read becoming abolitionists by derecka purnell

Here, Purnell invites readers to envision new systems that work to address the root causes of violence.

The book travels across geography and time, and offers lessons that activists have learned from Ferguson to South Africa, from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings. Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. Calling them felt like something, and something feels like everything when the other option seems like nothing. She saw too much sexual violence and buried too many friends to consider getting rid of police in her hometown of St. In her critically acclaimed first book Becoming Abolitionists, Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer, and organizer initially skeptical about police abolition. Millions of people continue to protest police violence because these 'solutions' do not match the problem: the police cannot be reformed. Now in paperback and with new material, a 2021 Kirkus Best Book of the year in both Nonfiction and Current Events, the book Naomi Klein called: “a triumph of political imagination and a tremendous gift to all movements struggling towards liberation.”įor more than a century, activists in the United States have tried to reform the police. One of the New York Times' 6 New Paperbacks to Read

Read becoming abolitionists by derecka purnell