Abolish Means Abolish

But this week of all weeks has really been trying my spirit and my soul. So on this fuck It Friday, I'm pretty much saying fuck it to every single goddamn thing. Coming up next, dear friends, is going to be my conversation with the author of the book Becoming Abolitionist, Dereka Purnell. I enjoyed this conversation so much, and I hope all of you do too, Folks. I am so excited to welcome to wokaf Daily for it the first time author Dereka Purnell, who is the author of a book whose

title I just love, Becoming Abolitionists. Dereka, we have talked about abolition on Woke a f in so many different forms, in so many different ways, about what it means to abolish something, what it means to purge it, right, And I think that in order to purge something, you have to recognize it. You have to recognize it's ills, the troubles,

the trauma, the grief that it is bringing. When we talked about abolitionists or slavery, we were, you know, abolishing a system of depravity, of cruelty, of horrifics treatment of human beings. When you wrote this book and you're in the title becoming Abolitionists, what does that mean to you? Oh? Wow, I love this question. I love the foreground and so the one. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited about this conversation. I went back and forth

on titles. It's very hard trying to figure out which title made the most sense for this book. And the reason why I ultimately landed on Becoming Abolitionists with this plurals it is because to be an abolitionist, I believe it's to always be in the process of the journey and reevaluating what makes the most sense for the future that we want to build, right and so like the reasons why I was an abolitionist when I first started writing the book are very different than some of the

things that I have right now. And it's just a allowing yourself to be curious enough to ask questions, to be in a conversation with people, to be wrong sometime, to reflect to say, oh wow, I used to think this about myself. I used to think this about the world. I used to think this about police and prisons. And now with more information, I have new better reasons to not want the police to be here, or I have new better reasons why well, I don't think that we

should have prisons in this society. And so in the book, I try to show that journey for me, but also for other people. Right ten twelve years ago, I guess ten years ago, oh my gosh, ten years ago, about ten years ago when George's Immerman killed Treymon and Martin. There are so many of us who were fighting, spending hours, sacrificing, you know, our work, our families, our school to make sure that someone was arrested. That is what we put

that energy in. And there are so many of those people who were at the forefront of those movements who now don't even believe in a don't even believe in prisons, don't even believe in police. And I wanted to talk about that because with people critique abolitionists, they'll say something like, well, you know, this isn't realistic. When we tried the realistic thing. We have spent our lives learning about the realistic way

you're supposed to hold someone accountabile, accountable. And now that we know that those systems were never intended to actually offer true justice, true accountability, and so we're constantly becoming and examining what kinds of systems that we want to abolish and then what we also want to build. You know, I love that one because I think that the journey that your book lays out is the journey that many

of us are on. Right. Where we wanted to believe in a criminal justice system, in a judicial system that was going to see our full humanity, that was going to actually uphold the creed that justice isn't act blind. Right.

I think that from two thousand and what was it, two thousand and fourteen until now, right, the amount of hashtags, the amount of unarmed black people that have been murdered, the video of nine minutes of George Floyd losing his losing, having the life squeezed out of him, not losing his life,

having his life stolen from him. You know, I wanted to believe in the beginning when we saw Trey von Martin to your point that there's no doubt this is a child, right, this was an adult, and so we know that he will be convicted because how could he not. And it was in that moment for me that I just I the faith that I had in our politics,

in our government, in our systems began to wane. And I want to talk to you about these different pinpoint pointed moments because you also lay out very clearly where you grew up right the neighborhoods and how they were filled with various forms of violence, whether you're talking about environmental injustice factors or you're talking about actual crime or the lack of jobs and you know, good schools and hopefulness.

What are those kind of pinpoint moments that stand out for you over this timeline of moving from believing in the probability that a policing system could work for black people and then understanding that it was never meant to. Yes. Yes, So I would say that early on, rather than saying that I like believe that this system weren't for us. I think now, having read in the book and read it like a thousand times for all the edits, I think it was probably the most accurate thing for me

to say is that I had really unexamined ideas about policing. Right, I had unexamined ideas about my own commitments to policing. I just assumed that they were here. I didn't ask where they came from. I didn't ask if we needed them. It was just like, oh, police kind of exist, like male people exist, like fire five or six, like teacher. They're just they're just a part of society. I didn't even have wherewithal I knew that there were problematic police.

I knew that there were police with my mom's friends. Right, there was a range of and there sometimes there was an OVERWEP and that a diagram. But you know, I just took for granted their existence. I really had unexamined commitments to these institutions. And so over time, especially when Michael Brown was killed, that was one of the first times I started being pushed to acts. Okay, like what is this thing about like why, why, why is this? Why can't cops just kill someone and kind of go home.

It was very It was a very huge political awakening for me and lots of other people. And what I also realized I was doing at that time alongside lots of other people, I was using what white people get, or at least what I perceived white people to receive as justice, as a metric for what I thought we

deserved too. So I would say, something happenuntil a white boy, like we already know this black hot would be in jail and we don't even have to guess because Mohammed nor in Minnesota end up killing I think Justine Diamond, the white woman from Australia, he's in prison, right, So we would say, you know, if this was a white person, this is what would happened. This is a white person,

this is what would happened. And at some point, by being in a a conversation with other organizers doing more study and doing more research learning about the origins of police I had to be like, Waite, what if this system that we know is racially unjust, what if it's also not working for white people and we're in fighting to get what white people will have. We're fighting that white people think we get, and it's just like what if

what if we get what white people get? Well, that then mean that a few of black people would die, And I don't think that's true because white people kill our police all the time. And I just don't want cops to go to prison after they kill us. I don't want the killings to stop. I wanted the violence to stop. And so it just completely disrupted my noses of justice and fairness and equity, and I had to let go of that metric. I had to ask, is

it unfair that we don't have it? Yes? But does it mean that it's real justice if we get it? And that answer was not clear to me. You know that is so illuminating because I think that we spend a lot of times comparing comparing ourselves, right, comparing what it is that black people don't have versus what it

is that white people have. The fact is is that because we have qualified immunity in this country, because you can just be a cop and you can fear for your life regardless of who is in front of you, kill them and then go home, is in fact the problem right and right now, just you know, just last week we had, after eight months of supposed deliberation and back and forth between you know, a Senator Corey Booker and Senator Tim Scott, they want to come out and

be like, Nope, the gap is too large for us to do anything about policing reform. So this moment of George Floyd having his life squeeze out of him for nine minutes that we all watch together, they want to tell us after eight months, well, we just can't do anything, so we stay with the status quo or devolve even worse into the place that we are. What does that

feel like? How did that feel to you? Do you know what I'm saying like, after we all witnessed this collectively in the midst of quarantine where we are all glued to our devices, glued to our television, and witnessed this collective horror together, and now eight months later they tell us that what we thought was the spark of something new is now it's just too big to do. Yeah.

So I felt, I think two immediate things. The first thing that I felt was immediately sympathy for George Floyd's family, because you know, Joe Biden had promised them I'm gonna champion police reform. I intend to keep that promise. I got you. We're gonna name this after George Floyd. We're gonna, you know, put you on front stage at the Democratic National Convention. We're gonna rally down. He was doing all of this while also still promising to give more money

to police, but he ultimately did. So he's walking this wide. You know, we're gonna achieve real justice and policing that everyone can enjoy, and I'm gonna give more money to the police. Okay. So I felt horrible for George Floyd's family to have that hope. To think that someone you're campaigning for, your trying to get them in office, you're on calls, trying to get policy passed. It hurts to think what that family is going going through right now.

The second, the second thing that I felt, how how can I just what's the most honest way to say this. It's not that I was not surprised, It's not that I felt let down, because when the George Floyd Act was initially introduced, I wrote in my column and I completely just I could just completely disagree with everything about that bill. So here we have a policing bill that I argue wouldn't have even saved George Floyd's life, right,

you know, Derek Children was called. Police were called because over an alleged use of a counterfeit twenty dollars bill, which is illegal, and if he used it, it is illegal, and cops have a constitutional power to stop people who's using counterfeit money. You can go to jail. Right now, people watch that its just like man over twenty dollars, over twenty dollars. Counterfeit twenty dollars bills are an important currency for people who are economically and exploited. And we're

in a recession, job crises, eviction crises. What could have actually helped people like George Floyd, people like my mom, people in our communities was resources, more stimulus, actual money. And so if the couple have just came and arrested George Floyd took in the jail, there would have been no uprisings, no protests, they would have been no like

and that's what happens every single day. So when I read this bill, I was just like the way, at the end of the day, what the actual problem was was, you know, people working class people, black people living on twenty dollars counterfeit exchanges. Being police now has become a way to give police more money, to do more training, to restrict chokeholds. Well, what about the poor? Why don't we give them more money to people? Why do we

give them more money to police? And at the end of the day, I called it in that piece and I called it in this piece around a couple of days ago. Whenever these reforms get you know, they go on tour. What ultimately happens, Police get more money until the next viral police killing and all the reforms that don't even work get put off to the side, and three people are still killed every day by police. And so it's frustrating that people have to be like, man,

I really have hope in this bill. I really have hoping this policy when I didn't have any hope, and it was quite bad, actually right, it was pretty bad. And then it's just like, well, now what now, what do you do? So reform isn't a realistic option, like and now he's saying polyst is not realistic. Reform is

not realistic. You know. It's funny because I have been moving myself towards a place where I'm like I don't even want to use the terms reform or reimagine, because you're reimagining something that is broken, right, Like, how do you reform something? How do you reform a leg that's been amputated? You don't, right, Like, you need to create

something different. And I think for me that's why abolition in it of itself feels right because it is the most honest thing because if you want to if you want to create a new system, you don't do so off of what is broken, right. You have to abolish is what is present in order to create something new.

And I feel like that's that's where the energy needs to be placed, which is that it's not enough to just say, oh, we're gonna reform, we're gonna reimagine, we're going to reassess, and we're gonna do all of these things, which is pretty much playing three card Monte with people's lives. You're just moving the cards around the table and you're not actually doing anything. It's a bullshit magic trick, right,

that doesn't produce That doesn't produce anything. When you hear the pushback when people talked about defund the police, right, and folks had said, you know, we should we shouldn't say defund, And to your point, at various points in the book, you're like, you know, if we're not, if we're if we're if we're talking about reallocation of funds, Like then that's the conversation that that's what I have said, if we're if defund the police is really talking about

a reallocation of funds to stop having where I sit in New York City a police department that has a budget of six billion dollars, Like when when you know what I'm saying. So it's like, it is that language. Should it be reallocation, should it be defund? Doesn't matter if if we're still again playing three card Monty with our criminal justice and policing systems. Yeah, well I like

defund the police for lots of reasons. One reason is because in twenty fourteen, when Black Lives Matter took off as a hashtag, people said black lives matter was divisive, like it's polarizing, all lives matter. I mean a lot of people didn't set that not in good faith. It's like, what, I will be on board with police not killing black people,

but you said black lives matter, So I can't. I can't even get it's like, come on, like seriously, So if something's black lives matter, it's polarizing that they just matter, like it's like the floor the bar is so low, like it's so solo. Right. The second thing I noticed around Black Lives Matter is that anyone, once it became more palatable, anyone could kind of say black lives matter and it not really mean anything that much anymore. You

could say black lives matter to defund the police. You can say black lives matter to give more funding to the police, and say black communities want this. Sacks Fifth Avenue was saying black lives matter. Everyone was just sort of saying black lives matter. But guess what, Black lives kept dying, right, black people being killed. What's interesting about defund the police is that it's a specific policy demand. It's like, take money away from the police. It's much

harder to then just co op something like that. Right. I'm not saying it can't be done, because I've seen it attempt to be done, but it's much difference. It's not as soft as black lives matter, for lack of a better phrase right now, And so that's another thing. The third thing I would say is that any fight towards freedom and justice has always used unpopular language at the time of the fight, and then thirty forty fifty years from now, what do we do? We say, man,

I'm so happy that they march for civil rights. Do you know what it was like to say that you were marching for civil rights in nineteen fifties? Civil rights? Oh, you must be a criminal, you're a troublemaker, as if they call MLK. You know, it's to say that you wanted women to be able to vote. It's imagine a man in the early nineteen hundred saying whoa, whoa, whoa. I would be on board with women voting, but I

don't like the words suffrage. Like this actually what we're doing when you say if the phrase, it's seriously the barrier. So let's figure out how to explain what the phrase means. But I imagine I would have guessed that the people who actually don't like the phrase most of them, not all of them. I've met a couple of people have really interesting critical arguments and defund the police and abolition right, and they are coming from a socialist analysis. They saying,

how do we build a broad basis? People who probably agree with what you're saying, but don't understand what it means. But they are committed to explaining what it means, right, which is different than I would get on board, but I don't like the language. So you gotta let police continue to kill three people a day because of a marketing campaign, Well, help us think about, you know, creative

language and creative ways to explain what abolition is. And so part of that is on abolitionists when we say abolition. When I say abolition, I mean we need to dismantle, eradicate, reduce the reasons why people need police, and we need to eradicate the institution of policing, and we need to eradicate the violence in society that make people feel that

they need police. It's both at the same time, and it's overtime, right, So that's on us to do that on society what people who don't know what that means. It's also on them to ask questions, to be curious, to critically engage their faith, to read to you know, to ask its. It requires both of that. But if you are not even open to having a conversation because of a term you don't understand, I think that's quite unfortunate, and I think there are a lot of resources out

here to learn more about what that means. I appreciate that so very much because I think you know too. One of the lies that we continue to tell in our society with regard to policing is that more police

equals more safety. Oh yeah. And the thing that I have been saying on woke f you know, interviews with former police chiefs, interviews with abolitionists, activists like yourself, is the fact that any I grew up in a very white suburb of New York on Long Island, and I will tell you that I never saw police officers ever, right, Like, that was not a part of my data to if I did, maybe they were, you know, driving past on

you know, on the main strip. What I did see were clean sidewalks, tree line streets, gated communities, country clubs, and resource centers and libraries and all of these things. And so, you know, one of the questions that another question that I have for you is how do we break that lie that gasolight about the fact that when we're talking about defund the police, that there's this association well, oh, you don't want to be safe, And I'm like some

of the safest neighborhoods have no police presence. What are you talking about? What they do have a resources and access? Absolutely yes, So that's and the inverse is also true. Right if you look at where I grew up in Saint Louis, I did not grow up in the community the tree line streets. It was very much, very very much the hood still is the hood. We haven't had a grocery store since two thousand, the year two thousand.

Not a grocery store, not a fruit market, not a community garden in sight, no health clinics, no jobs because the Highway ripped apart the most prosperous place where black people were employed by black businesses, ripped all those homes, community businesses gone, so people could commute from the suburbs to downtown Saint Louis to work, right, And so you look at a community like that, we look at Chicago, you look at DC where I'm sitting right now, in

Northwest super high rates of like violent crime, also among the highest per capital rates of police And so the police presence also doesn't reduce the violence that people fear. It's just not And every time, like right now, we're experience a murder hike, probably because we're in the pandemic. People are stressed out, there are fewer jobs, there's an eviction crisis that's happening. There's so much precarity that leads people to more vulnerable situations. And when there's a procarity

and vulnerability and a pandemic, there's violence. Like we know, the researchers know this, scientists know this. But then you read the New York Times, you read mainstream outlets, and it's like, y'all want to defund the police while there's a murder spike right now, Well, tell me why with a million cops in those places, especially in Chicago, Saint Louis, Detroit, DC, these neighborhoods, there's more police than anywhere else, you have to murder rate is still climbing. It's yeah, so more

police doesn't even equate to more safety. What it feels like, it feels like, okay, at least somebody's here to do something, But it's not uns If cops are standing outside of people's homes every night, guarding and stopping violence, that's not what's happening, right, So it's it's yeah, it's the inverse is not you as well. So it's like, well, what actually keeps people safe? You know, resources, strong social networks, education, jobs,

you know, pushing back on racism, homophobia, transphobia. You know. The one of the main reasons why people even kill people in the first place is because usually men want to control the sexuality of their partners. That leads to violence because you've been conditioning the patriarchy. Another reason why people end up killing each other is because of petty arguments. Usually it's men something said and assulted, but I have an idea of what a man should be. Police can't

stop patriarchy. They can't fix patriarchy, so they can't get to the root problem of solving harm. You know, people join like street games for protection. And then if you arrest people who are carrying a gun on them for protection and because they're no jobs, like none of that stuff is not our communities. And then they go to jail, they come out, they have a record. It's gonna be even hard harder for them to get a job, harder for them to get in school, harder for them to

get housing. So they're going to retreat to the place where they feel most safe. It's like how do we

support all of those people. How do we fight for broad sweeping changes so that people can be empower and have self determination to work in jobs where they have dignity, right where they have choices, where they have childcare and healthcare, and tuish it like it's all of those answers are there, and it's actually much cheaper to just fund police who primarily recruited from the working class, to police other working

class people. It's really really bad. Well, I will say this, Ica, is that I believe that your book is incredibly important and important in this particular moment that we are living in, and I hope that everyone picks up becoming Abolitionists and thinks about that word, thinks about that action and why it matters, and instead of just shrugging off phrases like defund the police, or phrases like black lives matter, phrases like you know, abolition, that you actually begin to understand

and unpack why we are saying those things now and why they matter. Dereka Purnell, I wish you the best of success with your book, Becoming Abolitionists, and I hope that you will join us again when you finish your successful tour because I would love to have you back. Yes, please have me. I really enjoy this. Thank you for all of your kindness and your thoughtful question. I really appreciate it. Appreciate you. Thank you. That is it for

today's Woke f Daily podcast. To hear more from today's show, including my full interview with Dereka Purnell, support me on Patreon at patreon dot com slash woke F. Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke, and stay woke as fuck.