Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ’Til We Free Us is a searing, hopeful, and necessary intervention—a reminder that abolition is not about our feelings, but about collective transformation. With clear-eyed compassion and unwavering principle, Kaba offers readers not a destruction manual, but a blueprint for building the structures that sustain life. In these essays and interviews, she reorients us: failure is not fatal, but an opportunity for growth. Harm is not an aberration, but a certainty—and our work lies in meeting it with care, not cages.

Kaba’s prose is sharp, accessible, and deeply human. She dismantles the myths we’ve been fed about police, power, and punishment, revealing how the legal system criminalizes survival, particularly for Black women, BIPOC youth, and "imperfect" survivors like Marissa Alexander. She makes plain that fewer police would mean fewer opportunities for brutality, yet warns us against mistaking courtroom victories for systemic change. Again and again, Kaba insists: “Hope is a discipline.” It is not passive, but practiced—a daily act of solidarity, community-building, and imagining otherwise.

One of Kaba’s most powerful contributions is her challenge to the narrative of the "perfect victim"—a narrative that underpins rape culture, the abuse-to-prison pipeline, and the criminalization of survival strategies like sex work. She urges us to shift from individual action to collective responsibility, from punitive mindsets to healing justice. She reminds us that a system that cages people never cages the conditions that create harm in the first place.

Reading We Do This ’Til We Free Us feels like sitting at the feet of a beloved teacher who holds you accountable while never letting you lose sight of your own capacity for compassion and change. It’s not a comfort read, but it is a care-filled one—an invitation to practice a harder, more meaningful kind of hope. A vital text for anyone dreaming of a freer world.

📖 Read this if you love: abolitionist thought grounded in community care, radical hope as a political practice, and the works of Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and adrienne maree brown.

🔑 Key Themes: Abolition as Creation, Imperfect Survivors and Criminalization, Healing Justice and Mutual Aid, Hope as Discipline, Racialized State Violence.