- [Jana] So I'm Jana Vi, I
know many but not all of you
and I am really excited and really honored
to introduce Mariame Kaba.
She is someone who I really consider one
of my greatest teachers
even though I've never
met her before tonight.
(laughs) Little bit awkward.
And I have been reading
her writing for many years
and really have learned
so much more from her
than from many of my
formal teachers in life.
So I'm gonna tell you just
a little bit about her
but her bio and her work
and the organizations she's
co-founded are way too long
for me to list tonight
but I'm gonna tell you a
little about a couple campaigns
that she's run and one that
she's working on right now,
if that's okay.
So she worked in Chicago for 20 years,
more than 20 years maybe
and has just recently
returned to New York City.
She organizes in the
areas of gender justice,
racial justice, prison abolition
and transformative justice
and has worked on some of the campaigns
I wanted to talk about are
one to get the City of Chicago
to pass a bill to give reparations
to survivors of police torture.
(audience claps and cheers)
Another with a group of, large
coalition of folks I think,
working to oust the state's
attorney, Anita Alvarez
who was in part
responsible for the coverup
of the police shooting of Laquan McDonald.
(audience claps)
And the campaign that she,
one of the campaigns I'm sure
that she's working on right now,
one of many I'm sure, is to
around the case of Bresha
Meadows who is a 15 year-old
who's currently detained pretrial
who's a survivor of domestic violence
and is being charged
with defending herself
against her abusive father,
so I hope that she gets
to talk about that.
So please join me in
welcoming Mariame Kaba.
(audience claps and cheers)
- [Mariame] So, I don't do
photographs or images or video,
so I'm gonna be standing over here.
It's not because I don't
like you on this side.
(audience laughs)
Which is why I'm
also standing here.
So they turned it off?
(man murmurs)
Okay, you've turned it off, you're great!
Awesome, thank you.
So, I wanna thank the NYU
Review of Law and Social Change
for the invitation really
to join you this evening.
I want to thank my fellow panelists
who I have so much admiration for,
in terms of your work, I'm
inspired by all of you,
all of you are younger
than me, I hate that.
(audience laughs)
I really do.
(audience laughs)
But I am so, I am so so inspired,
I can't believe what's going on right now
and I can't believe I get
to live in this moment.
And I wanna thank all of
you for being here tonight.
So, Sterling Brown, who's
a folklorist and a poet,
wrote a poem in the mid-1930s,
it's a poem called "Southern Cop"
and I'd like to open with that poem.
"Let us forgive Ty Kendricks.
"The place was Darktown.
"He was young.
"His nerves were jittery.
"The day was hot.
"The Negro ran out of the alley.
"And so Ty shot.
"Let us understand Ty Kendricks.
"The Negro must have been dangerous.
"Because he ran
"and here was a rookie with a chance
"to prove himself a man.
"Let us condone Ty Kendricks
"if we cannot decorate.
"When he found what the
Negro was running for,
"it was too late
"and all we can say for the Negro is
"it was unfortunate.
"Let us pity Ty Kendricks.
"He has been through enough,
"standing there, his big gun
smoking, rabbit-scared, alone,
"having to hear the wenches wail
"and the dying Negro moan."
So it's long been open
season against black people
in this country.
That's not new.
And that poem by Sterling Brown is a poem
that's been written over and over again.
Since the 1930s.
And was written before the 1930s.
So we know that this
is a long, long history
and that we are living still
in the afterlife of slavery
and that chattel slavery
was also not the beginning
and that anti-blackness precedes that.
And so that it's important for us
to understand the context
within which we live
and the context that we have
to continue to struggle in,
in order to be able to get
to what we hope, for me,
is an abolitionist end.
My friends at Critical Resistance tell us
that policing at its
very core is structured
to use force to maintain laws
that disproportionately target
poor brown and black people,
indigenous people, youth
and queer and trans people.
I would add people with disabilities.
Policing as it exists
is not a broken system.
- [Audience Member] Exactly.
- [Mariame] It works
exactly as it was meant to.
(audience claps)
Therefore, we must keep
imagining and fighting
for a world without police.
And I think for many many
people that terminology
and that turn of phrase that
the system is not broken
but works as of designed
has not been credited
to the source of that,
the people who popularized
that idea were the people
who started Critical Resistance in 1998.
An organization that I think
more people should know about
and more people should support.
Because they've been part
of establishing an
intellectual scaffolding for us
that takes us from the 1970s
when white feminists
actually were abolitionists,
anti-prison organizers.
I know that sounds shocking,
(audience laughs)
'cause like who are the white
people doing that today?
Especially the white women feminists
who are actually carceral mostly
in the way they try to solve problems.
(man murmurs)
They have a history and a
legacy they could go back to
if they wanted to.
So it's really important
to think about the legacies
that we have around the ability
to be able to frame these ideas
and who gives us the
intellectual scaffolding
upon which we stand
so that we can fight stronger and smarter.
So I'm gonna talk about
an abolitionist campaign
that I co-lead that was
referenced earlier in Chicago,
called Reparations Now.
As a way to ground the
idea of police abolition.
And to make it concrete for
those who tell me regularly
that they can't quote
"wrap their brains around the concept."
I think to my, you know,
I thought Abe's point is so apt
and I say it all the time
that for many white people
they're already living
an abolitionist present, yeah?
- [Audience Member] Yeah.
- [Mariame] They never see cops.
Except when they call them.
The police are doing work for them
in other communities, the ones we live in.
When Johnny gets caught with drugs,
he gets treatment and support.
Not punishment and banishment.
They're already living
an abolitionist present.
So it's not hard to wrap
your brain around it at all.
The question is, why not for our kids too?
Really is the question.
So I wanna say that my
abolitionist vision and practice
about ending policing is
guided by three main questions.
The first question is,
how do we reduce contacts with police?
How do we reduce contacts with police?
I learned about this through
working with young people,
mostly young black people who,
when years ago, when I was
like in my delusional state,
I was offering things
like having relationship
building opportunities
with the cops.
That's about 15 years
ago, maybe 20 years ago.
And it was a young person who said to me
"uh man, Miss Kaba, I don't
need to know the cops.
"They know me and I know them.
"I don't want a relationship with them.
"I want them to leave me alone."
That was the beginning for
me of a shift in thinking.
- [Audience Member] Yeah.
- [Mariame] About the fact
that they wanted less contact
with the cops.
And that that was in and of
itself an abolitionist demand.
The second question that I
want to make us think about
and ground us in is
how do we erode police power?
That the reforms and the policies
that people are currently proposing,
if they do not meet the test
of answering the question,
are those reforms and policies reducing
and eroding police power?
Then they are not abolitionist demands.
It's a very easy way to test yourself
and figure out whether or
not what you're offering is
actually increasing the strength
of the very institutions
you want to dismantle.
How do we repair harm caused by policing?
It's the third question
that we must wrestle with
and that we must ground
our ideas and thinking
and struggle around.
I also want to point out,
as my friend Rachel Herzing
has said that
"the problem of policing
extends well beyond the horror
"of people being killed by cops."
- [Audience Member] Yeah.
- [Mariame] And because of that
remedies must get at the heart
of the role cops play
rather than the most extreme
demonstration of their power.
What that means really
is that stop killing us
is a completely woefully
inadequate demand.
- [Audience Member] Absolutely
(audience claps)
- [Mariame] And that if
we are organized around
that as our demand,
we are sure to be losing.
We will always lose.
Because cops are not killing enough of us
for us to make that the
central demand in this moment.
- [Audience Member] Yep.
- [Mariame] It is too limiting
it doesn't actually explain the problem.
If you don't explain the problem
and you don't have an
understanding of that,
you cannot get to a
solution that makes sense.
(audience murmurs agreeably)
So I think what we need in this moment is
to reshape and redefine our vision
of what justice means.
We cannot settle for the
tinkering around the edges,
for reforms that actually
strengthen policing,
prisons and surveillance,
that Marbray brings up
this point of surveillance
that we leave out of the holy trinity,
which we should not.
Because it's incredibly important
and black people have been surveilled
since the first black person
set foot on this continent.
Surveilled in multiple kinds of ways
and if we don't wrestle with that,
we cannot address the overarching need
to dismantle the entire PIC.
We cannot settle for
individual indictments
that are mostly symbolic.
Or for body cameras on police
that are more likely to
be turned on the public
than on the cops.
- [Audience Member] Yeah.
- [Mariame] We have to
restructure the ways we interact
with each other, in order
to make the police the last
rather than the first people we call
in emergencies and non-emergencies.
We have to decouple the things
like mental health response from policing.
Why should people with guns
be doing wellness checks?
That means that's on us
as a polity, as people,
to give actual job
descriptions to the police
that are incredibly limited.
And by the way, the cops
tell us this all the time.
They do not want to be
social workers in schools.
So why not get them out of there?
- [Audience Member] Yeah.
- [Mariame] That would be
a good way to move forward.
Importantly, we have to abolish capitalism
if we were to successfully
end police as an institution.
(audience claps)
Gotta do it.
Got to do it.
You cannot talk about the police aside
from talking about capitalism.
The police protect property.
They do not protect people.
And so, the idea that we're going
to actually be able to solve this issue
by remaining in this
capitalist horror show is
like complete delusion.
I only have a very short time this evening
so I'm instead going to,
instead of focusing on
the first two questions
around how do we reduce
contact with the police
and how do we erode police power?
I'm happy to talk more about that
if we get a chance to have
more of a discussion later,
I want to talk
about how we repair the
harm caused by policing.
And I'm guided by Amilcar
Cabral's admonition,
- [Audience Member] Okay.
- [Mariame] "Always bear in mind
"that the people are
not fighting for ideas.
"For the things in anyone's head.
"They are fighting to
win material benefits,
"to live better and in peace.
"To see their lives go forward,
"to guarantee the future
of their children."
I think that, when I think about that
and I read a lot and
(laughs) I love books.
(audience laughs)
And I'm gonna get you to read a lot.
I don't care, the best, every time,
before I left Chicago,
a lot of young folks did some
really nice things for me
that I've been working with for years.
One of the things was a video
and they asked people "What
did Mariame teach you?"
And almost everybody had
"Read, keep reading."
Because I believe in that.
I think you gotta, you gotta read it
to understand the world.
And so Cabral really teaches us something
about abolition is not a set just of ideas
that people should be
keeping in their heads,
but about a fight
to actually improve the
material needs of people.
In order for them to be
able to live livable lives
in the world.
And so I spent almost
20 years, over 20 years,
in Chicago before moving
back home a few months ago
as was said.
And in Chicago, between 1972 and 1991,
there was a kind of cabal
called the Midnight Crew led
by an officer named Jon Burge.
And that group of police
officers tortured over 110,
that we can document, black people.
And when I say torture,
I mean real torture.
I mean suffocating people
with plastic typewriter bags
to try to get them to
give false confessions.
I mean putting people on radiators
and making sure that they were hit
so that they'd fall on the radiator
and it'd burn their stomachs.
I mean using electrical prods.
- [Audience Member] Yep.
- [Mariame] And putting
them on people's ears
and on their genitals and shocking them.
Playing Russian roulette with people
with loaded guns.
I'm talking torture engaged in
in a city calling itself
modern for over 20 years.
And it took families
and, most importantly,
the survivors of that torture
to start in the early
'80s into the mid '80s,
talking about what happened
to them from behind bars.
Representing themselves pro se in court
to say that they had been tortured
and no one listened.
There were a few people
who started to listen
and interestingly enough
they were lawyers.
But they were movement lawyers.
They were movement lawyers who understood
that litigation wasn't gonna be enough
but that litigation would
help get a story out
and create a record
and they began that
documentation in that fight
and they partnered in communities like
in the South side of Chicago
where Black People Against Torture
and other groups were also beginning
to sound the alarm that this was happening
in their neighborhoods.
The cops were picking people up,
torturing them, getting
them on false confessions
and then putting them on death row.
Over 12 of the torture
survivors were on death row.
They almost died
until Governor Ryan years later
commuted all their sentences
and ended up,
we ended up abolishing the
death penalty in Illinois.
The fight for the abolition
of the death penalty was intimately tied
to the Burge torture cases.
Just to give you a sense that
when we talk about movements,
that movements are always
building upon the past.
In order to be able to
stand in the present,
and that if you don't understand
that you can get nowhere without looking
at who came before you,
who was fighting before you
and how they did, then you're
not ever gonna be successful
in what you're currently fighting for.
So what I know for sure is
that I got to know, over the years,
torture survivors and their families
and I was incredibly
moved by their stories.
But the fight at the time was prosecution,
that we were gonna go after Burge
and we were gonna prosecute him
and we were gonna find a
way to get people in court
and get them to admit
to what they had done
and I knew we would fail.
Because the system, the legal
system, cannot support that.
Why?
Because the system will
never tell on itself.
It will never indict itself.
We cannot rely on it
(man murmuring)
for quote "justice".
And so for years people fought
and they got Burge fired in 1993.
And then years, years, years more
of investigative journalism and organizing
to get Burge to be brought up
on federal charges by the DOJ.
He goes to court,
torture survivors testify
and they can get him
on lying about torture.
And he gets a sentence
of four years in prison
after doing that to dozens
and dozens of people
after destroying communities,
that's four years.
People were despondent,
"what are we gonna do now?
"Right?
"We fought for the justice and the courts
"and it has failed us."
And meanwhile the survivors
and their families are left
with nothing, no material way
to be able to make their lives better.
Waking up with nightmares and cold sweats,
no psychological counseling.
So all that fighting,
only a few people getting
a few civil determinations
in terms of money
but the vast majority of survivors
and their families left behind.
So it was in that context that
in 2010 a group of artists,
lawyers, organizers, survivors
and their families came together
to form something called
the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials
which was to take an idea about using art
to think about what was possible
in terms of memorializing the cases
of torture that happened.
They invited the community
through a set of town halls,
charrettes and other things
to start talking about what to do now
that basically they had
exhausted everything.
It was at that time that I
got officially more involved
in the fight,
by joining the advisory board
of the Torture Justice
Memorials when it was clear
that no longer were we
gonna be focusing mainly
on a prosecution,
indictment, legal strategy.
Then I could get involved
in a different way.
To think about how we as a
community would come together
to create something different,
to imagine something else, to
create a more transformative
and expansive view of justice
than the justice we'd been fighting for
for 30 years before that.
So, just a long story short,
last year in May of 2015,
the Chicago mayor
and the city council passed
the first ever reparations law
in a municipality in America, yes.
(audience claps)
The first ever reparations law
in a municipality in the U.S.
That is dedicated towards people
who were violated by
racist law enforcement.
And I wanna say two things about that.
I wanna say that it's really important
that we got to still, we
fought to call it reparations.
Because we were not just
fighting for those survivors
in that moment in the City of Chicago,
but fighting for everybody else
to be able to stand on that example
to call for reparations more broadly
and to say that it's
possible for us to win.
We were told, very early on,
that no one would pass
this reparations ordinance.
We were told that it was impossible.
That Rahm Emanuel, no one
would actually do this, right?
And it's really important
that when people tell you no, no, no.
That you always respond with why not?
Why not?
Why not?
Because it is possible
and it makes sense that
it would be possible
because I'm standing here
because somebody thought it was possible
to abolish chattel slavery.
Even when people said it
was not gonna be done.
(audience claps)
That matters!
We gotta have people saying "why not?"
And fighting and continuing
to struggle anyway.
So I wanna say that for the campaign,
I was a co-lead organizer of the campaign,
there were four organizations
that were the lead organizers
for the reparations campaign.
It was CTJM that I mentioned,
Amnesty International, Project
NIA and We Charge Genocide.
And I don't have time to
talk about We Charge Genocide
in depth but I can't tell you how,
what an amazing opportunity it was for me
to work with this group of young people
as part of We Charge Genocide,
to take the case about
what was going on outside
of this country, to go to the U.N.
Which has its own problems
but to insist that a group of
eight young people of color,
black and brown,
stayed stood and said to
the whole entire world
that this was happening in Chicago.
That they were being tortured and harassed
and harmed by law enforcement
and got everybody on those panels
to ask the question to the
state right in front of them,
"Why are you treating black people
"in your country this way?"
And having the state
have to answer for that.
Those young people did
something really important
and it was to shame the country, right?
From the outside and we could not,
I cannot imagine that we
would have won reparations
had the country not been
shamed from the outside.
Had they not written
in the notes afterwards
that the reparations
ordinance should pass.
That we could use that as a springboard
for a six-month intensive,
intergenerational interracial,
inter everything campaign to
push during an election period
to push Rahm Emmanuel to come
to the table and do that.
What did we win through the
Reparations Now campaign?
Beyond the $5.5 million
which is not the thing
that was most important to the survivors
though that was helpful,
we also won an ability to be able
to teach the Burge torture cases
in Chicago Public Schools
starting next fall.
(audience claps)
To all eighth and tenth graders.
(audience claps)
So that nobody will ever
forget what happened.
- [Audience Member] Wow, wow.
- [Mariame] Very important.
Very important.
We also won a public memorial
which will be erected
to the survivors, the torture
and the resistance in Chicago.
Nobody will ever forget.
(audience claps)
Darrell Cannon who was
mightily, horrifically, tortured
in 1973 and then spent
nearly 25 years in prison,
15 of those in Tamms
Supermax, hell on earth.
When he stood in front of
the City Council in May
to tell his story, to say
what had happened to him,
and for the Mayor then
to apologize on behalf
of the City of Chicago,
he said that nobody,
he couldn't have imagined when
he was in his six by nine,
tortured 23 hours a day, cell,
he could not have imagined that moment
that somebody would
acknowledge they did it.
That mattered to him more than anything.
You can't imagine, when
you've been tortured
in this way and nobody will believe,
nobody believes that you were.
For people to believe
that 40 years later was really something.
We also have now,
currently people are
building a community center
on the South side of Chicago
with money from the city
to be able to provide
specialized counseling services
and vocational services
for survivors of torture
and their families.
Survivors have free city
college for themselves,
their children and their grandchildren.
(audience claps)
- [Audience Member] Wow.
- [Mariame] Yeah, so, I can go on and on
but the vision of that
document, of that ordinance,
is an abolitionist document.
That does not rely on any
strategy of going to court
where people cannot win
in that kind of way.
You have to take your
fight outside of the system
in order for it to officially be able to,
you know, give you what you need.
Some modicum and vision for justice.
So I'm gonna end by saying that,
you know, the Reparations
Now campaign was based
on a few questions that we ask ourselves
in a transformative justice framework.
We ask ourselves in a
transformative justice framework,
what went wrong?
What happened?
Who has been harmed?
And then you center those people.
How can we repair the harm?
That was the ordinance.
What can we do to prevent
this in the future?
And what is my, my community's, my state's
and my country's responsibility
to aid in that prevention?
Those are the grounding questions
that led us, that we fought for
and that we fought together around,
it's how we built our strategy
and ultimately, we were
able to bring that idea
and that vision to fruition.
Within a larger context of the
Black Lives Matter movement
and with that we achieved far more
than what any individual
criminal prosecution
or lawsuit could afford.
I'm gonna end by quoting Angela Davis,
who's a touchstone of mine,
in 1970 she wrote "the American
judicial system is bankrupt.
"Insofar as black people are concerned,
"it has proven itself to be one more arm
"of a system carrying out
the systematic oppression
"of our people.
"We are the victims not
the recipients of justice."
Let it be known that in Chicago in 2015,
some black people, having been the victims
of the criminal legal system,
were finally the recipients
of a modicum of justice.
We can build on this.
We must, onward toward abolition.
Thank you.
(audience claps)
(audience member cheers)
