveled at this book is that it’s too vague, not concrete enough, etc., and I’ve been sitting with my of-two-minds reaction to this. In some cases, I did feel like it was too vague, because I’m hypervigilant about people not defining things concretely enough, and have to wrestle with whether I’m holding them to unrealistic standards of idiot-proofing and how that expectation is actually a type of brainworms. On the other hand, I’m also wrestling with the contradictions between 1) I, too, am also reading this book because I want to learn things and 2) I believe that the expectations many readers have about the amount of How To Organize stuff that you should be able to learn from the comfort of your couch without interacting with anyone is unrealistic and frankly a bad idea. To get more case-study type material about transformative justice processes, you gotta do the think Kabe politely (but apparently not politely enough!) tells people to do repeatedly–go organize. Join an organization that is doing organizing work and start doing it with them. Take actual trainings and listen to your comrades and network with other organizers at other organizations about their processes and what you can learn to improve your org’s processes, because if you don’t have an org to have processes for, then what does it matter that you don’t know what a TJ process looks like? You will be neither running nor participating in one. The notion that everything needs to be publicly available in a book, including “real-life examples of handling people’s very personal, messy shit in a specific organizational or community context,” has… some problems! Concrete details are also potentially personally identifying ones, and one of the aspects of the criminal justice system that is frequently cited as one of its indignities is the putting on display of everyone’s personal business for public consumption and judgment. Even with that, Kaba references several useful online toolkits about TJ; this book just isn’t those toolkits. Should it have been? I’m leaning toward “no, it didn’t need to be” even as I also kind of wanted it to be. Also, any kind of short, easily digestible, publicly available resource is going to fundamentally run into the same problem–if it’s just words on a page, nothing and no one is there to stop you from reading it and just deciding it means what you want it to mean.
Anyway, this is the stuff that sticks in my brain the most because Hard Questions About Organizing are already taking up a lot of space in my brain. Most of the book is about things that are frankly more important but also more outside of my experience, since most of my organizing has not been around prison issues so it doesn’t hit me right in the raw spots. I’ve actually been quite lucky, even by white girl standards, that I have avoided police brutality and arrest to the degree that I have, given the organizing I have done. I’ve somehow never even been pepper sprayed. (I am intensely grateful for this.) Black people being attacked by police essentially at random is, objectively, a much bigger problem than another tiresome crank in your DSA chapter trying to convince the HGOs that it’s “oppression” for you to personally dislike them just because they are constantly disruptive, but I also don’t find myself really having as much to say about it besides “That’s real fucked up and we should stop it.” The stopping it doesn’t get done by me having opinions, online or otherwise; I will either put some portion of my personal energy into local anti-police and anti-prison projects when I’m done with my organizing break, or I will put it toward other things. (I will probably go back to antifascist/queer community defense stuff, which overlaps heavily with but is not the same thing as anti-police work. It overlaps much less heavily with anti-prison work in the day-to-day.) Anyway, I’m fully aware that my perspective is warped toward fixating on certain things and that I am in need of psychological healing before I can be a reasonable person about those things.
Overall, We Do This Til We Free Us does a fairly solid job of introducing the reader to key concepts around PIC abolition and TJ, but I don’t know if it can really do what it wants to do to make readers reprioritize what questions they consider important and generally shift their whole approach to these issues–but that’s because that’s a real big ask, and it’s not like she doesn’t pretty explicitly explain why she has the approach she does. Ultimately I think this book was pretty good, it’s just that the state of my brain re: organizing is pretty bad, so it’s on me as a reader that this ultimately pretty hopeful book managed to completely ruin my mood for a week. Discussion should be interesting.
It’s hard for me to separate out my thoughts on the actual merits of the book from all the psychic damage I’ve taken in my years as an organizer. I’m trying to not do the thing where I react to things people didn’t say because it hits a raw spot about shit completely different people did another time, if only because it drives me fucking bananas when other people do that and I don’t want to be part of the problem. But I do end up feeling like it was a bit of an own goal for me to suggest this book, because it is an overall pretty solid book that nevertheless pitched me head-first back into series of emotional rabbit holes that don’t even have the decency to be about, like, prison and police violence and all the really serious stuff that the book is about.
Some of this is because I made the mistake of not just reading the book, but also of reading other people’s reviews of the book, which started off my brain’s usual lamentations about the dysfunctional State of the Discourse. I am 0% here for any criticisms of admonition that “Abolition is not about your fucking feelings” and I am even less than 0% here for any criticisms that rely on fundamentally misunderstanding the word “about” because you’re too deep in your feelings to hear simple words clearly (which I sympathize with, even though I hate it, because I am currently struggling not to be so deep in my feelings that I can’t hear simple words clearly). The thing I find myself wanting to criticize is that I think Kaba was too nice in some of her writings about abolition not being about your fucking feelings, even though given the reaction to what she did say, I cannot actually think it would have gotten through to anyone if she were harsher.
A quick example. When reading the Table of Contents, I saw that one of the essays was titled “The Sentence of Larry Nassar Was Not ‘Transformative Justice.’ Here’s Why.” My first thought was, Did anyone say it was? I know Kaba’s a prolific Twitter user, and people on Twitter will say any batshit thing, but that doesn’t mean you have to respond to them. The dumbest thing I could remember anyone saying on Twitter when Nasser was sentenced was proposing exiling him to Wyoming, as if Wyoming weren’t a real state that still has schools and sports and teenage girls and a general public. More than half a million people live in Wyoming and they don’t deserve Larry Nasser any more than the people of Michigan do.
It turns out that I had stone cold forgotten the actual worst Nasser take, which was published in once-respectable mainstream magazine The Atlantic, where someone actually did try to argue that Nasser’s prison sentence was “transformative justice,” apparently on an understanding that “transformative justice” just means “justice with some syllables tacked on the beginning to signal that I am politically on-trend.” I think my brain blocked this out to protect myself, because since rediscovering this information it has been wallowing in a black pit of despair at the Sisyphean impossibility of keeping political terms tethered anywhere close to their meanings. Anyway, seeing as how this Humpty-Dumptying nonsense was in a headline in the motherfucking Atlantic, Kaba and Kelly Hayes felt this required a rebuttal, and wrote one. Over the course of six pages, they define what “transformative justice” means, outline what a transformative justice approach to sexual assault committed by an authority figure would involve, and reiterate a simple, eloquent, beginner-friendly version of basic abolitionist talking points about how the criminal justice system (which Kaba calls the “criminal punishment system,” because that’s what it actually does) occasionally convicts someone who did bad things, but is never really just.
It was a good piece that set out what it did to do, and did so with grace and patience, acknowledging that people have retributive feelings toward people like Nasser with very good reason. Personally, I hated every word of it, because my retributive feelings were in full swing–toward whoever wrote, greenlit, and edited that stupid piece at the Atlantic. Using language to try to create and communicate meaning, instead of to wantonly destroy it, is one of my big things, and I yearned for the emotional satisfaction of a response like: The sentencing of Larry Nasser wasn’t transformative justice because it was a prison sentence, and prison sentences aren’t transformative justice in approximately the same way they aren’t a wheel of cheese, i.e, because words have definitions. “Transformative justice” isn’t just extra syllables added to the term “justice” and you can’t use the terms completely interchangeably when having a values debate over whether such-and-such a thing constitutes justice. If you think Nasser’s sentencing was justice, fine, you can think that, but it’s still regular-ass criminal justice because it went through the regular-ass criminal justice system and not a transformative justice process. The criminal justice system does not deliver transformative justice any more than it delivers pizza. It delivers prison sentences, which are a different thing. That isn’t a statement of values; it’s a factual claim. Learn what words mean before using them in magazine articles, for the love of Christ.
(This is why Kaba is a well-respected public political educator and I am not.)
Anyway, “abolition is not about your fucking feelings” is one of the best lines in the book, as far as I’m concerned. The other bits that stuck with me the most are ones that I haven’t seen anyone else bring up:
“I think that people are new to these ideas. They’re trying to make sense of them in real-time, and they’re projecting the meanings they want and need onto these ideas… Oftentimes when you encounter something for the first time, it raises so much within you, it makes you grasp for familiar things to explain the thing you may not quite understand.” (p.190)
This quotation, as you can see from the paragraphs above, called me out. I think this is a really astute and compassionate way to explain why people do That Thing That Drives Me Absolutely Bugfuck Insane, why it’s so easy for sensible people to fall into butchering political terminology, why there’s so much talking past each other, why the discourse turns into an unintelligible slurry of radical terminology papered over thoroughly moderate unexamined assumptions. And things like prison abolition and transformative justice are probably particularly susceptible to this because a pretty good chunk of what they mean doesn’t seem like it should be that radical–stuff like “asking ‘how did this happen, and what can we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again?’ instead of fixating on figuring out who is The Bad Guy and making them Sorry” is just considered regular old maturity and problem-solving when encountered in contexts outside criminal law. How much of prison abolitionist theory and organizing is frankly just the basic morally defensible position once you get some of the facts about how the prison and policing systems actually work can easily obfuscate the parts of prison abolition that really are radical and that likely require more faith in humanity’s ability to do difficult things than, quite likely, most of actually have.
“Everyone doesn’t have to be an abolitionist.” (p.190)
I have thoughts on this. I will keep the most uncharitable ones to myself, because Posting Discipline, but let’s just say I combined this thought with her discussion about movements, not individual people, being the timeline on which things happen, and say I have made peace with the notion that it’s more important that the organizations I belong to be principled abolitionist orgs than that I personally be 100% abolitionist. Let’s say I’m 90% abolitionist and I hope the day where I actually get to find out who’s right about that last 10% happens within my lifetime. I would love to get to the point where that last bit about to what degree we can eliminate the idea of “people too dangerous to have around anyone” stops being purely philosophical and becomes an actual thing that we’re working to solve, because right now, it’s academic.
In “Everything Worthwhile Is Done with Other People,” an interview with Eve Ewing in the “Show Up and Don’t Travel Alone” section of the book, we get some really tantalizing tidbits about what I consider the real Hard Questions in an immediate, practical sense. In discussing the recent popularization of these ideas, they mention “the consequence of what happens when people are learning about concepts primarily through–” “Reading.” There are old, old questions about the relationship between theory and praxis that leftists have been wrestling with for the entire history of the left, which I think in our current political moment are exacerbated by the double-edged sword of social media and our current punditocracy culture to obfuscate the differences between political hobbyism, activism, and organizing. One of the critiques leveled at this book is that it’s too vague, not concrete enough, etc., and I’ve been sitting with my of-two-minds reaction to this. In some cases, I did feel like it was too vague, because I’m hypervigilant about people not defining things concretely enough, and have to wrestle with whether I’m holding them to unrealistic standards of idiot-proofing and how that expectation is actually a type of brainworms. On the other hand, I’m also wrestling with the contradictions between 1) I, too, am also reading this book because I want to learn things and 2) I believe that the expectations many readers have about the amount of How To Organize stuff that you should be able to learn from the comfort of your couch without interacting with anyone is unrealistic and frankly a bad idea. To get more case-study type material about transformative justice processes, you gotta do the think Kabe politely (but apparently not politely enough!) tells people to do repeatedly–go organize. Join an organization that is doing organizing work and start doing it with them. Take actual trainings and listen to your comrades and network with other organizers at other organizations about their processes and what you can learn to improve your org’s processes, because if you don’t have an org to have processes for, then what does it matter that you don’t know what a TJ process looks like? You will be neither running nor participating in one. The notion that everything needs to be publicly available in a book, including “real-life examples of handling people’s very personal, messy shit in a specific organizational or community context,” has… some problems! Concrete details are also potentially personally identifying ones, and one of the aspects of the criminal justice system that is frequently cited as one of its indignities is the putting on display of everyone’s personal business for public consumption and judgment. Even with that, Kaba references several useful online toolkits about TJ; this book just isn’t those toolkits. Should it have been? I’m leaning toward “no, it didn’t need to be” even as I also kind of wanted it to be. Also, any kind of short, easily digestible, publicly available resource is going to fundamentally run into the same problem–if it’s just words on a page, nothing and no one is there to stop you from reading it and just deciding it means what you want it to mean.
Anyway, this is the stuff that sticks in my brain the most because Hard Questions About Organizing are already taking up a lot of space in my brain. Most of the book is about things that are frankly more important but also more outside of my experience, since most of my organizing has not been around prison issues so it doesn’t hit me right in the raw spots. I’ve actually been quite lucky, even by white girl standards, that I have avoided police brutality and arrest to the degree that I have, given the organizing I have done. I’ve somehow never even been pepper sprayed. (I am intensely grateful for this.) Black people being attacked by police essentially at random is, objectively, a much bigger problem than another tiresome crank in your DSA chapter trying to convince the HGOs that it’s “oppression” for you to personally dislike them just because they are constantly disruptive, but I also don’t find myself really having as much to say about it besides “That’s real fucked up and we should stop it.” The stopping it doesn’t get done by me having opinions, online or otherwise; I will either put some portion of my personal energy into local anti-police and anti-prison projects when I’m done with my organizing break, or I will put it toward other things. (I will probably go back to antifascist/queer community defense stuff, which overlaps heavily with but is not the same thing as anti-police work. It overlaps much less heavily with anti-prison work in the day-to-day.) Anyway, I’m fully aware that my perspective is warped toward fixating on certain things and that I am in need of psychological healing before I can be a reasonable person about those things.
Overall, We Do This Til We Free Us does a fairly solid job of introducing the reader to key concepts around PIC abolition and TJ, but I don’t know if it can really do what it wants to do to make readers reprioritize what questions they consider important and generally shift their whole approach to these issues–but that’s because that’s a real big ask, and it’s not like she doesn’t pretty explicitly explain why she has the approach she does. Ultimately I think this book was pretty good, it’s just that the state of my brain re: organizing is pretty bad, so it’s on me as a reader that this ultimately pretty hopeful book managed to completely ruin my mood for a week. Discussion should be interesting.