Hi, I’m Jackie Strohm, the Prevention & Resource Coordinator at the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape. Welcome to this episode of History You Should Know, part of the PA Centered Podcast.
To celebrate and highlight stories of people who advanced the anti-sexual violence movement, particularly Black women, we are sharing a series of shorter episodes so you can learn all about the people and events that contributed to our movement
During today’s episode we’re going to learn about Mariame Kaba, an organizer, educator and curator whose work focuses on ending violence, dismantling the prison industrial complex, transformative justice, and supporting youth leadership development.
Mariame Kaba was born in New York City and came of age in the 1980s on the Lower East Side. She commuted to a privileged Upper West Side high school, which painted a clear picture of the racial disparities that separated her classmates from her friends on the Lower East Side.
Kaba's childhood helped lay the foundation for her passion for justice and liberation. Her father spoke openly about his politics, and was part of Guinea’s independence struggle, while working for the United Nations. Her mother was a deeply religious woman who focused on charity and mutual aid. She and her six siblings traveled often as a family, including to see friends and family in Africa, and she learned to speak different languages in her multilingual household.
Reflecting on her childhood, Kaba has said, quote “I recognize that a huge part of my belief in myself as a person was cultivated by the fact that I saw myself as Black and that it was just who I was. It was a break for me to come into my preteen years and begin to really recognize that, in this country, Blackness was seen in negative, unequal ways. But my childhood gave me so many tools, about being proud of myself, of my family and of my lineage. That was a buffer."
Kaba started doing anti-racism work as a teenager in New York City. In an interview she shared, quote, “My friends in the community were consistently harassed by police. I saw that particularly in the case of my brothers, always targeted by cops in my neighborhood. I didn’t think of it as anything to organize around. It was just what was going on, and it was kind of like the weather.” 
Kaba says she developed her politics through reading, experiences with friends and family who ended up in the criminal legal system, and a series of incidents of racialized violence in her community. She began to understand how the criminal legal system often perpetuates harm. 
On her website, Kaba indicates that she has been active in the anti gender-based violence movement since 1989, starting when she was in college. 
In 1995, she moved to Chicago to study sociology at Northwestern University. Over the next 20 years, Kaba co-founded multiple organizations and projects, with a particular focus on gender violence and restorative justice. She has also served on multiple advisory boards and committees.
In Chicago, Kaba also worked as the prevention and education manager at Friends of Battered Women and their Children, now called Between Friends, a domestic violence agency. She also served as the co-chair of the Women of Color Committee at the Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women’s Network.
In an interview she shared, quote, "When I was working in a domestic violence organization … I saw what we were offering people was so limited. We're not actually addressing the roots of these forms of violence. A lot of folks were like, 'I don't want my partner in prison. I don't want to call the cops.' That pushed me toward learning about restorative justice. Between anti-violence work and then learning about restorative justice, it was that that opened my imagination and started pushing me toward an abolitionist horizon."
In 2007, Kaba helped found the Chicago Freedom School, that provides training and education for young people and adult allies using social justice and anti-oppression practices to create a just world. 
In 2009, Kaba founded Project NIA, a grassroots organization that works to end the arrest, detention, and incarceration of children and young adults by promoting restorative and transformative justice practices. “Nia” means “with purpose” in Swahili. In 2016, Project NIA moved to New York City, and in 2019, launched the NYC Transformative Justice Hub, which brings volunteers together every month for political action and community project consultation. 
A lot of Kaba’s work focuses on transformative justice and community accountability. In an interview she shared, quote “You can’t force some­body into being account­able for things they do… Peo­ple have to take account­abil­i­ty for things that they actu­al­ly do wrong… They have to say, ?“This is wrong and I want to be part of mak­ing some sort of amends or repair­ing this or not doing it again.” The ques­tion is: What in our cul­ture allows peo­ple to do that?.. What in our cul­ture encour­ages peo­ple who assault peo­ple and harm peo­ple to take respon­si­bil­i­ty? What I see is almost nothing... We have to make com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers under­stand what sex­u­al harm looks like, what it feels like, why it is unac­cept­able. We have to make vio­lence unthink­able in our cul­ture. We have to make inter­per­son­al vio­lence unthink­able. It has to become that.”
In 2016, Kaba co-founded Survived and Punished, and still organizes with them. Survived and Punished grew out of the Campaign to free Marissa Alexander, a Black mother of three who was facing decades in prison for defending her life from her abusive husband. Organizers met members of similar campaigns, and began meeting to develop a national organizing plan; they named themselves Survived and Punished. 
About the organization, she has said, quote “We have come togeth­er nation­al­ly to put a spot­light on the fact that when you look at who is actu­al­ly incar­cer­at­ed and crim­i­nal­ized in the cur­rent crim­i­nal pun­ish­ment sys­tem, in terms of women and gen­der non­con­form­ing peo­ple, in par­tic­u­lar, often these are peo­ple who are sur­vivors of sex­u­al vio­lence and domes­tic vio­lence… They end up crim­i­nal­ized with­in the sys­tem, often for defend­ing them­selves against vio­lence or for crim­i­nal­ized sur­vival actions.”
She goes on to say, quote, “We under­stand that the link between crim­i­nal­iza­tion and domes­tic and sex­u­al vio­lence is inex­tri­ca­ble and unde­ni­able, and peo­ple find them­selves caught up in the sys­tem and end up re-vio­lat­ed and re-trau­ma­tized with­in that very sys­tem… We have to be mind­ful of the fact that the very thing we say we want to end?—?vio­lence?—?is being per­pe­trat­ed by that very same sys­tem. We are try­ing to end vio­lence with more vio­lence. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Kaba is also a founding member of the Just Practice Collaborative, a training and mentoring group for people who want to address relationship violence without reliance on the criminal legal system and traditional social services.
Kaba has authored and edited reports, articles, essays, curricula, zines, and other publications. She runs the blog, Prison Culture, and has even published a children’s book titled, Missing Daddy.
From 2018 to 2020, she was a researcher in residence on Race, Gender, Sexuality and Criminalization at the Social Justice Institute at the Barnard Center for Research on Women. During this time, she co-founded and worked with Andrea J. Ritchie, on a new initiative called Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action. Kaba and Ritchie continue to work on this project, with fellow researcher Woods Ervin. The project aims to interrupt and end the growing criminalization and incarceration of women and LGBTQ people of color for criminalized acts related to public order, poverty, child welfare, drug use, survival and self-defense, including criminalization and incarceration of survivors of violence.
Today, Kaba works as the director of Project NIA, and in 2021 she published the book, We Do This 'Til We Free Us. It debuted at number nine on The New York Times bestseller list for non-fiction paperbacks
Kaba's motto, known by her friends, colleagues, and anyone familiar with her work, speaks to her values: "Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone."
We are grateful for Mariame Kaba’s leadership and challenging us to think of alternative ways to get justice for survivors of violence.
Thanks for listening to this episode of History You Should Know, part of the PA Centered Podcast. To learn more about Mariame Kaba, check out the resources shared in the episode description. To learn more about the history of the anti-sexual violence movement, check out PCAR’s free History and Philosphy eLearning course at campus.nsvrc.org.