We Do This 'Til We Free Us
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Description
A reflection on prison industrial complex abolition and a vision for collective liberation from organizer and educator Mariame Kaba.
Product Details
| Publisher | Haymarket Books |
| Publish Date | February 23, 2021 |
| Pages | 240 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781642595253 |
| Dimensions | 8.4 X 5.5 X 0.6 inches | 0.7 pounds |
About the Author
Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame is currently a researcher at Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. Mariame has co-founded multiple other organizations and projects over the years including We Charge Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, Love & Protect, the Just Practice Collaborative and Survived & Punished. Mariame serves on the advisory boards of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Critical Resistance and the Chicago Community Bond Fund. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Nation Magazine, The Guardian, The Washington Post, In These Times, Teen Vogue, The New Inquiry and more. She co-authored the guidebook Lifting As They Climbed and published a children's book titled Missing Daddy about the impacts of incarceration on children and families. Kaba is the recipient of the Cultural Freedom Prize from Lannan Foundation.
Tamara K. Nopper is a sociologist, writer, editor, and data artist whose research focuses on the racial and gender wealth gap, financialization, criminalization, punishment, and the social impact of technology, with a particular emphasis on alternative data and credit scoring. A Fellow at Data for Progress and an Affiliate of The Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies, Nopper's scholarship and writing have appeared in numerous academic publications as well as in The New Inquiry, Jacobin, Truthout, and Verso Books Blog. She researched and wrote several data stories for Colin Kaepernick's Abolition for the People series.
Naomi Murakawa is an associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She studies the reproduction of racial inequality in 20th and 21st century American politics, with specialization in crime policy and the carceral state. She is the author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. She is the editor of the Abolitionist Papers book series at Haymarket Books.
Reviews
"Mariame Kaba is a humble phenom in the most important of traditions - abolition. What we have in these pages is a wide ranging account of abolitionist theory in action - and that is no easy feat. Through Kaba's rigorous commitment to humanity, we are reminded that another future is possible. We are fortunate that Kaba's praxis is accounted for in this compelling and incisive text. For those of us who are eager to bring about a world where Black lives matter, this is required reading."-- Opal Tometi, Co-Founder #BlackLivesMatter and founder Diaspora Rising
"I want to say this is a 'generation-defining' book, but that feels wrong because I know it will be shaping political imaginations for a century or more. It's generations-defining. This is a classic in the vein of Sister Outsider, a book that will spark countless radical imaginations." -- Eve L. Ewing, author, 1919
"Mariame Kaba's clarity, firm-but-gentle guidance, embracing spirit, deep creativity, and love of laughter, demonstrate how abolition is, in deed, presence. Thank goodness for this urgent book." --Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author, Change Everything
"One of the most fascinating developments during this age of Black Lives Matter is how 'abolition' has been integrated into mainstream debates on how to change the United States. Yet there is still so much not known or understood about the history, politics and practice of abolition-informed politics. Longtime organizer and educator, Mariame Kaba, is one of the most important voices in the emergent abolitionist movement. We have all been waiting on this book! Kaba and her collaborators write with urgency, while imbuing critical insights with clarifying analyses into what it means to demand an end to the reflexive impulse toward punishment that defines much of our society." --Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
"Much of the vast living archive that is Mariame Kaba's amazing career as an abolitionist-feminist organizer, people's intellectual, movement strategist, and Black freedom fighter, is not in written form. It is inscribed in her praxis: the many campaigns she has crafted, the young people she has mentored, and the organizations she has founded. But in this unique collection of essays, interviews and transcribed speeches, we get a glimpse of that brilliant and powerful body of work, and it is awe-inspiring and instructive: a must-read for anyone serious about the struggle for freedom and justice in the 21st century."-- Barbara Ransby, historian, author, activist
"This book writes a political genealogy of one of our movement era's most significant intellectuals and community organizers and her people into the record of a feminist and abolitionist Black Radical Tradition. Kaba invites us all into a 500-year clock through reflection, assessment, and celebration of the people who dedicate their lives to social change. Yet again, she teaches us to praise the choir, appreciate vulnerability and be disciplined in service of transforming ourselves and the world in which we live."-- Charlene A. Carruthers, author, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
"This is a long awaited book. For the throngs of people who have been inspired by Mariame Kaba's work, we now have - in one place - her words, her keen analysis of criminalization, her relentless critique of the carceral state and seemingly limitless optimism about the po
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