We Do This 'Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba

Author:Mariame Kaba
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2021-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

PART V

We Must Practice and Experiment: Abolitionist Organizing and Theory

Police Torture, Reparations, and Lessons in Struggle and Justice from Chicago

Prison Culture, February 2015

The national protests catalyzed by the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson last August continue even as many (including the mainstream media) have moved on. Some critics have suggested that the uprisings are leaderless, lack concrete demands, or are without clear strategy. Each of these critiques is easily refuted, so I won’t concern myself with them here.

In Chicago, many have used the energy and opening created by these ongoing protests to reanimate existing long-term anti–police violence campaigns. Hundreds of people gathered at the Chicago Temple to show our love for police torture survivors on the day after Jon Burge was released from house arrest. The gathering was billed as a people’s hearing and rally in support of a reparations ordinance currently stalled in the Chicago City Council. Politicians, faith leaders, and community activists spoke at the event. Poets exhorted the crowd. But the most impactful, poignant, and powerful words came from the Burge torture survivors themselves.

They spoke of the impact(s) of the police torture on their lives: the false confessions, the years of incarceration, the mental and physical trauma, the years away from loved ones, the feelings of anger, and ultimately the triumph of still standing in spite of the brutal violence.

As I listened, 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. It’s not that I don’t 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. I’ve revised my previous belief that the words should remain unspoken. “Who are they trying to convince?” I’d 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.

We are committed here in Chicago to making Black lives matter. The reparations ordinance is one concrete way that some of us have chosen to fight to make them matter. Through this decades-long struggle, we are prefiguring the world that we want to inhabit. Again, we have learned from Lorde:

At the same time as we organize behind specific and urgent issues, we must also develop and maintain an ongoing vision, and the theory following upon that vision, of why we struggle—of the shape and taste and philosophy of what we wish to see.

It’s not that Black lives will matter to others within this country when we win the ordinance. Rather, it’s that we who struggle together will have defined (in part) the vision of what we mean by Black lives mattering. Through the ordinance, we reject the torture of Black people. We demand that Black people’s torture be included in public school curriculum.

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