Mariame Kaba

"Going into processes, if you go into it with an idea that the person youre working with is a fragile China doll who is going to crack under any pressure, you cant make a mistake-well, then youre already set up for failure, in the sense of potential catastrophic hurt. Start off with the notion that our process allows for survivors to reclaim agency. Thats what youre working toward. The binary of success/failure, get rid of that. Thats important, number one."

"Poetry helps me to imagine freedom."

"Failure and mistakes are part of a process."

"I think we’re going to have to be much more creative in the way that we address issues. I tend to be skeptical of gun control, in general. I see it often as a way to criminalize communities of color further."

"The fact that sexual violence is so incredibly pervasive should tell us that its not a story of individual monsters. We have got to think about this in a more complex way if were really going to uproot forms of sexual violence."

"With punishment at the center of everything we havent been able to really address the other stuff that needs to happen. Because people fucking need to-they need to take accountability when they harm people."

"I think part of what we have to talk about is the fact that one of the main tricks, I think, of white supremacy is that it invisiblizes both kind of structures of violence and tries to focus mostly on individual forms of violence, right? So that when we see a situation where, for the most part, the people who are doing these mass killings are mostly young white men, the story gets told that that is a form of violence that’s kind of an acceptable, normal form of violence. When people of color and others commit forms of violence, we are told and taught to see that as somehow outside of the norm of general kinds of violence, and we tend to catastrophize that. And then that also leads to certain kinds of policy responses that are intended to actually continue to oppress the groups that are very much already targeted and oppressed. So, I think that that is a big aspect of this that we have to look at, that you can’t look at these mass shootings without understanding also the ways in which violence is the glue that holds forms of oppression in place. And one of those forms of oppression is white supremacist kinds of forms of violence and oppression."

"Lets begin our abolitionist journey not with the question "What do we have now, and how can we make it better?" Instead, lets ask, "What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?" If we do that, then boundless possibilities of a more just world await us."

"I was struck again by the importance of language and of words that need to be spoken. Our best teachers, including Audre Lorde among others, have imparted this truth. In the last few months, weeks, and days, I have found myself saying #BlackLivesMatter out loud at various times. Its not that I dont already know that they do. I think that I am trying to speak the words into existence. These words should be taken for granted. They are not. Ive revised my previous belief that the words should remain unspoken. "Who are they trying to convince?" Id previously confided to a friend. It turns out that I owe a debt of gratitude to Opal, Patrisse, and Alicia for reminding me of the power of language and the spoken word."

"I have so many touchstones. I believe in touchstones, people you go back to in particular moments when you need something. I turn to Baldwin a lot. I read him when Im feeling a sense of despair over the world that Im in. I find a sentence that he wrote and its like, "Ooh, yes." I think about so many of the Black communist and socialist women of the first part of the century. If they could go through what they went through, if Marvel Cooke could survive the Red Scare and being fired by the Amsterdam News-she was the first woman working there ever-if she can endure that in the 1930s, what am I doing? You know what I mean? Now I have so much more at my disposal. Im so much less oppressed. I love Ida B. Wells-Barnett. I love reading her journal where shes lamenting that she cant stop spending money, like, "Why did I buy that scarf? My God. Why am I spending this money?" And its beautiful, because it shows you this woman who fearlessly went to the South by herself to literally take down peoples testimony after a lynching, just sitting around saying, "Why cant I fucking stop shopping? Why did I buy this super expensive scarf that I cannot afford?" It makes me so happy to go back to that and read that passage and be like, "Yes, Ida!"...Angela Davis is a huge touchstone for me. Ruthie Wilson Gilmore is a touchstone for me. Beth Richie is a touchstone for me. A lot of Black feminist women who Ive been able to be in space with in real life. Some whove given me a way of being in the world."

"I also keep thinking about the cruel irony of naming a bill after — a police reform, supposedly, bill, after someone who was killed by the police, and then to include a whole set of so-called procedural reforms that would not have prevented that person’s death. So, you know, this particular offering that they’re making, supposedly, in Congress wouldn’t have kept George Floyd alive. And I think that’s just cruel irony."

"Poetry can help lift the ceiling from our brains so that we can imagine liberation."