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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." For more than
a century, activists in the United States have tried to reform the
police. Millions of people continue to protest police violence
because these "solutions" do not match the problem: the police
cannot be reformed. In her critically acclaimed first book Becoming
Abolitionists, Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer,
writer, and organizer initially skeptical about police abolition.
She saw too much sexual violence and buried too many friends to
consider getting rid of police in her hometown of St. Louis, let
alone the nation. But the police were a placebo. Calling them felt
like something, and something feels like everything when the other
option seems like nothing. Purnell details how multi-racial social
movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love
pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. 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.
Here, Purnell invites readers to envision new systems that work to
address the root causes of violence. Becoming Abolitionists shows
that abolition is not solely about getting rid of police, but a
commitment to create and support different answers to the problem
of harm in society, and, most excitingly, an opportunity to reduce
and eliminate harm in the first place.
In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence
of Black Lives Matter the call for the abolition of the police
became a central demand for the movement. In this extraordinary,
revelatory memoir, Derecka Purnell recounts her own path towards
abolitionism. Her story starts in St. Louis, where she was often
unhoused and experienced food insecurity, and where calling 911 was
often the only option in a crisis. She describes her political
awakening and activism through watching the aftermaths of events
including Hurricane Katrina, the murder of Trayvon Martin and the
uprising in her hometown of Ferguson following the death of Michael
Brown. Through Harvard Law School she comes to see that that
solution can be found not just in the debate on better policing but
the end of the policing itself. Through her own story she makes a
powerful, passionate argument for rethinking a fair, equal society
where there is no place for state violence and racial repression.
Purnell confronts the history of police as a means to capture
runaway slaves and uphold white supremacy, to the over-policing and
murder of Black people in today's cities. She argues that the
police are doing exactly what they were created to do and, in
response, imagines new systems that work to address the root causes
of violence instead. A revolutionary book about the hope for
freedom, Becoming Abolitionists will inspire readers to imagine and
create new communities that can guarantee safety, equality, and
real justice for all.
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