We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses structural racism and racist violence, including police shootings, as well as sexual violence.

“The familiar trope about the need for young people and the cops to get to know each other was bandied about, useless pablum offered as a solution for ending police violence, which relies on a faulty definition of the problem. As a young person once told me: ‘I know the cops here very well, and they know me. We know each other too well. That’s not the problem. The problem is that they harass me daily. If they’d stop that, we’d be fine.’”

It is common to cite ignorance or a lack of understanding as a cause of social tension, since it implies a convenient solution whereby a bit more education and interaction will cause the problem to go away. However, the problem between Black men and police is not one of ignorance, argues Kaba, but one of racist assumptions entrenched in systems of power. The oppressed have no need to understand the oppressors. The oppressors simply need to stop their oppressing.

“By design or necessity, Black people have focused on our collective rights over our individual liberties. This makes sense in a society where we don’t just assume individual Black guilt and suspicion; we are all guilty and we are all suspicious […]. In that context, individual liberties and rights take a back seat to a collective struggle for emancipation and freedom.”

In the United States, liberties are traditionally understood as belonging to individuals, such as the right to criticize one’s government or to bear firearms. For Black Americans, however, they have had to focus more on group rights because they have traditionally experienced oppression as members of a group. This compels them to take a more collective interest in the rights of Black people as a whole, because the violation of one Black person’s rights is not about them as an individual, but rather about the fact that they are a Black person, and so those violations are likely to have spillover effects for the entire community.