“It’s not just about: ‘We need to talk about women, we need to talk about queer folks, we need to talk about trans folks,’” BYP100 founder Charlene Carruthers told The Root. “We need to look to their work—historically and currently—because it puts us in a position to tell more complete stories. And when we tell more complete stories, we’re able to craft more complete solutions.”13
8toAbolition
When “Defund the Police” started to become trendy in the summer of 2020, many activists attempted to appease the majority of potential allies who may feel threatened by such a radical stance. They were quick to clarify that this demand was simply meant as a call for reallocation, not a call for abolition. They explained that the goal was to take surplus funds out of inflated police department budgets—funds designated, as an example, for military-grade equipment—and begin investing them in communities. It was something more digestible for the general public.
One of the leading coalitions for this strategy was Campaign Zero, which launched 8 Can’t Wait (www.8cantwait.org), a campaign to implement certain reforms within police forces to curb police violence. Hard-liner abolitionists were appalled. The campaign had all the elements they despised: “reform,” “police,” and “wait.” Within weeks a new coalition was born through internet chatter among some of these purists. They designed 8toAbolition (www.8toabolition.com), a direct response to 8 Can’t Wait, and when they say defund the police, they mean what you think they mean: the eradication of police and prisons.
The authors of 8toAbolition—Mon Mohapatra, Leila Raven, Nnennaya Amuchie, Reina Sultan, K Agbebiyi, Sarah T. Hamid, Micah Herskind, Derecka Purnell, Eli Dru, and Rachel Kuo—are a diversified group of individuals spread across the country. They are, in no particular order, Black, Latino, Asian, Arab, Muslim, white, trans, queer, migrant, disabled, sex working, caregiving, and working-class. And while their identities vary greatly, their identity politics are closely aligned. Put simply, that politic boils down to this: “We believe in a world where there are zero police murders because there are zero police.”
Together the group members envisioned an eight-point path to justice, as outlined on the organization’s website, 8toabolition.com:
Defund the police by enacting the highest budget cuts each year until the budget is zero.
Demilitarize communities by ending police militarization programs and repealing policies like broken-windows policing and hot-spot policing.
Remove police from schools and prohibit surveillance of Black and Brown students by school officials through programs that criminalize them.
Free people from jails and prisons and reject all “alternatives to incarceration,” including electronic monitoring and coercive programs.
Repeal laws that criminalize survival, such as homelessness, sex work, and mandatory arrests in domestic violence cases.
Invest in community self-governance by promoting neighborhood councils and funding community-based public safety approaches such as non-carceral violence prevention and intervention programs.
Provide housing for everyone by repurposing empty buildings, houses, apartments, and hotels.
Invest in care, not cops, by redirecting funds allocated for law enforcement to programs that build community relationships and resources for mutual aid and transformative responses to harm.
The preceding is a simplification of the organization’s very detailed plan for a better future. If you’re interested in the mission to build a society that transfers safety and well-being from police to communities, 8toAbolition has several resources that detail specific demands, as well as tools for amplification on social media.
The Alliance for Safety and Justice
If the chapters regarding mass incarceration piqued your interest, you’ll want to acquaint yourself with the Alliance for Safety and Justice. Many organizations are fighting mass incarceration by way of research-based advocacy—the Sentencing Project, the Marshall Project, and Prison Policy Initiative, just to name a few—but the Alliance for Safety and Justice stands out because it is driven by directly impacted individuals with inside knowledge . . . literally.
For the last four years, the organization has been led by CEO Jay Jordan, founder and poster child of the ongoing #TimeDone campaign. Jordan organizes individuals like himself who are living with conviction histories and face countless barriers to success long after their sentence has expired. The campaign took on California’s Ban the Box movement, which ultimately removed the requirement for job applicants to disclose their criminal history. Testifying about his struggles with stigma and unemployment after incarceration, Jordan has worked with many organizations, both as a staffer and a participant in several coalitions, to create more accessible options for equity and personal development for those leaving prison.14
In addition to incorporating the #TimeDone campaign, the Alliance for Safety and Justice brings the victims of crime into the conversation regarding imprisonment and punishment. For example, in 2022, the organization surveyed more than 80,000 crime survivors from across the country to gauge their views on public safety. The resulting report, Crime Survivors Speak: National Survey of Victims’ Views on Safety and Justice, had several revelatory findings, such as less than 50 percent are allowed conferences with the perpetrator upon conviction, and 68 percent said they would rather see taxpayer dollars invested in crime prevention, crisis assistance, and strong communities than increases in arrests, longer sentences, and incarceration.15
I worked with Jay, who stepped down from his role at ASJ in late 2023, on Proposition 17, the California ballot measure to end felony disenfranchisement in the state. (We won.) When he speaks he commands the room, so I’ll let him leave a final thought, this one from his appearance on The Problem with Jon Stewart:
“We don’t have a public safety system in this country. We have a crime response system.”16
Choose Your Own Liberation
The racial and economic divides in America are man-made and deeply rooted in the nation’s identity. The latter makes the struggle to close the gaps painfully challenging, but the former ensures its probability. If people can create a divide, they can build a bridge to cross it.
We have been conditioned to believe that those people are our elected representatives, when in reality politicians would more readily save themselves, and their positions of power, than anything else. You have to wonder about the kind of person who would run for political office. They’re ambitious. They’re willing to bend their values to appease voters. They’re seemingly willing to undermine their constituents only to later engage them in futile collaborative endeavors.
This is not a political book, because I have long given up on political solutions. Proposed and enacted by people who strive for individual power rather than collective power, legislative actions have never gone far enough when it comes to real change. Legislation is entangled in a system of legal precedent and social control, and it falls prey to rollbacks, caveats, carve-outs, and reversals. More commonly, they serve as rhetorical tools to push party-lines agendas, with both Democrats and Republicans more interested in maintaining a majority in a finite chamber of members, rather than what is good for the majority of their constituents.
After the 2020 general election, I changed my voter registration to No Party. This angered many of my liberal friends, who interpreted my decision as indifference. In some respects, they were correct, but not entirely.
I remember the moment I made my pivot quite clearly: I was at Outback Steakhouse, nervously cramming Bloomin’ Onion bits into my mouth while watching the Super Tuesday primary numbers come in on the TV behind the bar. The race had come down to Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, and I was pulling for Bernie. Yes, he was another old white man, but so was the other guy. I liked Bernie because he hated fanfare. Rather than a stage with intro music and waving American flags, Bernie announced his first candidacy in 2016 by walking outside his office, telling a handful of reporters he was running for president, and then walking away to finish his lunch break. I liked that he was about the work, not about the performance art that has come to plague each congressional hearing and presidential debate. In politics there is always drama, because when there isn’t, people don’t pay attention.
The drama in the 2016 and 2020 primaries came at the expense of the most unwilling participant: my boy Bernie. In 2016 WikiLeaks exposed emails between top officials of the Democratic National Committee mocking Bernie and vowing to undermine his campaign. As I sat munching on fried onions, I watched another successful campaign for the establishment. The day before, three major candidates—Pete Buttigieg, Tom Steyer, and Amy Klobuchar—withdrew, each endorsing Joe Biden. In fact, every major candidate who had bowed out before Super Tuesday—Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Julián Castro, Andrew Yang, and Michael Bloomberg—had endorsed Joe. For the casual primary voter, their party was telling them only one candidate made sense. I had just asked for more dipping sauce when CNN made its projections: 629 pledged delegates for Joe, 539 for Bernie. A month later, Bernie dropped out.
Change is hard. None of us really like it—even when we yearn for it—and politicians hate it. Bernie had proposed changes that appeared radical in 2016, things like Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, and free college tuition. Even though all of these were mainstream talking points by 2020—free college tuition morphed into the debate over student loan forgiveness—Bernie was ostracized by the Democratic Party in the name of maintaining the status quo. The primaries, like most politics, had simply become a game, and I was done playing.
The truth is, stripped down of all rhetoric, America’s two parties are divided on two talking points, and two talking points alone: guns and abortion. Everything outside those subjects is hot air, the passion behind it fueled solely by the desire to maintain power. The parties are so alike that they’ve been able to swap titles, with Southern Democrats becoming Republicans and more liberal voters becoming Democrats in 1964, a period known as “realignment.”
I still engage in politics, particularly when it comes to local elections, for two reasons. The first is the suffering I’ve seen in the eyes and body language of those who have been stripped of their right to vote. In my many interviews researching articles about felony disenfranchisement, I’ve heard about the pains of feeling like a “non-person,” of having no say in the decisions that impact your life, of desperately attempting to reintegrate into society, while constantly being reminded that you still cannot really be a part of it. I vote for the people who cannot.
The second reason is more of a long game. The other day, my son fell off his scooter and scraped his knee. I think the sight of gushing blood streaming down his leg hurt more than the wound itself, and it certainly scared the shit out of me. My instinct as his mother, however, isn’t to walk away and hope he finds his way to a doctor who can fix him. No, I clean the wound, put a bandage on it, and get him an ice pack. I do what I can to curb the bleeding until we can get to an urgent care. That’s how I feel about voting. The options are never ideal and, at best, inadequate to fix the problem, but I’ll do what I can until a more viable option becomes available.
The longest-running ideological shortcoming seems to be this idea of there not being enough for everyone: not enough money, not enough housing, not enough food, not enough freedom. Even the most staunch advocates for Adam Smith’s capitalism seem to have lost touch with his original hypothesis: That society is not composed of a zero-sum, finite-pie amount of substance, where one person’s gain means another’s loss. The thought of freedom should not be threatening to anyone, and a true patriot would embrace the struggle to achieve it.
Some may read this book and think, “What does she know about patriotism? She clearly hates America!” I get it. And when I first started writing this book, I might have agreed with them. I had stopped singing the national anthem at sporting events, and I hated the Fourth of July. The fireworks scared my dogs, woke up the baby, and in celebration of what? What was there left to love in a society so entrenched in divisive rhetoric and oppressive systems?
What I learned through the process of writing this book, however, is that the individuals I talked to really love the people of this country and believe in the promise of democracy and freedom, although yet unfulfilled. It’s still all about survival, but collective survival, collective uplift. They believe in people and their ability to self-liberate, collaborate, share responsibility, and care for each other. That belief is what I’ve come to embrace as American.
You can tell the story of this country two ways. The first is a story of atrocities. That story begins with the genocide of the people who called this land home long before it was discovered by Europeans, climaxes with the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans, and culminates with 2,000 Black men and women killed by police in a five-year span.
The second is a story of revolution. Of people who fought together in Bacon’s Rebellion. People who fought together against the British, the only colors of division being the ones dyed into their frock coats. It’s the story of people who were hosed down, hounded by hounds, and who returned to the streets the next day to fight again. It’s the story of a well-trodden Edmund Pettus Bridge, crossed on Bloody Sunday (March 7, 1965) when state troopers attacked unarmed, peaceful marchers with billy clubs and tear gas; crossed again in 2015 by members of local Black churches who walked the bridge starting from the Montgomery side—what they termed as a “reverse march”—protesting new rollbacks to the Civil Rights Act; crossed the next day when then-President Barack Obama and Rep. John Lewis led another group along the same path to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the initial crossing; crossed again in July 2020 as a horse-drawn wagon carried Lewis’s casket over the expanse. Back and forth, back and forth, each footfall a determined step in the direction of freedom, justice, and equality.
Neither story has an ending, nor are they independent of each other. But you get to decide which story you want to be a part of. You can contribute to the nation’s atrocities, or you can participate in revolutionary change that embodies the freedom it presumes to uphold. There is no middle ground: Abstaining is simply opting to engage in the former by default.
Should you choose the growing movement of liberation, be as systematic about dismantling the nation’s defects as its early citizens were about embedding them in its fabric. Learn about history, not as a way of focusing on the past but as a way of informing you, the way the individuals profiled in this book have been informed by their own histories. Our collective experience will provide tools to aid in our collective salvation.
You have individual tools as well: a prominent social media account, perhaps, or a knack for storytelling. Maybe you have surplus food, surplus land, that can be developed into community resources. Maybe you have money to fund programs created by incarcerated activists. Add your individual tools to the larger box of collective tools, and apply them to a plan. Take the lessons learned from the past, and forge a path forward. Pave a wide road that can accommodate everyone who’s willing to help propel the movement in the direction of freedom. And when you arrive, build a foundation strong enough to last.
