Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World is Possible

by Sonali Kolhatkar

Overview

Powerful interviews with scholars, organizers, and activists who are leading the movement to end policing and prison.

Award-winning journalist Kolhatkar presents a visionary outlook for a future rooted in liberation, freedom, and justice.

Abolitionist thinkers have been envisioning police-free communities for decades, but only in the aftershock of the racial justice uprisings of 2020 have their radical ideas entered into mainstream discourse. In Talking About Abolition, award-winning journalist Sonali Kolhatkar presents an inspiring collection of her conversations with scholars, movement figures, and activists who are leading the movement to end policing and prisons. From articulating the best counter-arguments to pervasive “copaganda,” to exposing the moral bankruptcy of reformism, each conversation connects the dots between past and present while imagining a collective future rooted in liberation, freedom, and justice.

Featuring interviews with Alicia Garza, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Leah Penniman, Gina Dent, Cat Brooks, Andrea Ritchie, Eunisses Hernandes, Noelle Hanrahan, Ivette Alé-Ferlito, Melina Abdullah, Reina Sultan, and Dylan Rodriguez, and with an introduction by Robin D. G. Kelley.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644214367
Publisher:	Seven Stories Press
Publication date:	01/14/2025
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208

About the Author

SONALI KOLHATKAR is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the racial justice editor at YES! Magazine and the host of YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali, a weekly television and radio program that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica Radio stations and affiliates around the United States. Sonali is a senior correspondent of the Economy For All Project at the Independent Media Institute and the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice. She has won numerous awards, including Best TV Anchor and Best National Political Commentary from the LA Press Club, and has been nominated for Best Radio Anchor four years in a row.

Sonali earned her MS in Astronomy from the University of Hawaii, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. She resides with her husband and two sons in Pasadena, California.

ROBIN D.G. KELLEY is the Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA and author of many books including Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Harvard University Press, 2012); Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon, 2002).

Table of Contents

CONTENTS
 
FOREWORD by Robin D. G. Kelley
           
INTRODUCTION
 
 
1          Andrea Ritchie: Racial Capitalism Requires Policing
 
2          Ruth Wilson Gilmore: Geography, Economy, and the Academy
 
3          Dylan Rodriguez: Rejecting Reformism
 
4          Noelle Hanrahan: Evolving Toward Abolitionism
 
5          Reina Sultan: 8 Steps to Abolition
 
6          Cat Brooks: What Really Keeps Us Safe
 
7          Eunisses Hernandez: Defunding the Police
 
8          Ivette Alé-Ferlito: Judging the Judges
 
9          Melina Abdullah: Participatory Budgeting
 
10        Alicia Garza: From Black History to Black Futures
 
11        Leah Penniman: Food, Land and Abolition
 
12        Gina Dent: Building a Just and Equitable New World
 
            CONCLUSION
           
ENDNOTES
 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR