Police Abolition
6/5/20 - It's been a week. Amid uprisings and violent police suppression, we turn to Mariame Kaba. Mariame is a longtime police and prison abolitionist, educator, and organizer who has been doing the day-in, day-out work of activism and opposing state-sponsored violence since the early 2000s.
If you've been wondering: what's police abolition? what's prison abolition? why not simply reform or defund police departments? how do I commit myself to racial justice? what does a post-police future look like? is there room for hope?
...this episode is for you.
Transcript below.
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CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Associate Producer: Jordan Bailey
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Design Assistant: Brijae Morris
Ad sales: Midroll
TRANSCRIPT: POLICE ABOLITION
[Ads] (0:55)
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Aminatou: Hi Ann Friedman.
Ann: Hello Aminatou Sow.
Aminatou: What a week.
Ann: I know. I was going to say something like how're you holding up over there and just didn't want to ask that question.
Aminatou: Yeah. I will only speak for myself, I am very exhausted. I am exhausted by coronavirus. I am exhausted by just being surrounded by black death. I am exhausted by the fact that it just seems like we are getting nowhere. I'm exhausted by the fact that there's background noise in my tape so I'm going to do that again. [Laughter]
Ann: I mean I also feel like there's a point at which it's like you know what? Just deal with it. A little background noise on the tape in the scope of everything else that's happening right now, I think everyone who's listening is very accustomed at this point to the interrupted audio and video experience. (2:05)
Aminatou: Right. In that place please deal with the little bit of background noise in my quarantine living situation.
Ann: Yes.
Aminatou: Yeah, it's been really tough Ann but I . . . [Sighs] I think a long time ago on this podcast circa when we interviewed Robin DeAngelo I feel like I made really clear my stance on just -- I just refuse to educate white people because at some point I was like there are just diminishing returns and also I was like some of us do not have to do that work because there are no rewards in it. I just feel . . . I'm just rethinking a lot to that moment and to what is happening now. My heart is broken and I feel defeated but also I am just reminded, you know, I was like the people who are doing the work are doing the work and the people who are not doing the work are very pointedly not doing the work and we are not going to get anywhere.
Ann: Right. And also you know who you are. I am very in touch with myself about when I am and I'm not doing the work and I can't sit here and tell you that I am 24/7 doing the work but I can tell you that I have enough honesty to have maybe a realistic assessment of what is and isn't the work. And I think we live in a time of distraction about what is and isn't the work as well, you know? I think I have really been wrestling with the very narrow way that I think some people in my world have interpreted the catchphrase or the slogan "White Silence Equals Violence." I just feel like that term encompasses so much more than speaking on social media. Like you know what I mean? It's like you can be active on this and you can be actually doing the work and not say a peep on Instagram. You can actually be doing some constructive work on social media. There is a real flattening that's happening I think and some of the critical thinking and critical media reading skills that we talk about day in and day out I think are really applicable to the white experience of a moment like this in terms of taking an extra step and doing the harder work and really thinking about what do all these phrases and slogans mean? What is being asked of me and what does that really translate to in terms of action in my own life? (4:30) And I said that thing about being able to personally kind of understand the difference between what is active and what is inactive because I think I've been thinking a lot about laziness as it comes in here. Like not -- you know, there's a lot of exhortations to do the work but I actually think that there is a way of describing the inverse to that experience. So for me I know I'm not doing the work when I'm like oh, I'm tired and I don't want to sit on hold and make a phone call about this. That feeling is a sign that I am not living in accordance with my beliefs on this issue. And sometimes I think drilling down into the substance of not only what I am being called on to do but also at a gut level am I living in accordance? I feel very strongly that the answers are -- and resources and people doing this work and all of that -- is out in this world so it's on me and it's on white people to really sift through that. And sorry to monologue at you. [Laughs] I really just went down a hole.
Aminatou: No I really appreciate it. Thank you for saying all of that. I am just really at a place of I don't have a lot to say and I feel . . . I feel really at peace with that and so I appreciate you, you know, doing the bulk of the talking and the bulk of the interviewing this week because I am [Sighs] clearly at my wit's end with living in this society, you know? It's okay not to feel great.
[Theme Song] (6:35)
Ann: I also think that today's interview is a really constructive and important one that everything that I was monologuing about in terms of going a little bit deeper than a hashtag or a catchphrase, it really speaks to a lot of those things. So I spoke with Mariame Kaba who you may know because she is quite active on Twitter. Her handle is @prisonculture. She is an abolitionist, an organizer, and an educator and she used this phrase in our conversation where she said it's pretty much her calling to turn personal problems into public issues. She's someone who we wanted to have on the show for a long time, like we've had an interview request into her for weeks and weeks because she's one of those people we turn to. A few of them we've had on the show in the past like activist Alicia Garza and Stacey Abrams, I think your conversation with her spoke to this. But we really in a systemic way like to think about how do we keep doing work when it feels relentless and repetitive and maybe like we're not getting anywhere or going as fast as we want to? And Mariame is really someone who I think is a true visionary and at the forefront of answering some of those questions about being in a movement like this for the long haul. So yeah, so here is my conversation with Mariame.
[Interview Starts] (8:00)
Ann: Mariame thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Mariame: Thank you for having me.
Ann: I noticed that some of the terms you use to identify yourself are abolitionist, organizer, and educator. I'm wondering what does it mean to be each of these things in 2020 to you? And maybe with a particular focus on abolitionist in this moment.
Mariame: Sure. I'm an educator in the sense that I've been a teacher of high school students and a teacher of college students and a teacher of, you know, folks in community settings basically since the early 1990s so that's a big part of my life is teaching. And I think in some ways the way that I use my social media is also about education in many ways and teaching and sharing resources with people. As an organizer I am someone who helps to create containers where folks can come together to turn personal problems into public issues. So a lot of that work has been mostly my unpaid life has been about organizing and then as a prison industrial complex abolitionist I am committed to fostering the conditions that would make prisons, policing, and surveillance obsolete.
Ann: That last note, I think, rendering obsolete really is powerful to me in the sense that I think it implies creating an alternate reality. [Laughs] You know, it's not just taking away.
Mariame: Yeah. Ann: I wonder if that's something you agree with or that's how you think of it.
Mariame: Yeah. For me I've always felt that PIC abolition, Prison Industrial Complex abolition, is very much a project of creation and very much a project of building. So really it's a positive project. Positive not in the sense of like good or bad but positive in the sense of always being hopeful. And so absolutely I see it very much that way and have been mostly interested over my life, especially as I became more understanding of what PIC abolition means in the early 2000s that I'm trying to create various ways to actualize that vision in my day-to-day life. I believe that we're practicing abolition on a daily basis when we are thinking about how to address harms for example in our family, in our communities, without involving the state which includes policing but also includes child welfare and other kinds of parts of the carceral state. When we do that work we're doing abolitionist work all the time. When you're an organizer or an activist or just somebody in the community and you're pushing against climate change and you're doing that work you're really doing abolitionist work. If you're building and pushing for universal education for all you're doing abolitionist work. You're pushing for living wages, you're doing abolitionist work. So I think it's an expansive vision and an expansive framework. It's not a blueprint. That work of making the thing we have to do ourselves. We have to come up with the strategies, the demands. You know, the things that are going to be needed to reach that horizon. But I think that vision, it's a good north star to have. (12:00)
Ann: You mentioned that you came to this work in the early 2000s. I'm wondering how you got involved in abolition.
Mariame: Yeah. I mean the journey for me was really actually a process of being involved in a lot of different things and having my consciousness raised over time. I came up in terms of my work. Initially I taught but then I moved into doing more kind of traditional, mainstream, domestic violence work where I worked at an organization in New York in the mid-90s called Sanctuary for Families which still exists today. It's still the largest domestic violence -- private domestic violence organization in New York City. At that time I was doing a lot of anti-violence work and what we called anti-violence against women and girls work at that time. I just found myself getting alienated more and more and more within that field. As I kept working with survivors and what we were offering them was not what they wanted at all, and most of them did not want to report to the police. Most of them were very much like I want the violence to end and I want to figure out how to do that without harming the person who's harming me because I happen to either continue to love them or they're the father of my children or I'm economically dependent on them. And really what we were offering them was a lot of what they didn't want: orders of protection, reports to cops, things like that. And over time I became more and more disillusioned. This also coincided with then getting disillusioned by learning about the criminal punishment system specifically around juvenile justice issues when one of my students was caught up in that system. And even though I had always known about the kind of disparate treatment in the criminal punishment system that people who look like me or who lived in my neighborhood were experiencing I didn't put two and two together. I didn't have an analysis. I was just looking at and had information. But it wasn't until I started having these other actual experiences with people and looking for remedies and then just coming up against those remedies not being in any way useful to anybody or being very destructive or dangerous for people that I started looking towards what else is there? What other way of thinking about this? (14:40) These institutions can't actually be reformed. If they could why haven't they been, you know? So I had a lot of thoughts about there's got to be something else out there to be pushing for. Like this is not working at all and that's -- those kind of . . . that began me on a path towards abolition. Before I even had a real understanding of abolitionist framework or vision I did begin to get involved in restorative justice work.
Ann: Can you explain what restorative justice work is for those who might not be familiar?
Mariame: Sure. Restorative justice is for people who are restorative justice practitioners they would call it even not a project or a program but actually a way of life in some ways. The set of values that people have about how to intervene in harm when it occurs, that you need to think about for example violence or "crime" as a rupture, a rupture in our relationships between us and our communities. In other words the people who are in our lives including the bystanders. And what you want to try to do through restorative practices is to get in right relationship with each other again. (16:05) So restorative justice asks you a series of questions to consider about what happened in the case that happened in terms of the harm or the violence. It asks you to also ask the question about what are your needs that arise from what happened? And then it asks you to think about whose responsibility is it to meet these needs? And then it asks you what you need to repair the harm so that it doesn't happen again. Or at least how do you feel like you could get some restitution for what happened? And it engages not just the person who was harmed and the person who harmed that person but also a broader community of folks because again as I mentioned to you before the key is that it's been a rupture of relationship and so in order to be able to repair that you need more than just the direct people who are involved. So you'll have a lot of restorative justice practitioners talk about -- and I think often when people hear restorative justice now they think immediately circles, peace circles.
Ann: Sitting around and talking.
Mariame: Sitting around and talking or whatever. But it's like I always say, you know, restorative justice doesn't mean put a circle on it. It's a process. It's a way of living. It's an intervention sometimes but it's got a long kind of history rooted in many indigenous cultures including indigenous people from the US and indigenous people from Canada and indigenous people everywhere, you know? You go to Latin America or you go to Africa. The way that people tried to resolve their conflicts and address harms didn't rely on the police. [Laughs] It didn't rely on prisons. People had their ways of trying to address what was going on and restorative practices were usually used in the ways people did that. (18:12)
Ann: Right. This week in particular we -- or I at least -- am hearing a lot of different terminology or maybe I should say a range of terminology in regard to demands about what should happen next when it comes to police. And I would say the things I hear most often are calls for reform, calls for defunding, and calls for abolition. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about why pushing for abolition rather than maybe reform or defunding is where you're at.
Mariame: Well yes, my long-term vision of what I would like to see is the abolition of policing. So however I'm living right now in the world on a daily basis, and I know that's not going to be tomorrow, but I do know that not having that as your actual goal would prevent you from getting to the goal. So I think it's very important to uplift that demand and that vision of abolishing policing because when we talk about police -- the police -- people think of cops and people know a lot of cops right? They may have an Uncle Charlie who's a copy or they may be married to a cop or they may have watched Law & Order. In this country you can't escape it. So they think they know all the cops, right? They're very friendly with Stabler. I don't know who the other person is. But they feel, you know, and as Paola Rojas has written years ago the cops are in our heads and in our hearts right? (19:55) And so when you say you don't want policing to continue, because it's broader than just the police, but if let's just stick to police, if you don't want police to exist anymore there are two things going on. There's the emotions of "But, you know, my Uncle Charlie's a good guy." And there is also the immediate thing of fear. Like if we don't have these folks they are the bulwark between us and complete chaos and, you know, destruction right? So fear has a huge thing and that brings up lots of emotions and tensions, etc. But when people keep asking the question -- and I hear this all the time, people will say "I am so . . . I don't understand why these killings keep happening." Like I've actually had lots of . . . "Why does this keep happening?" You know? So that is one thing people are always bringing up to me is why is this happening? And the second thing that I hear all the time is the reason people are very, very galvanized are the killings. I think cops kill, what, 1,100 people a year in the US consistently every single year? It's been escalating. It actually has been getting worse since 2014 when the Black Lives Matter movement really took hold. And so people say that, and killing is obviously horrific because it's such a final thing and it's so harmful right? So I hear that. I hear people saying it. But, you know, policing is a lot more . . . the harms of policing are a lot more than killing people. Like people are injured by the cops on a regular basis. The cops are the gatekeepers of the prison industrial complex. In other words they're the ones who funnel you in the front door. They arrest people for petty things constantly filling up and clogging up and destroying people's lives. Jailing them then they lose their jobs and there's a compounding of that. (22:05) So the police have a role that is so pervasive, so insidious, harmful in ways that people don't even see beyond the killings that to ask the question of why it keeps happening or why the police keep murdering unarmed or armed black men, women, other people is that you don't understand the function of policing right? You don't understand what the cops are for. The cops exist to control and contain particular groups of people for the interests of the ruling class and to protect the property of the ruling class and the state. That's their function. So if you understand what the actual function of the police is then you don't have to ask why these things keep happening because that's their work. [Laughs] You know? And so I always tell people I'm so confused about you're asking the police not to be the police and I don't understand then what you're asking for. That's what they're there for and that's what abolitionists believe. That's the difference between how we conceptualize them and how others conceptualize them. They still see them in this kind of individualistic, protect and serve model and for me that's not their role at all. And so it makes sense to me that they keep killing people and injuring people and arresting people. (23:55)
Ann: I'm glad you invoked that term protect and serve because I really believe that certain things like seeing that phrase over and over, if you are someone from a community that has not been as directly or systemically harmed by policing, has a very powerful effect.
Mariame: It does. It does. It absolutely does. And, you know, and again I always say for most of the young folks that I've worked with for many years now the idea of officer-friendly never existed. It was never a myth of officer-friendly for these young people. From the beginning of their lives they did not have that myth. So in a way there's no illusion to lose and what I see amongst a lot of people who are not as impacted directly by the violence of policing is they still have illusions to lose. Nobody likes to lose their illusions. No one. You want to be able to keep that and hold onto that right? Sometimes it's very comforting to hold onto otherwise . . .
Ann: It's hard to have your beliefs contradicted, yeah.
Mariame: You don't want it. Why would you? You have the beliefs and you're trying to then arrange your world around those beliefs right? We all do it. This is normal, like it's part of being a human being and trying to operate in the world. So I think a lot about that right now with what I see which I see a lot more privileged people, white people who are more privileged as well because I think a lot of poor white people have similar views of the cops frankly that people of color have. You know, at least my experience has been they're been harassed, they've been jailed, you know? So they also don't have an illusion to lose. (25:50)
Ann: What does a post-policing, post-prisons community look like?
Mariame: That's a great question and my answer is I have no idea.
Ann: [Laughs]
Mariame: I have no idea, and you know why I have no idea? Number one, because it's a collective project. We're going to build it together. It's not going to be my vision; it's going to be lots of different visions together if it's to come. And the second thing is because in order to get to that world we have to change everything. Absolutely everything. And how do I know about what the world will look like when everything is changed? I have no idea. And so I always tell people that one of the most I think for me kind of heartening things is that I don't have to do a lot of post-thinking. I see a lot of folks who when they think about abolition and when I say prison abolition or police abolition what they go immediately to is their current view of the current society and you just extricate the cops and prisons. And then they shudder right? Because that leaves this massively existing violent unequal world that we currently inhabit without the . . .
Ann: Right, nothing but fear.
Mariame: Right, nothing but -- so you just excise these death-making institutions from it but you've left everything else constant and the same. That's not a world I want either, you know? And so I get it. I get where people would be freaked out by that. But what abolitionists talk about is the importance of thinking of abolition as a restructured world where everything has shifted, where people have what they need. Where people are living lives where we figured out how to do conflict resolution amongst ourselves without calling the cops. Where we have enough to eat and shelter. Where people have good schools. Where people have medical care when they need it at whatever time and at no cost. So it's a vision of a restructured world and within that restructured world when those conditions have shifted we will no longer need these punishing institutions because we will have figured out how to interact and relate to each other and be in the right relationship in ways that we can't imagine right now in the world we exist in. (28:15) So that's what I usually say to folks about that, you know? You asked also a question earlier about why abolition as opposed to reform or defunding and I always say, you know, defunding is a strategy on the way towards abolition because what we want to do, if you want to -- the surest way, a friend of mine Rachel Herzing says this all the time, the surest way to reduce the violence of policing is to reduce the contact with police. That's number one. Number two, the surest way in my estimation to reduce the violence of policing which is inherent and endemic is to actually shrink police power. And one way that you get at reducing police power is by taking resources away from them as a system so that they don't have the resources to be able to keep hiring all these cops. And so they don't have the resources to be able to get more tanks. So they don't have . . . So you want to reduce police power on the one hand while you want to reduce the actual contact with policing on the other. And those are strategies that we have to employ on our way towards abolishing policing altogether. So defund for me, it might bet he end of the beginning step that we ought to be taking when you want to ask how do we get from where we are to where we need to get and go? So I support defunding within a context of other things. Defunding as one strategy amongst many strategies that we're going to be deploying to get towards the abolition of prisons, policing, and surveillance. (30:05) The issue about reforms as they've been delivered to us since, hmm, the late 19th century because we've been "reforming" policing -- modern policing -- since the late 19th century in the United States and trust me you can go back and look at all of the task reports starting with the Wickersham report in 1929 to see the recommendations that they gave about reforming policing at that time and you could make a line between that and the Serpico commissions in New York and the task force that Obama organized in 2015. You can see, what, history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes? Like there are echoes all across of the same kinds of procedural interventions -- "reforms" -- that we ought to put in place to be able to make the police kinder and gentler. And if I can just go back to my beginning point, which is why is everybody asking the police not to be the police? That's what these reforms are doing, these procedural reforms. Procedural reforms, or in other words reforms where we're like we should ban chokeholds. Okay? Like we should train them more. Um, they've been getting trained. We should give them implicit bias tests. Okay. We should hire more diverse cops. [Laughs] Like we should, you know, the list . . . body cams which drove me up the wazoo when that was the big push in 2014. I wrote a piece where I basically had a rant about why are you going to A) give them more money so they can have more legitimacy to do the thing they do? Which is be the police. And then who do you think the cameras turned on? It's not on them, it's on you. [Laughs] Like we don't . . .
Ann: Right. (32:10)
Mariame: These are not -- it's what Gortz calls reformist reforms, you know? Reformist reforms are reforms that actually you have to come back in five years to undo because they become obstacles to what your goal is. And what you want is non-reformist reforms which are reforms that actually give you a path towards being able to get to your actual goal, not putting more obstacles, not legitimizing the system more, not growing the system, not, you know, all that stuff. So I think about that all the time so that's why no reform. Also I always ask people to write down the word reform then put R-E-dash-form. Reform. But if the form is by design setup to be violent what are you reforming? You're reforming violence. Meaning you're creating it all over again. I just -- people are just not, you know . . . I'm constantly at a loss honestly. I spend most of my time going what are people seeing here? Because this makes no sense to me and it's definitely not going to get us to this point. It's not going to kill less people. It's not going to injure less people. It's not going to make people feel better about this institution so what are we really doing? You know, it feels like some sort of weird surface band-aid stuff that the politicians want to offer so they can get offstage and return to giving the cops all the money they want and even money they didn't ask for.
Ann: Yeah. (34:05)
Mariame: While cutting social services on the other end. The things that actually keep us safe, they're cutting that majorly and pouring money into the death-making institutions. It's amazing.
Ann: Let's take a quick break and Mariame and I will be back.
[Ads]
Ann: There's also something going on, I'm just reminded of earlier in our conversation about this real desire to think of cops as sort of officer friendlies plus bad apples as opposed to thinking about policing as an institution or as . . . you know, the difference between some racist versus white supremacy or racism as a giant structure.
Mariame: Exactly. Exactly. Very hard for people to think past the system we're currently living in and I always think about my friend Erica Minors who says liberation is unthinkable by design.
Ann: Oh wow.
Mariame: I think she's absolutely right. In the same way police abolition is unthinkable by design in part because the fear mongering that you get, the kind of sense of like [Gasps] if you don't have the police . . . I think a lot, particularly liberals, I think a lot of liberals can think of the end of prisons before they can think of the end of policing. You know, they can get close. They can wrap their heads around more easily the end of prisons than the end of policing. That has to do with all the things we talked about before about the cops being in our heads and hearts, about the cultural hegemony of the way that cops are represented within our culture. The ways that cop shows discipline and dominate our imaginations. And, you know, the system really needs to maintain itself and so the fact that -- you know, it just shows you all the ways it has to happen for the police to keep their legitimacy going. They have to have a billion cop shows. They have to have a union that acts as a crime syndicate. They have to, you know what I mean? They have to have all these very . . . they have to have all these weapons, like be armed to the teeth and have tanks and AKs. All this apparatus to just maintain their legitimacy within the culture. It's amazing.
Ann: Ugh. You referred to defunding as a strategy.
Mariame: Yeah.
Ann: And in this moment when there is a lot of fresh attention on and desire for strategies toward abolition I'm wondering if there are others you want to highlight.
Mariame: Yeah. I think as I mentioned defunding is one that I think people can rally around right now under a framework of investing and divesting, so divesting from policing and investing in our communities and the other things we actually want to grow. I think that's a beautiful way and an easy way for people to understand the ultimate goal of just shrinking the power of this institution and also reducing contact with the institution. I think a lot also about all the different other ways. I think there are non-reformist reforms that we can be putting on the table right now. There are things like for example I was involved in a campaign in Chicago where five years ago we successfully won reparations for victims of police torture and their families who had been tortured by John Birge and his midnight crew which was a crew in area 2 of Chicago and area 3 and they spent 20 years torturing -- systematically torturing people in those communities. (38:20) And we won a reparations law and one of the things included in there were restitution for those survivors and their families in terms of financial restitution. We won a mandatory curriculum in the eighth and tenth grade in all Chicago public schools about police torture and the Birge case in particular. We won free education in terms of community college education for the survivors, their children, and their grandchildren. We won -- the city has to create a memorial to memorialize the torture cases and the resistance to them. You know, there's a series of things that we proposed in this ordinance that became law that have a direct impact on addressing the material needs of people who are harmed by these systems. So other jurisdictions should consider and think about doing reparations laws for survivors and victims of police torture and police violence. I think it's something that could be replicated in other places. You know, I think about the importance of potentially having legislation that actually ends the military equipment that the police can access. Just make that illegal, like they can't get that stuff anymore. That would be the beginning of a disarming of the cops right? I think that there should be proposals that people advance to simplify the process of dissolving existing police departments. There are police departments that are under consent decree through the Department of Justice that are supposed to do X, Y, and Z to "reform" their departments but when they don't do that why don't we have a mechanism for actually dissolving those departments? (40:10) We do structured and managed bankruptcies in corporate land. Why not start thinking about doing that for existing police departments? And there are a number of things that you can be offering right now. You know, keep pushing for more data transparency. It's still left up to private organizations and not the freaking government to keep track of all the stops and arrests and stop and frisk and all the other stuff that is happening in our local communities. We should be able to access that data transparently so people in communities know what's going on and can continue to mobilize and organize after uprisings and rebellions and not have to wait for those in order for things to start shifting. But ultimately really as I said in that piece the only way to address oppressive policing is to actually abolish the police. These reforms that I mentioned, or these proposals that could in the interim reduce some harm, they're just that: they're just reducing harm but they're not reforming the structural, systemic nature of police and policing.
Ann: Right. I often refer to your tweet about the questions that you regularly ask yourself when you are outraged about injustice. What are those questions and also how did you arrive at this short list? I think there are only four, it feels very simple, and yet they're not simple. [Laughs] How did you arrive at those four questions and how did that become your process? (41:42)
Mariame: You know, I just -- I spend a lot of time reflecting on a regular basis on my capacity because I'm doing 100 million things all the time. The questions basically are what resources exist so I can better educate myself? Who's already doing work around this injustice? I think it's do I have the capacity to offer concrete support and help to those people? And how can I actually be constructive in this moment? So those are just ways that I think -- I really do use it all the time for myself. It's kind of my own little mental checklist that fist slows me down from spiraling about outrage, you know? And being like this is the latest thing, oh my god! Whatever. Which you can do and literally exhausts you. I have to understand that I'm one person and that I can only do so much. That means being organized and thinking about what I can add to my plate and add to my list. There are outrages and injustices by every single minute, like every minute, every second of our lives and social media just amplifies that because you're getting it to you all the time. And so I'm just like okay, just recite in your head those four questions. They will just -- they just calm you. They focus you. They remind you of your capacity. They remind you you're just one single person and it allows you to, I feel like at least, be able to move through the world with less of a sense of dread.
Ann: Yeah. They've been a real touchstone to me in kind of the swirl of social media, especially as I find myself just feeling very activated and enraged about frankly it feels like something different every couple of days. And I don't want to be that person in the world who is worried about everything so she does nothing.
Mariame: Yes, it's paralyzing. It is. It's paralyzing to be bombarded and inundated on a regular basis with so much injustice, outrage, hardship, you know? So much suffering. If you take all that in, or even if you take half of it or a quarter of it in in your life on a weekly basis it's just I don't know how -- we can't survive that. We can't survive that. Yeah, yeah. So very important for me at least again to have a centering practice that allows me to try to stay as grounded as I can. (44:30)
Ann: What's an issue that you are in the midst of educating yourself about?
Mariame: Wow that's such a good question. I have to be honest I read a lot. Like I am like notorious amongst my friends and family because I'm reading a book. I'm not reading just one book; I'm reading like five books at the same time all the time.
Ann: This is my not-surprised face. You can't see it. [Laughter]
Mariame: I am reading all the time. And on Twitter I joke because it'll be like "Hey Mark at Us Weekly what are you reading this weekend?" I'm always responding to it. And so people are like I get my reading suggestions from your saying what books you're reading in the moment because you're always reading something new. But I've been actually doing a deep dive right now in -- I have a long-term interest in walking tours and in kind of mapping. I like the idea of embodied kind of geographic exploration of my city and so I've been doing these walking tours. I do them from time-to-time, like four times a year maybe, and raise money for charity through them. (45:45) But right now I'm actually learning a lot more about a man named Hubert Harrison in order to be able to create a tour, a walking tour, about him and his context you know? Who else he was interacting with at the time that he was alive, raising the issues that they cared about in that moment and using the mapping to do that as well. So I've been re-reading. I had read his biography and then I have been re-reading right now his speeches which I had forgotten how good they are and I'm as a result of doing that work with him I'm in a complete rabbit hole of like re-learning about black socialism in Harlem in the early 20th century. So I'm doing a lot, a lot, a lot of readings about that right now.
Ann: What a fantastic answer. I'm so glad I asked. [Laughs]
Mariame: I mean I'm glad you asked as well because it forced me to at least have something coherent to tell you as opposed to here are the 19 books I'm currently reading. [Laughs]
Ann: I mean you're in the midst of educating yourself about 19 different things then, right?
Mariame: That's right.
Ann: I find myself wondering how you define and practice hope or what role hope plays in the work that you do and the way that you live.
Mariame: Oh, well so much for me. I told a story on Twitter maybe three years ago about a nun that I had heard speaking who used this -- you know, talked about hope being a discipline and it kind of resonated with a lot of people. But for me what I took out of that was that hope was a practice, you know, that you had to do every single day. It was not something -- it isn't . . . it's not an emotion. It's not like some product that you buy that you ingest that all of a sudden gives you something. You know, it's a daily practice of constantly reminding yourself that we have a possibility of another world every single day. That's how I think about it for myself, that another world really is possible and that I'm part of a whole, an interconnected whole of people who I don't know even including people in my family, friends, all that stuff, yes, my comrades, but also people all over this planet who I don't know who wake up every day and commit to trying to transform our conditions for the better. (48:50) And that for me is very hopeful. Insisting that I have to act, you know? that it's not enough for me to just comment on the world or be removed from the world as an observer but that I'm responsible for actually acting. Acting in the service of transformation of conditions and improving people's material lives and lessening suffering. Lessening suffering. That's really a huge part of what I gain from my religious practice but also what I was brought up in in terms of my family and my cultural practice and my organizing family that we constantly are thinking about how do we lesson suffering? Our own and others. (49:45) And this is why I love the word compassion so much right? Because compassion is to suffer with and I think about that a lot. A big part, I do a lot of transformative justice work and a big part of what I think about when I think about the work I do around community accountability is that I think about that as accompaniment right? That what we're doing at our best, if you're a good friend, if you're a good sibling, a good daughter, a good whatever, you know, however we define ourselves in relationship to other people we're in relationship with, that at our best what we can do for each other is accompany each other. And I think about that in the larger sense of also the spiritual accompaniment right? I think of for me God is not somebody who's up there with the Wizard of Oz thing and just constantly working on all this stuff. No. I think for me the way that I've grown to understand God for myself is that I'm not going to be prevented from bad things happening to me by my belief in God but what I can be assured of is that God will be beside me while I'm struggling through that hard thing. So God will accompany me through that hard thing. So I feel like for me in the world that's what I see myself as doing too is to accompany other people. I can't control what happens to you. I can't make you better. I can't, you know, I don't have control over that. I don't have control over your behavior. I have control barely over my own but I should have better control over that, you know what I mean?
Ann: [Laughs] (51:45)
Mariame: I can be self-accountable, like that's what I've got to do, but I can't hold other people accountable. I can only hold myself accountable. And other people have to take accountability and choose to do the things they need to do to do better for themselves. But the promise that I have though is that I -- if I'm in relationship with you I'm going to be willing to accompany you. I'll be beside you right? So being in suffering, suffering with and in accompaniment and hope all go together for me.
Ann: That's so beautiful. Thank you.
Mariame: Sure.
Ann: Truly. I do want to ask you before I let you go we do a kind of lightning round of quick questions at the end of most of our interviews.
Mariame: Okay.
Ann: Okay. So I know you are a professed Hallmark Channel watcher. What is your favorite Hallmark movie or piece of content that that channel offers?
Mariame: Miss Christmas.
Ann: [Laughs] All year round or particularly during the season?
Mariame: My favorite content is Christmas in July, Christmas at Christmas. Whatever's going on with the Christmas movies I like. But my favorite Hallmark movie of all time is Miss Christmas. [Laughs]
Ann: Oh, okay, amen. What are your top snacks?
Mariame: My top snack of course of all time is potato chips. I love chips.
Ann: Again tears to my eyes. Any specific flavor or brand that you . . .
Mariame: I will -- I'm . . . really I have to tell you I go on a journey. I'm obsessed with the kettle chips barbecue version, my favorite snack.
Ann: Do you know kettle chips makes a Korean barbecue as well that I really have to strongly recommend?
Mariame: I will go for that. That's actually something I will get to right away. [Laughs]
Ann: Okay. What's one thing you're doing to care for yourself in this moment? (53:45)
Mariame: I'm a knitter and a crocheter so I'm ongoing with that. I'm always on some sort of knitting or crochet project.
Ann: And finally what is a resource or an organization or maybe a specific action that you feel like could really use a boost right now that you want to shout out to our listeners?
Mariame: Wow. So many possibilities but actually there's a project that I did last year that I invited other people to join me on that was to make grants of up to $2,500 to young people between the ages I think it was of 12 to 24 for mutual aid projects over the summer that they wanted to do. We called it MAP for Youth so Mutual Aid Project for Youth. And if people go to the website, so it's map4youth.com and folks can go there and you can see last year's recipients of the grants. We raised the money, outsourced the money on social media. We raised I think $40,000 or something or $30,000, I can't remember, some number like that, then we were able to give grants to 14 young people between the ages of 12 to 24 to do projects for themselves, mutual aid projects last summer. We're hoping to give away money this year trying to raise $40,000 to do the same.
Ann: Mariame thanks so, so much for being on the podcast. We really appreciate it.
Mariame: Well thank you for having me and thanks for inviting me and also thank Jordan for being patient.
[Interview Ends]
Ann: Ugh, Mariame. I am so grateful for her time and for this conversation.
Aminatou: Same, same, same. I'm so grateful for all of her work.
Ann: Yeah. And just want to point out she's someone who's been doing it day in, day out for a long time regardless of the events of this week or next week and we can all choose to really follow that model. That's one reason I think I feel so energized when I speak to her so we will link to many of the resources that she mentioned in the show notes and extra special thanks to Jordan Bailey for producing this episode.
Aminatou: See you on the Internet.
Ann: See you on the Internet. Aminatou: You can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favs. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back, leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf and you can buy our book Big Friendship anywhere you buy books. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Our logos are by Kenesha Sneed. We have editorial support from Laura Bertocci. Our producer is Jordan Bailey. This podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.