August 2023 Episode of Solidarity Is This

Welcome to The Solidarity Is This Podcast, an initiative of the Building Movement Project. I'm Adaku Utah, one of your co-hosts, and this season we are so thrilled to be examining how sites of history and memory can transform ourselves and our communities deep in solidarity amongst us and build towards a more just society. This episode we have the pleasure of talking with Mariame Kaba, an organizer, educator, librarian and prison industrial complex abolitionist. She has been active in movements for racial gender and transformative justice for years. She's the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots abolitionist organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame also co-leads the initiative, Interrupting Criminalization, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. She's also founded and co-founded many organizations, formations and projects over the past 30 years. Open up your hearts and imaginations you all and get ready to be transformed by this conversation.

Welcome, Mariame. It is such a joy to have you here on the podcast. Thank you for choosing to exist in this time and for being so incredibly generous with your wisdom, your strategic orientation and agitation and your hope with so many of us in these times. Your work and really at the core, who you are as a person is contagious and is shifting our culture and practice of organizing and movement building in this time. And you, as you know, have changed me in so many ways and sharpened me as an organizer and cultural worker. So thank you for being here in all the ways being here is.

Thank you so much, Adaku. Thanks for inviting me to join you in conversation. You know I love you, so always we'll try to do what I can to be part of anything you're a part of. So thank you for having me.

So we often begin this podcast inviting folks to share their points of entry and catalyst into social change work. Who and what has shaped your path?

I would say definitely first and foremost was my family. Were kind of the main influences, I think both my parents, but especially my father who taught me a lot by example. He also taught me a lot by helping me to learn about ideas through books and reading, through dialogue and discussion, through listening to him, dialogue with his friends and buddies about any number of political issues that are going around and happening globally. So that was my first kind of influence. And I would say also coming of age in New York City, particularly in the early to mid 1980s, and what was happening at the time in the city was a real influence for me.

It shaped me. It really made me who I am in so many ways. And then finally, I would say that just my peers were a great influence. Getting to talk with and organize at a young age with my peers around issues that were of concern to us, learning that way. Those are all things that really shaped me and brought me to consciousness, and then allowed me to be able to figure out what I cared about in order to be able to commit to basically lifelong struggle.

Thank you for revealing a little bit more about you with us, and I really feel your commitment and your care throughout time and how you intentionally seized a lot of moments to learn and also reinvest in our communities and build collective knowledge, collective competence, collective power. Yeah. Thank you for bringing those folks into the space. Shout out to your dad too.

Shout out to dad. [inaudible 00:04:31].

Yes. Yes. Rest in power. So as you know, this season we're focusing on memory and justice and how folks are reclaiming these sites to deepen solidarity, interdependence and healing. And you are producing an exhibit coming up, Return to Sender, Prison as Censorship. Could you share a little bit more about this work, why it's so important right now for folks to get connected to?

It'll open on September 14th and will run through the month of October. It's basically an attempt to think about the current wave of censorship in schools and in libraries and other places that the public notices and to say these current waves of censorship are an extension of more highly advanced structures of control that have been and are being developed in prisons and jails every single day. So it's basically an attempt to get people to see the way that the prison has always been a testing ground and a training ground for perfecting a lot of things that then get deployed in the broader culture and that we need to pay attention to what happens at the level of prisons and jails in order to be able to understand then what will happen in broader parts of society. I am using the exhibition to basically maintain that the prison itself is a form of censorship, that it is multifaceted, that it is complex, and frankly, the only way that you're going to end prison censorship is to end prisons.

So the abolitionist call within a broader conversation about the ideas of censorship that are so live for people right now. People are talking a lot about book bans and bans on abortion and bans on people being able to access gender forming care. And if you think about it, you don't have to think hard to see the ways that within prisons already, people are constantly having their mail and their books and their writing censored. People are always having their bodily autonomy infringed upon, and people are always not able to access healthcare. So to train our eye on the prison and see the ways that these things operate there under total control maybe gives people an understanding of how when it's happening in the outside world, it's not new.

Not new, rooted in so many legacies of erasure and punishment and imprisonment. And I really see the multifaceted ways that this piece of work really helps to resuscitate memory both of the harms that has happened, but also what might be possible if we remember not just harm, but also our capacity to transform.

I always want to point out to people that whatever we see that is about repression, in particular spheres or sites where people are, wherever you see those things, you also see resistance and you also see people who are trying to maintain their sense of selves and their dignity and are making sure that they're not just going to be ground under by these systems of oppression. So we'll see this in the exhibition where there is intense state surveillance and attempts to squash people and quash people. There are people on the inside who are fighting and refusing that, and then there are also people on the outside who are in solidarity with the people on the inside who are also fighting and resisting that. So it's a little bit of all of those things. I do want to also point out that I'm working this summer with some young people on a summer institute that's running in July this month.

It's called the Youth Public History Institute, which is exactly an attempt also to help young people to understand themselves as part of history, both in terms of the way that, at least I see it, the way that public history attempts to kind of make the past accessible to people in society, where those people live and where those people are. The opportunity for young people in the summer program that we're running right now, they will work together to create a walking tour. That's the kind of product at the end of the time together. But in the midst of trying to create this walking tour about histories of prisons and policing and surveillance in New York City, they are engaging in going on walking tours. So going to see how other people tell these histories and stories and use this concept of memory and tie it to our current circumstances in a really direct way.

So in a really kind of embodied way that you actually walk the streets, that the people that you're talking about walked also, that you have to look at buildings, some of which exist exactly as they were in 1920 and others that are no longer in our kind of physical landscape of the present. But you could imagine with an old photograph what that looked like at the time. Yeah, I'm playing around and have been for a while with the ideas around public history and how to make public history useful in particular and relevant for young people in multiple kinds of ways. So yeah, just wanted to throw that in too.

That's powerful. And like you said, it's such a meaningful embodied way for young people to be able to reclaim time and to reclaim geography, location as places and sites where they're also making change.

This summer, Youth Public History Institute is exposing a group of 17, I think. Yeah, young people between the ages of 16 to 24 to ideas about the histories of policing and prisons and surveillance in New York through using the walking tour as heuristic for them to be able to understand it and then also to then be able to create their own tours. My hope is that at the end of the summer when we're done, we'll put everything together and hopefully we'll make something that will actually live online that other people when they do come to the city will be able to follow and use themselves. This is similar to other walking tours that I've digitized and created over the years. So I have a slavery and resistance in New York City walking tour, which we'll link I'm sure, because people can use that now and kind of use it for their own opportunities when they come to New York.

They can make their own kind of self-guided tour around that topic. I also, with Asha Fetterman a few years ago, created a radical black women in Harlem walking tour, which is also a booklet which is available for people to have and use online. And then a book that I did that was self-published in 2017 with my friend Essence McDowell, which was called Lifting as they Climbed, Mapping the Histories and Contributions of Black Women in Chicago is coming out actually in an expanded format through Haymarket Books in August. So if folks are interested in walking tours, they can't necessarily join us for this one that the young people are currently making, but they can access all those other walking tours that I've co-created over the years.

Thank you. Thanks for that distinction and also really your generosity and the impulse to look at place and resuscitate history in a way that feels really accessible for people to engage and analyze from a much more liberatory stand. So I really, really appreciate that. I'm really excited to get to go on some of these tours up in our hood up in New York. So in addition to the sites that you've mentioned, for you personally, whether it's here in the Global North or Global South, what are some sites that have some personal meaning to you?

So I think I'll say one site that I actually haven't had a chance to visit yet. That's because I haven't been back to Chicago since it was erected officially. I think it was last year that it went up. But for many, many years, Michelle Duster and other members of her family were trying to get an Ida B Wells Monument built in Chicago. And I heard, I think it was in spring of 2018, I saw a post that Michelle had tweeted on Twitter about the fact that she and her family and a committee of folks were trying to raise over $200,000 to cover the cost of the Ida B Wells Monument and that they had already been fundraising for over a decade to try to make this thing happen. And you know how I am, right? I was like, "[inaudible 00:14:28]."

Because Ida B Wells is a huge touchstone for me and has been for a long time. And when I was living in Chicago, I was so interested in her and her life and her contributions and her legacy, and I organized some book talks where we read Paula Giddings's book, for example, biography on Ida B Wells. And then we had a book group, an intergenerational discussion group on the book, and I just always have found her so moving to me and just, I don't know, I've always vibed with Ida. So I started, I think it was April of 2018, I announced on Twitter that I was going to raise $10,000 to support the monument project and that I would commit to donating some money to and ask others to make a contribution. And by the end of the day, we had raised $10,000. It was like one day, it went so fast, it was like people were ready to support and then I revised the goal to 20,000, and then a couple days later we had met that goal.

So over time I kind of continued to fundraise online and also offline. I organized a film screening and a panel discussion that included black women journalists, Nikole Hannah Jones was on the panel, and this was pre COVID, so we were in person, Jamilah Lemieux, Akiba Solomon, and we raised a whole bunch of money through that event and then just kept raising money over time, and it ultimately was able to raise many tens of thousands of dollars through also connecting the group to a funder that also wanted to support an institutional foundation that gave money to supporting the monument. I say all that to say the monument is up. I was really, really so happy to get a chance to... When they had the dedication, they had everybody who had something to do with making it happen there.

But I couldn't travel. This was during COVID still. And so I sent a short video that kind of gave a little bit of a background to why I wanted to be part of this. And I say that to say I really am looking forward to going to that particular monument and being present and seeing it. It feels somehow, I don't know, it feels a little bit like a sacred journey for me, and I really can't wait to be able to go. And so that's the site that I'm hoping to get to see soon.

I want that for you. And thank you for everything that you did to co-conspire with community to make that monument there. And may it be there for as long as possible.

Yes. Yes. It's a thing that I feel really just proud to have been part of and proud to have helped make possible. I usually really don't spend a lot of time dwelling on my own contributions to things. I kind of just do work and then I keep it moving and this is something I feel like is special. So yeah.

I mean, it speaks to your humility as just a person. And yeah, it's work that is worth being proud of. So I also can't wait to see it the next time I go back to Chicago. So we talked a little bit earlier about the erasure that's happening on massive scales in our country right now, from the banning of language and books to the shrinking of bodily autonomy to just mass forgetting of multiple pandemics that we're in right now. And in so many ways we're trained about how the past happen, and we're also trained that the future is inevitable and governance by our people has to be through the state. We know these things are not true, and yet sometimes we forget and I'm grateful for them. There's just multiple sites in your work where this resuscitation of memory and power is happening. And I'm curious, in addition to some of what you've mentioned, what are practices that we need to be in or that you're in that help to reclaim and sustain collective memory?

Well, first I think you mentioned the erasure happening, all of the stuff that's swirling around us that we're experiencing. And I think it's hard to take in all of the calamities and the catastrophes that we're currently experiencing and navigating. And I do think it's important to say that we owe ourselves and each other some grace right now. I think we always do, but particularly now, people are going through so much. As I kind of regularly repeat to myself and to others, it's really important to consider what we actually have influence over and what we actually have some control over and to focus on those things. So a practice that we need to reclaim or sustain our collective memory is to take a moment and to think about what is actually within our control, what is actually something we can influence? Because the reality is we cannot do everything.

And that trying to do that actually leads us to feeling like we can't do anything. And when I'm thinking about practices, I'm thinking you do have to pick and choose in the midst of all this stuff that's happening, reclaiming and sustaining what memories. It cannot be everything and you cannot focus on everything. And I think that for me, a big guiding principle for me is never to forget that we have to be able to take the good with the bad, that we're going to have to look at the negative things that are happening that are part of our collective world and our collective navigation of that world. And we have to, yes, our brains are actually wired for negativity. So when negative things occur, we're like, "Oh, yeah," confirmation that everything sucks. That's actually a human and a brain thing. And so while you are feeling that and seeing that and in that, it's also important for you to think about what's positive out there and what actually are things that are potentially bringing you some joy when you think about them and add that to your collective memory toolkit.

What are the things that are commemorative maybe that involve having rituals that you can engage in that allow you to slow down time and take some time to really think and process and be, that's critically important. I think we need practices of celebration and joy making and things that we love that are beautiful. And then we definitely need to continue the process of memorialization in the sense of making sure we give people their flowers. We should hopefully do that when they're still here rather than wait until they pass. Life is short. It really is. And I think the older I get, the more I recognize that and understand that, and a practice of memorializing while they're still here. The people who have gotten you over, the people who have made you possible, the people who maybe don't even know they've made you possible. Those are some practices I'm thinking about, commemoration through ritual celebration and then a memorialization prior to the person or the people or the institutions or the organizations or whatever before they die, memorializing in the present.

Memorializing in the present. And it feels like such a good invitation for folks listening to reach out and connect with folks who have shaped their lives to honor them and give them their flowers.

I also think you'd be shocked by a two sentence email how that will go over so well, somebody who maybe doesn't even know that you feel like they have made you possible. That is such a huge, huge thing. We need to do much more of that because I do think that what ends up happening, you mentioned erasure. Erasure happens when people forget. Isn't there a saying that says that you're still alive until the last person who knew you forgets. You'll remain alive as long as people remember you. And then when the last person who ceases to remember you goes, that's the real end. And so we can be people who refuse to cease remembering people even if we didn't know them personally, but we know them. We know of their labor, we know of their contributions, we know of their legacy, and we keep saying their names and we keep picking them up, and we keep making them alive in our moments, even though they've been dead for 200 years.

Yeah. It feels like such just a long-term strategy of keeping our people alive through lifetimes is this ritual of remembrance, whether it's saying their names are offering gratitude or building memorials so that they last through time and are not forgotten.

And also making room and space and containers for our grief. Because I do think that that's a big part of these things too, is that erasure is actually facilitated in large part to me by people being unwilling or unable to access and process grief. So because you feel such grief, you may actually lead to not talking about a person or not being in a place where when you talk about a person, other people are here to listen and to acknowledge what you're sharing of that person because we're so afraid of grief and we tiptoe around each other a lot [inaudible 00:25:22] stuff. And so people have very little outlets if they don't grieve properly quote, unquote. And then I think, "Where does all of that love go because that is what it is, right?" As long you love something or someone, then you're going to have grief, that's just a given.

And we are losing so many things. There's loss happening on so many-

All the time.

... scales all the time. All the time individually, interpersonally, generationally, and there's so much to be grieving about, which also impacts memory and what we're able to remember and-

And what we want to remember, right?

And what we want to remember. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I really, really appreciate how you started off talking about grace and grace that can meet this almost perfectionist tendency that we have, that holding memory has to be a particular way, or that we only hold onto the good memories or we only hold onto the bad memories. And that actually we're a lot more expansive than that, and the conditions that we're living in right now, and also some of the neuroscience of how the brain works can have us leaning too far in one direction that we forget that there's actually, there's more.

That's right.

There's more. And so I appreciate the invitation around grace and just being real with the immensity of what so much of us are holding. All of us are holding right now in the midst of so much chaos and contradiction. And even in that there's still room to remember. Another R word that you often talk about is relationships, which you talk about how everything worthwhile is done with other people. And every single example that you raised, every single site of solidarity and interdependence that you talked about is woven with community folks that you've been connected to. Even your path to this work is connected to people that you've chosen and who have chosen you. And I'm curious how you approach building relationships with people and communities that you're working with around solidarity.

I honestly don't think that deeply about it. I just act. I practice. I am part of that stuff. I invite people all the time to do stuff with me if they want to. And I don't take it personally if they say no, and I will keep inviting you. Just because you said no this time doesn't mean that you won't want to do something another time. It just meant that you weren't available to do it this time. And if you tell me to stop bothering you, then I will stop bothering you. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

I think you know this from me, you've known me for a long time, that I am someone who has a lot of ideas. I am always kind of thinking about I'm interested in making things, and I would not be as interested in making things if I was just doing it myself.

I want to make things with other people because I think that that means that whatever I'm making will be better because more people's ideas will have been involved and more people will have contributed to making the thing, and they will see things that I don't see. They will hear things that I don't hear. They will feel things that I don't feel and then bring those to bear and we will be better because of it in the end, even when it's hard, even when it's hard to incorporate everybody's thoughts and feelings and desires into whatever it is that you're making, it's still worth doing. And so yeah, I really believe in invitation as the basis for me, the basis of making a good life, that you constantly and consistently invite people, and you never take it personally if they turn you down because you don't know why it is that they're turning you down.

Unless they tell you they're turning you down because they hate you. And that's a whole [inaudible 00:29:32]. But I think people are less likely to do that than is imagined, by imagining it. From where you are, it's like you catastrophize things usually when you haven't actually done them. You're like, "Oh, what about this? What about that?" You overthink. And I'm not an overthinker. I'm a, "Hey, this is an idea. I wonder who I know who's good at this thing or who likes this thing or who might be ideal partner for this thing?" And I don't just do that for projects. I also just do it in general. Like, "Oh, I know this person seems to like this, so I'm going to send them this thing that I saw that reminded me of them and what they do." I'm always mailing stuff to people who... I'm like, "Oh, I saw this really cool, I don't know, scarf that reminded me of your colors or whatever."

And I just think to me, that's all part of being in the world with other people is remembering what people appreciate and keeping track of that, not as an exchange, but as a joyful opportunity to give and to be just in good relation with each other and right relation with each other. I also think it's okay for people not to like you. So I'm also not somebody who feels like... I don't see it as a personal upfront if somebody doesn't like me. I'm just kind of like, "Okay, maybe our personalities don't get along." I hope that if somebody is not happy with me, that they will communicate that to me, I think communication is really key and important and a basis for any sort of good relationship.

So I would really want to know what did I do to hurt you if that's something? And if I agree that I did, then I want to actually work on taking accountability for what I did and working to make repair to the best that I can. And without any expectation that you should then be like, "Oh, okay, great. You repaired this. I feel good." But rather that I'm trying to do my best to repair within what I think I can do to do that, it's really important. So I don't know if that answers your question.

It does.

But I think you have to do all those kinds of things.

We do.

And you don't have to like people to do this. You don't, you don't have to be a quote, people person. I'm not a people person. I'm actually very much of an introvert, and I might also be a little antisocial actually. Even with all of that, I can still build solid and good relationships with people. And I think that says everything to me that you need to know about that because I think the reason I prize relationships is because I believe that we're absolutely interconnected and that we won't survive without each other. That's just a truism. And that you may want to believe otherwise. That may be your way of coping or whatever, but it's just not true. So you are not going to survive alone. Yeah. You're just not. And I think, I hope what people are seeing now with all the catastrophes and the climate change issues and the stuff we're dealing with that is outside of our control, how much more we'll need each other moving forward.

Yeah. And not just from a transactional point of view, which is what I really appreciate about what you're saying. When you see people, you see who they are and the gifts that they bring. So it's really easy for you to make those bridges of connection because you're pulling at the heart of who someone is versus what they can do for you alone.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And also, what do they seem to be interested in?

Exactly. Exactly. I think it's such a powerful lesson for folks who are really interested in solidarity and movements to lean in on, because I think a lot of folks wonder about the longevity of solidarity, either campaigns or coalitions or projects, and some of them don't last that long because of the quality of the relationships that they're a part of. They're much more transactional rather than transformational relationships that are interdependent with people.

Yeah, I think that's true. But I do also want to make the point that I don't think we have to be friends to [inaudible 00:34:10]. You know what I mean?

Absolutely.

I don't think we have to be friends to organize in a good way with each other. And I think a lot of pain often comes from people who think that they need to be friends with everybody they're organizing with, and in fact, even sometimes more than that, that they're quote, unquote family and no, you're not family. Your family is your family. And that's complicated enough. And so I think I keep saying to people, "It's worth investing in being great comrades to each other," and sometimes great comradeship is better than everything else because you're not putting so much pressure on each other to be and fulfill all these needs and desires and emotional wants and all the things that are tied up to us as human beings.

You can kind of outsource that to other people rather than to your space where you're doing this movement work together or building together or whatever. Now, if you happen, many people have grown to love and consider family in my life taken in separate from the work we did together. You can build those kinds of relationships out of the relationships of work and of co-strugglership, but it's not a given, and it doesn't have to be in order for the co-strugglership to be good.

Yeah. Yeah. Those are really important distinctions to make. And also an invitation to just generative boundaries. We have particular kinds of relationships inside of our movement orientations. And then like you said, family. Family is family. Yeah. Well, Mariame, I feel so full, and I'm percolating on so many seeds that you dropped, and I feel really grateful for your just clarity in how you move and also how you invite us in to both see and understand this work in ways that feel more liberatory, more hopeful, and also more strategic. And you talked about the sacred journey going back to Chicago. I hope that happens for you to get to see this public site, and I'm really excited to get to support the exhibition that you have coming up this fall, and also welcome the listeners to do the same. Thank you so much, Mariame.

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it, Adaku. And yeah, and also just want to remind everybody about just how important it is for us to stay in struggle with each other, and not when it's abusive and harmful. No, but even when it's hard.

Yeah. We are worth being in it with each other.

It's really true. It's really true.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm so grateful Mariame could join us to share her legacy, her unrelenting commitment to our collective freedom and inspiring projects that reclaim and sustain our memory. Please check out her work at project-nia, N-I-A, .org, and we would love to hear from you about your own projects, projects that preserve history and memory. How are you reclaiming public sites to deepen solidarity, interdependence, and healing? Connect with us and share your stories via our website, www.solidarityis.org where you'll find past episodes of this podcast as well as information about how to cultivate transformative solidarity principles and practices. Also, you all please make sure to subscribe so that when the next episode comes out, remember we keep us safe, be gentle and courageous with you and each other. See you next time.