Mariame Kaba

Last updated

Mariame Kaba
Born1971
New York City, New York, U.S.
Education McGill University (BA)
OccupationOrganizer
Notable workWe Do This 'Til We Free Us

Mariame Kaba is an American activist, grassroots organizer, and educator who advocates for the abolition of the prison industrial complex, including all police. [1] She is the author of We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021). The Mariame Kaba Papers are held by the Chicago Public Library Special Collections. [2]

Contents

Early life and education

Mariame Kaba was born in New York City to immigrant parents. [3] Her mother emigrated from the Ivory Coast; [3] her father was involved in the independence struggle in Guinea. [4]

Mariame grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and attended Lycée Français. [5] As a child, she viewed the world through a black nationalist framework and looked for ways to help others. [6] Kaba received a B.A. in Sociology from McGill University in 1992. [7] In 1995 she moved to Chicago to study sociology at Northwestern University. [3] [8] She completed her master's degree in Library and Information Science at Pratt Institute. [9]

Career

In Chicago, she founded the Chicago Freedom School, [10] the Rogers Park Young Women's Action Team (YWAT), [3] Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, [11] [12] Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander, [13] and We Charge Genocide (WCG). [14] In 2009, Kaba founded the organization Project NIA, which advocates to end youth incarceration. [15] [16]

Kaba views prison abolition as the total dismantling of prison and policing while building up community services and opposes the reform of policing. [17] [18] Her work has created the framework for current abolitionist organizations including Black Youth Project 100, Black Lives Matter Chicago, and Assata's Daughters. [6] She also helped found the organization Survived and Punished, an abolitionist organization that seeks to end sentencing for victims of intimate partner violence who defend themselves. [19] This project grew out of efforts to free Marissa Alexander. [20]

Writing

Kaba maintained a blog, "US Prison Culture," beginning in 2010. She has been active on Twitter under the account @prisonculture. [21] [22]

In 2012, she wrote Resisting Police Violence in Harlem, a historical pamphlet detailing the policing and violence in Harlem. [23]

In March 2018, she wrote Lifting As They Climbed: Mapping A History Of Black Women On Chicago’s South Side with Essence McDowell. Started in 2012, the book is written as a guidebook that maps the history of the influential Black women who contributed to the development of Chicago during the 19th and 20th centuries. [24] [8]

In 2021, she published We Do This 'Til We Free Us with Haymarket Books. It debuted at number nine on The New York Times bestseller list for non-fiction paperbacks. [25] In a review for the Chicago Reader , Ariel Parrella-Aureli described it as “a collection of talks, interviews, and past work that can serve as an initial primer on the PIC [prison-industrial complex] abolition and community building rooted in transformative justice.” [26] Kaba was reluctant to write the book, but the mass protests in the summer of 2020 persuaded her, in the interests of lending her tools for collective action to newly activated organizers. [26]

In 2023, Kaba published Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care, co-written with fellow organizer Kelly Hayes. In the book's introduction, Kaba described it as "one that I wish I had as a young activist. It’s our attempt to distill some of the lessons we’ve learned about organizing over the past few decades and to include some lessons from other organizers. We wrote it with new activists and organizers in mind." [27] The book was recommended by the New York Times [28] and was reviewed in The Nation, [29] The Chicago Reader, [30] and elsewhere. The book is named after a tweet of Kaba's that took hold as a slogan on the left: "Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair." [29]

Awards

Anti-violence projects

Publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Angela Davis</span> American academic and political activist (born 1944)

Angela Yvonne Davis is an American Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). She was active in movements such as the Occupy movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.

Transformative justice is a spectrum of social, economic, legal, and political practices and philosophies that aim to focus on the structures and underlying conditions that perpetuate harm and injustice. Taking up and expanding on the goals of restorative justice such as individual/community accountability, reparation, and non-retributive responses to harm, transformative justice imagines and puts into practice alternatives to the formal, state-based criminal justice system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Prison abolition movement in the United States</span> Movement to end incarceration

The prison abolition movement is a network of groups and activists that seek to reduce or eliminate prisons and the prison system, and replace them with systems of rehabilitation and education that do not focus on punishment and government institutionalization. The prison abolitionist movement is distinct from conventional prison reform, which is intended to improve conditions inside prisons.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Black anarchism</span> African diasporic adherents of anarchist principles

Black anarchism, also known as New Afrikan anarchism or Panther anarchism, is an anti-authoritarian and anti-racist current of the Black power movement and anarchism in the United States. It is characterized by its intersectional analysis of different forms of oppression, its skepticism of both authoritarian socialism and Eurocentric anarchism, and its advocacy of community organizing, armed self-defense and revolutionary black nationalism.

Non-reformist reform, also referred to as abolitionist reform, anti-capitalist reform, revolutionary reform, structural reform and transformative reform, is a reform that "is conceived, not in terms of what is possible within the framework of a given system and administration, but in view of what should be made possible in terms of human needs and demands". On the other hand, reformist reforms essentially maintain the status quo and do not threaten the existing structure. These have been described as reforms that rationalize or "fine-tune the status quo" by implementing modifications "from the top down", but that fail to address root causes of the issue. As described by philosopher André Gorz, who coined the term non-reformist reform, non-reformist reforms in a capitalist system are anti-capitalist reforms, or reforms that do not base their validity and their right to exist "on capitalist needs, criteria, and rationale", but rather on human ones.

Beth E. Richie is a professor of African American Studies, Sociology, Gender and Women's Studies, and Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where she currently serves as head of the Criminology, Law, and Justice Department. From 2010 to 2016, Richie served as the director of the UIC Institute of Research on Race and Public Policy. In 2014, she was named a senior adviser to the National Football League Players Association Commission on domestic violence and sexual assault. Of her most notable awards, Richie has been awarded the Audre Lorde Legacy Award from the Union Institute, the Advocacy Award from the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the Visionary Award from the Violence Intervention Project. Her work has been supported by multiple foundations including Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Institute for Justice, and the National Institute of Corrections.

Project NIA is an American advocacy organization that supports youth in trouble with the law as well as those victimized by violence and crime, through community-based alternatives as opposed to formal legal proceedings. The organization was founded in 2009 by activist and educator Mariame Kaba, with the project aiming to end juvenile incarceration. NIA comes from a Swahili word for "with purpose".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aja Monet</span> American poet

Aja Monet Bacquie is an American contemporary poet, writer, lyricist and activist based in Los Angeles, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marissa Alexander case</span> American woman convicted of aggravated assault

In May 2012, 31-year-old Marissa Alexander was prosecuted for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and received a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years in prison. Alexander said that she fired a warning shot after her husband attacked her and threatened to kill her on August 1, 2010, in Jacksonville, Florida.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miss Major Griffin-Gracy</span> American activist and author (born 1940s)

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, often referred to as Miss Major, is an American author, activist, and community organizer for transgender rights. She has participated in activism and community organizing for a range of causes, and served as the first executive director for the Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor</span> American academic and author

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an American academic, writer, and activist. She is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016). For this book, Taylor received the 2016 Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book from the Lannan Foundation. She is a co-publisher of Hammer & Hope, an online magazine that began in 2023.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrea Ritchie</span>

Andrea J. Ritchie is a writer, lawyer, and activist for women of color, especially LGBTQ women of color, who have been victims of police violence. An abolitionist, her activism consists of demand for the elimination of police and prisons. She is the author of Invisible No More, a history of state violence against women of color, and co-author of No More Police: A Case for Abolition with Mariame Kaba.

Gina Dent is an associate professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion for the Humanities Division at UC Santa Cruz. She co authored the 2022 book Abolition. Feminism. Now. with her partner, Angela Davis; Erica Meiners; and Beth Richie.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carceral feminism</span> Forms of feminism that advocate for increased prison sentences

Carceral feminism is a critical term for types of feminism that advocate for enhancing and increasing prison sentences that deal with feminist and gender issues. The term criticises the belief that harsher and longer prison sentences will help work towards solving these issues. The phrase "carceral feminism" was coined by Elizabeth Bernstein, a feminist sociologist, in her 2007 article, "The Sexual Politics of the 'New Abolitionism'". Examining the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States, Bernstein introduced the term to describe a type of feminist activism which casts all forms of sexual labor as sex trafficking. She sees this as a retrograde step, suggesting it erodes the rights of women in the sex industry, and takes the focus off other important feminist issues, and expands the neoliberal agenda.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Police abolition movement</span> Political movement in the United States

The police abolition movement is a political movement, mostly active in the United States, that advocates replacing policing with other systems of public safety. Police abolitionists believe that policing, as a system, is inherently flawed and cannot be reformed—a view that rejects the ideology of police reformists. While reformists seek to address the ways in which policing occurs, abolitionists seek to transform policing altogether through a process of disbanding, disempowering, and disarming the police. Abolitionists argue that the institution of policing is deeply rooted in a history of white supremacy and settler colonialism and that it is inseparable from a pre-existing racial capitalist order, and thus believe a reformist approach to policing will always fail.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Defund the police</span> Slogan supporting reallocation of public safety funds away from policing

In the United States, "defund the police" is a slogan that supports reducing funds from police departments and reallocating them to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare and other community resources. Activists who use the phrase may do so with varying intentions; some seek modest reductions, while others argue for full divestment as a step toward the abolition of contemporary police services. Activists who support the defunding of police departments often argue that investing in community programs could provide a better crime deterrent for communities; funds would go toward addressing social issues, like poverty, homelessness, and mental disorders. Police abolitionists call for replacing existing police forces with other systems of public safety, like housing, employment, community health, education, and other programs.

Joy James is an American political philosopher, academic, and author. James is the Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams College. Her books include Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals, Shadowboxing, Imprisoned Intellectuals, The New Abolitionists, Resisting State Violence, In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities and The Angela Y. Davis Reader. She was a Senior Research Fellow at the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin where she developed the Harriet Tubman Digital Repository.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Jane Richardson Jones</span> American abolitionist, suffragist, and activist (1819–1909)

Mary Jane Richardson Jones was an American abolitionist, philanthropist, and suffragist. Born in Tennessee to free African-American parents, Jones and her family moved to Illinois. With her husband, John, she was a leading African-American figure in the early history of Chicago. The Jones household was a stop on the Underground Railroad and a center of abolitionist activity in the pre-Civil War era, helping hundreds of fugitive slaves flee slavery.

<i>The Light of Truth Ida B. Wells National Monument</i> Public sculpture in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.

TheLight of Truth Ida B. Wells National Monument is a bronze and marble public sculpture by artist Richard Hunt. Located in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, the sculpture takes its name from a quote by civil rights activist and investigative journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931): "The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them". It was unveiled in 2021 by the Ida B. Wells Commemorative Art Committee.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abolition feminism</span>

Abolition Feminism is a branch of feminism that calls for the elimination of the prison industrial complex. The term was coined by thinkers Angela Y, Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie in their book Abolition. Feminism. Now. Abolitionist Feminist thinkers promote the idea of prison abolition, and embrace an anti-racism, anti-capitalist, anti-violence feminism. Abolition Feminism is in opposition to carceral feminism. Abolitionist Feminist reject carceral solutions to gender-based violence and propose models of transformative and restorative justice.

References

  1. ↑ Kaba, Mariame (June 12, 2020). "Opinion | Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police". The New York Times . Retrieved July 12, 2020.
  2. ↑ "Mariame Kaba Papers". www.chipublib.org. Retrieved December 12, 2023.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "#WarriorWednesdays: Mariame Kaba Is Our Very Own Modern Day Abolitionist". Essence. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
  4. ↑ Ewing, Eve L. (Fall 2019). "Mariame Kaba: Everything Worthwhile Is Done With Other People". Adi magazine. Retrieved May 11, 2022.
  5. ↑ "Why Is This Happening? Thinking about how to abolish prisons with Mariame Kaba". NBC News . April 10, 2019. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
  6. 1 2 Dukmasova, Maya (August 25, 2016). "Abolish the police? Organizers say it's less crazy than it sounds". Chicago Reader . Retrieved June 9, 2020.
  7. ↑ "New website celebrates Black McGill grads". July 8, 2020.
  8. 1 2 Bowean, Lolly (March 16, 2018). "Guidebook maps the legacy of black women on Chicago's South Side". chicagotribune.com. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
  9. ↑ Richardson, Catherine. "LibGuides: Bestselling Books by Black Authors: Home". prattlis.libguides.com. Retrieved May 6, 2022.
  10. ↑ Nair, Yasmin (May 11, 2016). "Talking with prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba - LGBT News - Windy City Times". Windy City Times . Retrieved October 28, 2020.
  11. ↑ "Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls & Young Women". www.chitaskforce.org. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  12. ↑ Harding, Kate (August 25, 2015). Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It (in Arabic). Da Capo Press. ISBN   978-0-7382-17031.
  13. ↑ "No Selves to Defend: Poetry about Criminalization and Violence Against Women". wordpress.com. September 29, 2014. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  14. ↑ "We Charge Genocide". wechargegenocide.org. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  15. ↑ "Project NIA > About Us". project-nia.org. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  16. ↑ "How to Never Call the Cops Again: A Guide with a Few Alternatives to Calling Police". Autostraddle . June 3, 2020. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
  17. ↑ Kaba, Mariame (June 12, 2020). "Opinion: Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police". The New York Times . ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved June 14, 2020.
  18. ↑ Kaba, Mariame (December 7, 2014). "Police "Reforms" You Should Always Oppose". Truthout. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
  19. ↑ Pollitt, Katha (July 28, 2019). "Give Your Heart Out!". The Nation. Archived from the original on July 28, 2019. Retrieved June 2, 2023.
  20. ↑ Kaba, Mariame (January 3, 2019). "Black women punished for self-defense must be freed from their cages". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077. Archived from the original on May 2, 2023. Retrieved June 2, 2023.
  21. ↑ "Prison Culture" . Retrieved May 18, 2021.
  22. ↑ "prisonculture". Twitter . Retrieved May 18, 2021.
  23. ↑ Martin, Douglas (October 8, 2014). "Robert Mangum, a City and Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 93". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved June 9, 2020.
  24. ↑ "A Tour Of Black Women's Stories On Chicago's South Side". WBEZ Chicago. August 27, 2019. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
  25. ↑ "Paperback Nonfiction Books - Best Sellers - Books - The New York Times". The New York Times . March 14, 2021. Retrieved March 5, 2021.
  26. 1 2 Parrella-Aureli, Ariel (February 15, 2020). "'Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone'". The Chicago Reader . Retrieved March 5, 2021.
  27. ↑ Kaba, Mariame; Hayes, Kelly (2023). Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care. Haymarket Books. ISBN   9781642598537.
  28. ↑ Chattopadhyay, Shreya (June 16, 2023). "6 Paperbacks to Read This Week". The New York Times. Retrieved June 28, 2024.
  29. 1 2 Baum, Sarah (May 16, 2023). "Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba on Their New Handbook for Radical Organizing". The Nation. Retrieved June 28, 2024.
  30. ↑ Saleh, Reema (May 16, 2023). "'Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair'". The Chicago Reader. Retrieved June 28, 2024.
  31. ↑ "Illinois State Senator Heather Steans". www.senatorsteans.com. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  32. ↑ "A Long Walk Home | Stars Foundation". www.starsfoundation.org.uk. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  33. ↑ "Awards". www.brightpromises.org. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  34. ↑ "2018 Impact Awards - Chicago Foundation for Women". Chicago Foundation for Women . Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  35. ↑ "Join us for Women Who Dared 2014!". Chicago NOW. August 29, 2014. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  36. ↑ "Lawndale Christian Legal Center". lclc.net. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  37. ↑ "Women to Celebrate". Transformative Spaces. March 5, 2015. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  38. ↑ "Awards". www.aera.net. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  39. ↑ "Mariame Kaba". Open Society Foundations . Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  40. ↑ "Ron Sable Award for Activism | Crossroads Fund". crossroadsfund.org. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  41. ↑ "WRL Peace Awards Recipients and Annual Dinner Speakers". War Resisters League. March 27, 2015. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  42. ↑ @prisonculture (May 13, 2022). "Twitter post" (Tweet) – via Twitter.[ dead link ]
  43. ↑ CTS Commencement ctschicago.edu May 2022
  44. ↑ "Marguerite Casey Foundation announces 2022 Freedom Scholars". www.caseygrants.org. Retrieved April 22, 2023.
  45. ↑ "2023: Shariana Ferrer-Núñez - The Ann Snitow Prize". annsnitowprize.com. January 28, 2022. Retrieved June 8, 2024.
  46. ↑ "A World Without Prisons: A Conversation with Mariame Kaba". Lumpen Magazine. April 8, 2016. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  47. ↑ Dubler, Joshua; Lloyd, Vincent (May 19, 2018). "Think prison abolition in America is impossible? It once felt inevitable | Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd". The Guardian . Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  48. ↑ "Restorative Posters | Representing Justice Visually". rjposters.com. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  49. ↑ "The Art of Restorative Questions". Cultural Organizing. October 5, 2016. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  50. ↑ "Disappearing Acts: Domestic Violence & Black Legal Subjects | UCB Center for Race & Gender". www.crg.berkeley.edu. University of California, Berkeley . Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  51. ↑ "Prison Culture » Video: Blood at the Root Exhibition". www.usprisonculture.com. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  52. ↑ "the art of the black lives matter movement". I-d. September 11, 2015. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  53. ↑ "Rekia Boyd, Other Female Victims of Police Violence Honored in Exhibit". DNAinfo Chicago. Archived from the original on July 25, 2018. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  54. ↑ "Prison Culture » Making Niggers: Demonizing and Distorting Blackness". www.usprisonculture.com. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  55. ↑ "Black/Inside". African American Cultural Center.
  56. ↑ "The End of Chiraq | Northwestern University Press". www.nupress.northwestern.edu. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  57. ↑ Kaba, Mariame; Lenz, Colby. "How We Worked to #FreeBresha Meadows from Incarceration". Teen Vogue . Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  58. ↑ "For Mother's Day, Activists Are Bailing Black Mamas out of Jail". Broadly. May 10, 2017. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  59. ↑ "Trying to Make the Personal Political: Feminism and Consciousness-Raising".
  60. ↑ Samudzi, Zoé; Anderson, William C.; Kaba, Mariame (June 5, 2018). As Black As Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation. Chico, California: AK Press. ISBN   9781849353168.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.