Abolition Work Shows Us There’s Joy to Be Found Even as the World Is on Fire

Part of the Series

The Road to Abolition

We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition is a call to rethink and re-practice the deeper everyday meaning, existential vitality and vulnerability of abolition praxis. As a co-parent of Black sons, I was deeply moved by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson’s new anthology, which invited me to rethink how structures of carceral domination are designed to break the bonds that unite us as caregivers and as human beings.

Through their intimate, courageous and truth-telling narrative force, the voices within this collection of healing texts not only unveil lament, but also encourage deep joy through a shared revolutionary understanding that we must form embodied interconnections, strive for nonviolent mutual touch and mutual care, and possess an audacious collective capacity and willingness to think, to imagine and to be otherwise.

Schenwar and Wilson’s book is a gift that reveals how doing the work of abolition needn’t be spectacular, but something as beautifully simple and yet profound and revolutionary as saying (and meaning it) to one’s child, indeed, to our collective children, or just to each other: “We’ve got you! We’re here for you! We won’t let you go!”

In this exclusive interview, Schenwar, who is director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism and board president at Truthout; and Wilson, who is an artist, educator, writer and organizer, discuss how abolition is a generative force, how their children inspire their struggle, and how practicing small and organizing for big things can be revolutionary.

George Yancy: I must be honest that prior to reading your book, I had not thought about the profound and complex connections between parenting and abolition praxis. In this regard, your book filled a lacuna in my thinking about abolitionism. What didn’t the two of you see being done or addressed such that you found it necessary to bring this book into existence?

Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson: The idea for this book emerged in the wake of the 2020 uprisings when discussions of prison-industrial complex abolition were getting … a little bit popular! As long-time abolitionists, this was striking to us: this welcome surge in public openness to the prospect of tearing down carceral systems — thanks, of course, to decades of intensive abolitionist organizing.

Organizers were deeply engaging with the fact that abolition is not simply a dismantling force — it’s also a generative one. Abolitionist work includes mutual aid, the building of transformative justice projects, the radical reprioritization of public funding, the creation of institutions of care and support free of policing. And yet, despite the importance of nurturance, growth and caregiving to the abolitionist project, one piece that often went missing from public conversation was the place of abolition in relation to parenting and caring for children. We recognized that conversations around these links were urgently needed, as prisons and policing constantly enact violence against parents, children and family formations on a mass scale. Punitive state systems persistently target parents of color, particularly Black and Indigenous mothers, and working-class parents. Even outside of state systems, police-like techniques of social control are still normative ways to treat children. Meanwhile, people who are parenting and caregiving in direct challenge to the prison-industrial complex — for example, people who are mothering children behind bars, people who are mothering children while being incarcerated themselves, and people who are simply parenting in ways that align with the values of abolition and liberation — are often rendered invisible. We also saw a need to further amplify the lessons we draw from parenting, and from children themselves, to nourish our abolitionist movements.

Abolition is not simply a dismantling force — it’s also a generative one.

When parenting and caregiving are erased from the stories of abolitionist movements, we lose something massive. The project of building a liberatory, caring, loving, abundant future must include fully acknowledging the work of birthing, raising, caring for and loving future generations.

Yancy: Maya, in your introduction to the book, you articulate a connection that I think needs to be emphasized again and again. Many might think that the political work of abolition is disconnected from what it means to be a parent. In this way, one may feel torn between two “irreconcilable” obligations. Please speak to how becoming a parent, for you, personally deepened your abolitionist passion. I think that parents who aspire to do (or are doing) abolitionist work need to hear this.

Schenwar: For me, and for a lot of people I know in the movement, parenting has ongoingly altered and shifted the way I think about abolition and the way I envision liberation. Part of this is that caring for a young child made tangible what care meant in a deep sense, in which it’s a constant action, a constant doing, for someone who is not me. People experience this in all kinds of different settings: caring for chosen family, caring for an elder, caring for a partner, caring for neighbors and community members. I saw how caregiving had the potential to form a challenge to individualism not just theoretically, but also in the doing, in the daily actions. For me, parenting my young kid illuminated powerfully how people can be truly connected to each other — intentionally interdependent — which is a key part of how to make an abolitionist world, a world in which we take care of each other and we (as opposed to some external, ultimately violent, force like police or prisons) keep each other safe. Early in the pandemic I was at home with my kid and I watched a webinar with Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Stephen (Stevie) Wilson, in which Ruth was talking about how “power” isn’t always bad; there’s not just hierarchical power, there’s interconnected power, like the power her best friend has in relation to her — the power we have over each other when we love. She called this “a power that makes the social possible.” And that power, which my kid has in relation to me, is an example of the interdependence that is a building block of an abolitionist world.

Also, sometimes in parenting, we create a bubble around ourselves — it’s what capitalism wants us to do, to close in the boundaries of the nuclear family. But if we break through that bubble and work to establish solidarities with other parents and caregivers, even the most sheltered of us will recognize that the prison-industrial complex is intertwined with parenting. My thudding, crashing moment of truly understanding how harmful prisons are was when my sister was separated from her child after giving birth. Prisons, policing, immigration policing and family policing systems are constantly enacting violence against parents, children and family formations on a mass scale, and separating caregivers and children, particularly Black, Indigenous, working-class, disabled and trans parents and children. So one reason that movements to abolish carceral systems must be integrally tied to parenting and caregiving is that carceral systems target and cause mass harm to parents and caregivers.

Yancy: Kim, in your conclusion to the book, you emphasize something that seems so clear and effortless: the process of showing up for others, particularly regarding children. Yet not everyone does this. You’ve convinced me that showing up is such a profound act of caregiving. Talk about how showing up is connected to building a more robust sense of community, how it is linked to liberation.

Wilson: Ruth Wilson Gilmore is someone that has long influenced my abolitionist practice and helped me to refine my analytical lenses. She’s also one of the many brilliant contributors to this book, and someone that both Maya and I often quote. Something that she says is that “abolition is presence.” I interpret these words to mean that presence is an act of deep love — a deep abiding love for humanity, which is in direct opposition to the death-making systems that want us to dispose of each other. I think that love is essential to our movement work, and that our relationship politics — beyond romance — must be rooted in a love ethic that we can delight in, and that replenishes us as we struggle together, but also that guides how we do our work.

How we show up for each other matters as much as the fact that we show up. Our presence requires that we consistently check in with each other, and it requires a commitment to open, honest and clear communication, including conflict resolution. We can’t just hope that radical change will emanate from our mere appearance. We have to deliberately engage each other and do the relationship work necessary to strengthen our bonds, because in doing so, our presence becomes an active thing that is growing, changing, evolving and responding to the current conditions.

Being present can look like so many things, and while our physical presence is preferable, we have to be creative with how to stay connected with each other because things like incarceration, geographic distance, illness and lack of financial resources make it difficult, and sometimes impossible, for people to be there in person. Presence to me means that we aren’t afraid to move in closer to each other (literally and metaphorically speaking), and we do so with consent — always with consent!

The project of building a liberatory, caring, loving, abundant future must include fully acknowledging the work of birthing, raising, caring for and loving future generations.

The most radical work isn’t always the most visible or public-facing work — it’s the stuff that happens behind the scenes, out of view, or that we are actively choosing to not see because that work is often gendered, devalued and seen as superfluous. Presence is the collective care work that we do for each other. It is the labor, time and energy that is the love-in-action that we pour into each other. It’s the countless ways that we demonstrate that people matter to us, and that serve as important reminders that someone is thinking about us and is happy that we exist.

Without romanticizing it, there is joy to be found even as the world is on fire. We cannot acquiesce to the logics of white supremacy and capitalism that require us to feel unloved, perpetually miserable, and that there is no hope for anything to change. To resign ourselves to the current conditions is to deny our collective power, and we harness that power by showing up for each other, over and over again — even when it’s difficult. I know that sometimes the struggle feels so big, and we may feel and be isolated, but it is because of these conditions that we are obligated to show up for each other. It’s also necessary for us to practice asking for and accepting help because the needs are not one directional, and too frequently the people accustomed to doing the heavy lifting around care work have a difficult time being the ones that receive care and attention. The caregivers need care too!

Many of the invitations and offerings in our book describe experiments that came about because there was an unmet need in the home, school, community or other setting. The thing about caregiving and parenting is that you’re often improvising and having to DIY your way to creating alternatives because the current structures are not designed to address many of our needs. It is in this spirit that we encourage folx to begin from where they are, with what they have, and to look around to see who else is similarly situated and bring them into the conversation. We devalue the resourcefulness that we all have when it comes to problem solving, and so much of what our contributors wrote about is how to collectively harness that resourcefulness to solve a range of problems. Our greatest resource is that we can not only imagine new worlds, and new possibilities, but that we can create them too, and when we find our people, we know that together we can transform things.

I think this is the revolutionary potential that I see in practicing small and organizing for big things. That is the ethos of this book, and something that feels so necessary to be reminded of right now. In spite of the horrors of end-stage capitalism, multiple genocides, climate violence and the continued expansion of a militarized police state — that where we build community, where there are people committed to liberatory struggle rooted in love, we will not only survive, but we will win.

Yancy: Maya, when I think about the imagination, I think about its generativity, and its capacity to encourage us to believe in and to seek the otherwise. The imagination is constantly under intimidation and coercion, especially within societies that are governed by violent policing. Talk about the power of the imagination, and how as adults we need to listen to our children’s voices that often help to empower us in moments of deep cynicism as we face state violence and a carceral system that is overwhelmingly complex and resistant to change or transformation.

Schenwar: We live in a policed, norm-driven, carceral, capitalist society that is in the business of squashing our imaginations. But kids can bring this gust of creativity and wonder and thinking-outside-the-box-ness that poses a challenge to that squashing. When I interviewed Rachel Herzing a few years ago, she spoke about a lack of creativity as a “primary stumbling block” to moving beyond prisons. And then, when my kid was born, I suddenly lived with a person who didn’t know a lot of things about the broader world but was overflowing with creativity and brought it to every task. There were horses in the freezer and shooting stars in the bathroom and a magic wand could turn me into a giraffe covered in ice cream, and if the tower of blocks fell over, there were a million ways to rebuild it — some worked, some didn’t, but imagining and trying and experimenting were just integral to my kid’s life. So in that way, they were just always teaching me lessons that I hoped I could somehow bring to the work.

I hear my kid and other kids constantly imagining ways that we could do everything from ending wars, to turning prisons into brownie bakeries, to abolishing bedtime. It’s a visceral shove out of cynicism. I believe one powerful step we can all take as parents, caregivers and adults in society is to truly listen to children, including their wildest imaginings, and soak up a little bit of that chaotic and courageous spirit. When I’m feeling deep in an organizing rut or a writing rut, due to all the world’s horrors, I sometimes play recordings of songs my kid has randomly made up, to try to instill some of that creative impromptu energy that makes it possible for us to try new things — and imagine something radically different on the horizon.

In our book We Grow the World Together, Mariame Kaba shares that one of the reasons she loves children’s books — and sees them as tools for abolition — is that they focus on imagination, an expansion of possibilities, and an encouragement of wonder. In our culture, wild imaginings are more acceptable in the realm of childhood, and those of us adults who are reaching for transformed futures (but maybe having trouble unleashing our dreams of what they might look like) might do well to turn to that realm — of children, of children’s books, of child-centric spaces and voices — for inspiration.

Yancy: Kim, I want to share with you that each day that passes, I fear that one of my Black sons will become trapped by a carceral system that is designed to punish. That is a painful fear, especially when I think about our society’s racist fear of Black boys and Black men. As a parent who is parenting two children in prison and one outside of prison, what do you say to parents who are similarly situated? What are your words of wisdom, compassion, continued advice about liberation? I can only imagine that many parents feel isolated and are in need of solidarity and a shared sense of recognition and love.

Wilson: Nothing prepared me for the terrible pain that I would feel when two detectives showed up at my house in the middle of the night. There was no guidebook that could have helped me navigate the confusing labyrinth of legalities, expenses, disruptions, broken relationships, emotions, and the constant worry that was to come. There was only a desire to make it through each hour, and each day, and to repeat that for each of the 4,693 days since. Sometimes that desire is further from reach than I want it to be, but that is when I turn to the folx that are nearest to me for support.

We cannot acquiesce to the logics of white supremacy and capitalism that require us to feel unloved, perpetually miserable, and that there is no hope for anything to change. To resign ourselves to the current conditions is to deny our collective power

Parenting incarcerated children requires a tremendous amount of labor and money. Your life is forever changed in ways that are difficult to fathom if you have little experience with incarceration. The weight of incarceration sits in your chest and takes up residence in your bones so that you move differently through life, and you mark time with both a speed that is incomprehensible and a slowness that threatens your peace of mind with every minute. Nothing is the same! Nothing could ever be the same!

Something that I think about a lot is how necessary it is to claim your incarcerated children. So much of my own experience with how others treated them and me when they went to prison was based on how people wanted to manage perceptions. People were concerned that their association with them or me would have negative consequences, so it was understandable that many of them distanced themselves as an act of self-preservation. The politics of disposability require that we methodically throw people away who we fear and dislike. Their exclusion from community and the broader society is necessary to uphold the fiction that prisons, policing and surveillance are the things that will keep us safe. This framework limits what is possible, it negates the transformative capacity of human beings, and it denies people the necessary family and community support that they need to make lasting change and feel like they belong.

When I decided to talk publicly about my personal experience with my sons’ incarceration, it was after having thought very carefully about what that would look like. I was not interested in becoming the tragic mom who got invited to speak or write so that other people could watch me bleed. I understood that my intervention into the conversation about incarceration would have to be grounded in a political analysis that took stock of the system-level problems, while not losing sight of the fact that these systems are implicated in destroying so many people’s lives, including my children’s. I also knew that this work would require the support of comrades and friends, because it was not something that I could do alone. I think that it can be strategically important to talk publicly about your experience with your children’s incarceration, but I also think that you have to be clear-eyed about how your story may be exploited and how it can cause real harm to your incarcerated loved one.

Carcerality is about instilling fear and worry in people, and creating conditions of constant hypervigilance. Dylan Rodriguez refers to this as the “technology of warfare,” where the sense of emergency never goes away. Prisons are expertly designed to foment an unnaturally heightened state of alert, which expresses itself as anger, anxiety, PTSD and psychosis. The forced removal of people from their homes and communities means that separation, distance and abandonment become normalized as part of the carceral apparatus. Being separated from your loved ones devastates previously weak relationships, and threatens to fracture even the strongest ones. In this way, incarceration is more than walls and cages — it is a system that traps families and communities in a never-ending cycle of loss and grief, which are seldom meaningfully discussed.

Many of us don’t share how devastating the experience is because it’s often too painful and difficult to do so. The weight of daily life, work responsibilities, children, bills to pay, house to keep, etc., leave very little time to attend to our psychological and emotional needs. We end up compartmentalizing, minimizing and swallowing the grief until it demands our attention, and then it’s often too late.

Our collective task is to not shy away from our emotional lives because they’re too difficult to talk about, but to acknowledge that this is what we’re dealing with and to hold space for attending to our grief, pain and rage as part of a liberatory project. There’s no one way to approach this, but we can begin by asking ourselves some difficult questions, and by organizing with people facing similar circumstances.

Incarceration is more than walls and cages — it is a system that traps families and communities in a never-ending cycle of loss and grief, which are seldom meaningfully discussed.

The contributors to the book offer us many different access points for how we might begin to build solutions, and I am heartened by the many experiments, collaborations and projects that they describe. I think it’s important to find a political home and engage in communal study because we need to understand the current conditions, and to sharpen our analysis so that the solutions we propose move us closer to freedom, rather than reinforce the existing oppressive structures. We do this work together, we do it imperfectly, and we do it because everything has to change!

Yancy: The root meaning of the word “abolition” means “to destroy.” An incredibly important theme in your book is to place emphasis on care, on keeping people united and in community, on making sure that people have what they need to be safe. When many people hear the term abolition, they immediately think of “destruction.” Your book makes it so clear that abolitionism is a robust site of kindness and radical love. People who are experiencing mental health issues, poverty, drug-related dependencies, etc., need our care, our love. What is it about care and love that threaten the carceral order of things?

Schenwar and Wilson: One of the contributors to our book is Shira Hassan, and she talks about the centrality of chosen family to the project of abolition. She quotes a long-time chosen family member, ill Weaver, observing, “if abolition is not only about dismantling the prison industrial complex, but also about building the world we want to see, then chosen family is one concrete way of how we do that.” And what does chosen family mean? It is, at least in part, about practicing care and love over the long term. One important daily way we practice abolition is care.

For both of us, that has included care for people who are incarcerated — which can serve as a direct affront to the carceral system. Throughout the incarceration of her sons, Kim has recognized how incarceration normalizes harm and punishment as responses to everything that imprisoned people do, so demonstrating care and love by showing up, staying connected, sending books, writing, and by not allowing these institutions to disregard incarcerated people’s needs, is a direct affront to this system. People would like to believe that incarcerated people exist alone in the world — that they are not loved or cared about in any meaningful way, and that if they are, then both those in prison and their supporters, friends, lovers, spouses, children, kin and chosen family outside should fade quietly into oblivion, and accept whatever abuse, torture and indignities they are subjected to.

Solidarity with incarcerated people means that we fight like hell every day against a behemoth that has a monopoly on the way that the society perceives and responds to threats against a system that is designed to disappear and erase people from our lives. This is why things like study groups are banned in prisons: because people getting together outside of officially sanctioned activities undermines their ability to control people’s thoughts and actions. The pretext for banning such things is always “security,” and there is no mechanism through which to challenge these claims. It’s simply taken as fact because the cultural work of creating distrust in the public’s mind about incarcerated people has been cultivated across films, television shows, cartoons, etc. Challenging these oppressive structures requires that we understand how they show up in our lives, and how they are deployed against us for the sole benefit of preserving the status quo.

Prisons are not black boxes! They are penetrable and breakable, and we have to embrace the call to destroy things as part of a liberatory politics, as Dylan Rodriguez writes about in his essay titled, “Parental Tools for Abolition: Some Dad Shit.” The destruction is just as important as the call to build, to attend to, and to care for the people that these systems target for management and control. Our desire to embrace a radical love ethic cannot sidestep the need to get rid of the things that undermine, frustrate and destroy human life. We work to dismantle and destroy these oppressive systems because we are guided by love.

Over the course of 14 years of Maya’s sister’s on-and-off incarceration in jails and prisons, confinement in mandated treatment, electronic monitoring, and more, Maya witnessed vividly the ways in which prison functions by trying to prevent care — from prohibiting people inside from sharing their supplies and food, to locking people in solitary confinement, to, of course, cutting people off from their loved ones outside. But Maya’s sister, Keeley, told her stories of how, even in the direst of circumstances, incarcerated women were figuring out how to get messages to people in solitary confinement, to get food and other care items to people who were sick, to celebrate people’s birthdays. Even as guards, wardens and the system as a whole attempted to portray these women as inherently “bad” or devoid of compassion, they were courageously practicing empathy in the face of tyranny — proving the power of collective care, the potential of radical love.

What would it look like to build a society where we are collectively accountable to all children — to both their present and their future?

In our book, Dorothy Roberts writes about how Black mothers have engaged in a practice of “radical resistance of care” over the centuries, and we hope that as people read, they feel that radical power — that sense that care work is not an accessory to the struggle, it’s core to the struggle itself.

Yancy: We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition is a polyphonic text. It is filled with wisdom, conceptual richness and (nonhierarchical) educational vision. In this way, the text exemplifies the value of creative collectivity, of shared struggle, and of shared joy. What would you say to readers is the core theme that you would like them to embody, to return to, as they face a world that is far more invested in cages? I emphasize “to return to” because your book is necessary for those of us who will find the need to read it again and again, especially for solace during moments of lament, and for diligence during moments that we forget the work yet to be done.

Schenwar and Wilson: In our book, many of the authors are saying in different ways: We need to see all children as “our children.” From Heba Gowayed’s piece about being a new mother while witnessing children in Gaza being massacred [in] Israel’s genocide, to Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s piece about mothers building solidarities in Los Angeles in defense of their sons who’ve been criminalized, to Holly Krig’s piece about how being arrested while pregnant sparked her drive toward solidarity with all incarcerated parents and children, and many others, our book builds a vision of a world where interconnectedness is recognized, embodied and practiced. This is hard in a society that upholds the nuclear family as a key tenet of capitalism, and makes parenting seem like an individual practice we need to “get right” (or get “wrong” and be punished for, as Kim points to in her essay about survival parenting). Certainly, it’s important to look at our own caregiving practices through an abolitionist lens and challenge ourselves on that front, too — thinking about our power dynamics with our kids, thinking about what punishment means and does within the home, and more. But on a broader level, we hope readers return to this question: What would it look like to build a society where we are collectively accountable to all children — to both their present and their future?

We appreciate the framing of “returning to” as part of an approach to individual and collective study because it functions as a reminder that we have to revisit and reexamine things. The throughline is that we practice this work imperfectly, and that we do it with other people. Every single essay is an invitation to experiment with different ways of being in community and in relationship with each other so that this project of living is made better — not perfect, but vastly better than if we were to just leave things as they are. There is a powerful current of humility that carries through the contributors’ essays, and it’s important to acknowledge the ways that this ethos is part and parcel of not only an aspirational abolitionist parenting praxis, but also a broader political vision that values the collective.