Speaker 1: Good morning, peeps, and welcome to okay f Daily with
Speaker 1: Meet your Girl Danielle Moody, recording live in our pot
Speaker 1: Stream studios here in Times Square. You know, folks, we
Speaker 1: have finally made it to the end of this god
Speaker 1: awful fucking week. If you've been following my Instagram at all,
Speaker 1: you know that I have been going through it. There
Speaker 1: are some weeks where the weight of our political and
Speaker 1: cultural discourse can kind of roll off my back right
Speaker 1: that I moved through and really don't let things affect me.
Speaker 1: But this week of all weeks has really been trying
Speaker 1: my spirit and my soul. So on this fuck It Friday,
Speaker 1: I'm pretty much saying fuck it to every single goddamn thing.
Speaker 1: Coming up next, dear friends, is going to be my
Speaker 1: conversation with the author of the book Becoming Abolitionist, Dereka Purnell.
Speaker 1: I enjoyed this conversation so much, and I hope all
Speaker 1: of you do too, Folks. I am so excited to
Speaker 1: welcome to wokaf Daily for it the first time author
Speaker 1: Dereka Purnell, who is the author of a book whose
Speaker 1: title I just love, Becoming Abolitionists. Dereka, we have talked
Speaker 1: about abolition on Woke a f in so many different forms,
Speaker 1: in so many different ways, about what it means to
Speaker 1: abolish something, what it means to purge it, right, And
Speaker 1: I think that in order to purge something, you have
Speaker 1: to recognize it. You have to recognize it's ills, the troubles,
Speaker 1: the trauma, the grief that it is bringing. When we
Speaker 1: talked about abolitionists or slavery, we were, you know, abolishing
Speaker 1: a system of depravity, of cruelty, of horrifics treatment of
Speaker 1: human beings. When you wrote this book and you're in
Speaker 1: the title becoming Abolitionists, what does that mean to you? Oh? Wow,
Speaker 1: I love this question. I love the foreground and so
Speaker 1: the one. Thank you so much for having me. I'm
Speaker 1: very excited about this conversation. I went back and forth
Speaker 1: on titles. It's very hard trying to figure out which
Speaker 1: title made the most sense for this book. And the
Speaker 1: reason why I ultimately landed on Becoming Abolitionists with this
Speaker 1: plurals it is because to be an abolitionist, I believe
Speaker 1: it's to always be in the process of the journey
Speaker 1: and reevaluating what makes the most sense for the future
Speaker 1: that we want to build, right and so like the
Speaker 1: reasons why I was an abolitionist when I first started
Speaker 1: writing the book are very different than some of the
Speaker 1: things that I have right now. And it's just a
Speaker 1: allowing yourself to be curious enough to ask questions, to
Speaker 1: be in a conversation with people, to be wrong sometime,
Speaker 1: to reflect to say, oh wow, I used to think
Speaker 1: this about myself. I used to think this about the world.
Speaker 1: I used to think this about police and prisons. And
Speaker 1: now with more information, I have new better reasons to
Speaker 1: not want the police to be here, or I have
Speaker 1: new better reasons why well, I don't think that we
Speaker 1: should have prisons in this society. And so in the book,
Speaker 1: I try to show that journey for me, but also
Speaker 1: for other people. Right ten twelve years ago, I guess
Speaker 1: ten years ago, oh my gosh, ten years ago, about
Speaker 1: ten years ago when George's Immerman killed Treymon and Martin.
Speaker 1: There are so many of us who were fighting, spending hours, sacrificing,
Speaker 1: you know, our work, our families, our school to make
Speaker 1: sure that someone was arrested. That is what we put
Speaker 1: that energy in. And there are so many of those
Speaker 1: people who were at the forefront of those movements who
Speaker 1: now don't even believe in a don't even believe in prisons,
Speaker 1: don't even believe in police. And I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about that because with people critique abolitionists, they'll say something like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, this isn't realistic. When we tried the realistic thing.
Speaker 1: We have spent our lives learning about the realistic way
Speaker 1: you're supposed to hold someone accountabile, accountable. And now that
Speaker 1: we know that those systems were never intended to actually
Speaker 1: offer true justice, true accountability, and so we're constantly becoming
Speaker 1: and examining what kinds of systems that we want to
Speaker 1: abolish and then what we also want to build. You know,
Speaker 1: I love that one because I think that the journey
Speaker 1: that your book lays out is the journey that many
Speaker 1: of us are on. Right. Where we wanted to believe
Speaker 1: in a criminal justice system, in a judicial system that
Speaker 1: was going to see our full humanity, that was going
Speaker 1: to actually uphold the creed that justice isn't act blind. Right.
Speaker 1: I think that from two thousand and what was it,
Speaker 1: two thousand and fourteen until now, right, the amount of hashtags,
Speaker 1: the amount of unarmed black people that have been murdered,
Speaker 1: the video of nine minutes of George Floyd losing his losing,
Speaker 1: having the life squeezed out of him, not losing his life,
Speaker 1: having his life stolen from him. You know, I wanted
Speaker 1: to believe in the beginning when we saw Trey von
Speaker 1: Martin to your point that there's no doubt this is
Speaker 1: a child, right, this was an adult, and so we
Speaker 1: know that he will be convicted because how could he not.
Speaker 1: And it was in that moment for me that I
Speaker 1: just I the faith that I had in our politics,
Speaker 1: in our government, in our systems began to wane. And
Speaker 1: I want to talk to you about these different pinpoint
Speaker 1: pointed moments because you also lay out very clearly where
Speaker 1: you grew up right the neighborhoods and how they were
Speaker 1: filled with various forms of violence, whether you're talking about
Speaker 1: environmental injustice factors or you're talking about actual crime or
Speaker 1: the lack of jobs and you know, good schools and hopefulness.
Speaker 1: What are those kind of pinpoint moments that stand out
Speaker 1: for you over this timeline of moving from believing in
Speaker 1: the probability that a policing system could work for black
Speaker 1: people and then understanding that it was never meant to. Yes. Yes,
Speaker 1: So I would say that early on, rather than saying
Speaker 1: that I like believe that this system weren't for us.
Speaker 1: I think now, having read in the book and read
Speaker 1: it like a thousand times for all the edits, I
Speaker 1: think it was probably the most accurate thing for me
Speaker 1: to say is that I had really unexamined ideas about policing. Right,
Speaker 1: I had unexamined ideas about my own commitments to policing.
Speaker 1: I just assumed that they were here. I didn't ask
Speaker 1: where they came from. I didn't ask if we needed them.
Speaker 1: It was just like, oh, police kind of exist, like
Speaker 1: male people exist, like fire five or six, like teacher.
Speaker 1: They're just they're just a part of society. I didn't
Speaker 1: even have wherewithal I knew that there were problematic police.
Speaker 1: I knew that there were police with my mom's friends. Right,
Speaker 1: there was a range of and there sometimes there was
Speaker 1: an OVERWEP and that a diagram. But you know, I
Speaker 1: just took for granted their existence. I really had unexamined
Speaker 1: commitments to these institutions. And so over time, especially when
Speaker 1: Michael Brown was killed, that was one of the first
Speaker 1: times I started being pushed to acts. Okay, like what
Speaker 1: is this thing about like why, why, why is this?
Speaker 1: Why can't cops just kill someone and kind of go home.
Speaker 1: It was very It was a very huge political awakening
Speaker 1: for me and lots of other people. And what I
Speaker 1: also realized I was doing at that time alongside lots
Speaker 1: of other people, I was using what white people get,
Speaker 1: or at least what I perceived white people to receive
Speaker 1: as justice, as a metric for what I thought we
Speaker 1: deserved too. So I would say, something happenuntil a white boy,
Speaker 1: like we already know this black hot would be in
Speaker 1: jail and we don't even have to guess because Mohammed
Speaker 1: nor in Minnesota end up killing I think Justine Diamond,
Speaker 1: the white woman from Australia, he's in prison, right, So
Speaker 1: we would say, you know, if this was a white person,
Speaker 1: this is what would happened. This is a white person,
Speaker 1: this is what would happened. And at some point, by
Speaker 1: being in a a conversation with other organizers doing more study
Speaker 1: and doing more research learning about the origins of police
Speaker 1: I had to be like, Waite, what if this system
Speaker 1: that we know is racially unjust, what if it's also
Speaker 1: not working for white people and we're in fighting to
Speaker 1: get what white people will have. We're fighting that white
Speaker 1: people think we get, and it's just like what if
Speaker 1: what if we get what white people get? Well, that
Speaker 1: then mean that a few of black people would die,
Speaker 1: And I don't think that's true because white people kill
Speaker 1: our police all the time. And I just don't want
Speaker 1: cops to go to prison after they kill us. I
Speaker 1: don't want the killings to stop. I wanted the violence
Speaker 1: to stop. And so it just completely disrupted my noses
Speaker 1: of justice and fairness and equity, and I had to
Speaker 1: let go of that metric. I had to ask, is
Speaker 1: it unfair that we don't have it? Yes? But does
Speaker 1: it mean that it's real justice if we get it?
Speaker 1: And that answer was not clear to me. You know
Speaker 1: that is so illuminating because I think that we spend
Speaker 1: a lot of times comparing comparing ourselves, right, comparing what
Speaker 1: it is that black people don't have versus what it
Speaker 1: is that white people have. The fact is is that
Speaker 1: because we have qualified immunity in this country, because you
Speaker 1: can just be a cop and you can fear for
Speaker 1: your life regardless of who is in front of you,
Speaker 1: kill them and then go home, is in fact the
Speaker 1: problem right and right now, just you know, just last
Speaker 1: week we had, after eight months of supposed deliberation and
Speaker 1: back and forth between you know, a Senator Corey Booker
Speaker 1: and Senator Tim Scott, they want to come out and
Speaker 1: be like, Nope, the gap is too large for us
Speaker 1: to do anything about policing reform. So this moment of
Speaker 1: George Floyd having his life squeeze out of him for
Speaker 1: nine minutes that we all watch together, they want to
Speaker 1: tell us after eight months, well, we just can't do anything,
Speaker 1: so we stay with the status quo or devolve even
Speaker 1: worse into the place that we are. What does that
Speaker 1: feel like? How did that feel to you? Do you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying like, after we all witnessed this
Speaker 1: collectively in the midst of quarantine where we are all
Speaker 1: glued to our devices, glued to our television, and witnessed
Speaker 1: this collective horror together, and now eight months later they
Speaker 1: tell us that what we thought was the spark of
Speaker 1: something new is now it's just too big to do. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I felt, I think two immediate things. The first
Speaker 1: thing that I felt was immediately sympathy for George Floyd's family,
Speaker 1: because you know, Joe Biden had promised them I'm gonna
Speaker 1: champion police reform. I intend to keep that promise. I
Speaker 1: got you. We're gonna name this after George Floyd. We're gonna,
Speaker 1: you know, put you on front stage at the Democratic
Speaker 1: National Convention. We're gonna rally down. He was doing all
Speaker 1: of this while also still promising to give more money
Speaker 1: to police, but he ultimately did. So he's walking this wide.
Speaker 1: You know, we're gonna achieve real justice and policing that
Speaker 1: everyone can enjoy, and I'm gonna give more money to
Speaker 1: the police. Okay. So I felt horrible for George Floyd's
Speaker 1: family to have that hope. To think that someone you're
Speaker 1: campaigning for, your trying to get them in office, you're
Speaker 1: on calls, trying to get policy passed. It hurts to
Speaker 1: think what that family is going going through right now.
Speaker 1: The second, the second thing that I felt, how how
Speaker 1: can I just what's the most honest way to say this.
Speaker 1: It's not that I was not surprised, It's not that
Speaker 1: I felt let down, because when the George Floyd Act
Speaker 1: was initially introduced, I wrote in my column and I
Speaker 1: completely just I could just completely disagree with everything about
Speaker 1: that bill. So here we have a policing bill that
Speaker 1: I argue wouldn't have even saved George Floyd's life, right,
Speaker 1: you know, Derek Children was called. Police were called because
Speaker 1: over an alleged use of a counterfeit twenty dollars bill,
Speaker 1: which is illegal, and if he used it, it is illegal,
Speaker 1: and cops have a constitutional power to stop people who's
Speaker 1: using counterfeit money. You can go to jail. Right now,
Speaker 1: people watch that its just like man over twenty dollars,
Speaker 1: over twenty dollars. Counterfeit twenty dollars bills are an important
Speaker 1: currency for people who are economically and exploited. And we're
Speaker 1: in a recession, job crises, eviction crises. What could have
Speaker 1: actually helped people like George Floyd, people like my mom,
Speaker 1: people in our communities was resources, more stimulus, actual money.
Speaker 1: And so if the couple have just came and arrested
Speaker 1: George Floyd took in the jail, there would have been
Speaker 1: no uprisings, no protests, they would have been no like
Speaker 1: and that's what happens every single day. So when I
Speaker 1: read this bill, I was just like the way, at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, what the actual problem was was,
Speaker 1: you know, people working class people, black people living on
Speaker 1: twenty dollars counterfeit exchanges. Being police now has become a
Speaker 1: way to give police more money, to do more training,
Speaker 1: to restrict chokeholds. Well, what about the poor? Why don't
Speaker 1: we give them more money to people? Why do we
Speaker 1: give them more money to police? And at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, I called it in that piece and
Speaker 1: I called it in this piece around a couple of
Speaker 1: days ago. Whenever these reforms get you know, they go
Speaker 1: on tour. What ultimately happens, Police get more money until
Speaker 1: the next viral police killing and all the reforms that
Speaker 1: don't even work get put off to the side, and
Speaker 1: three people are still killed every day by police. And
Speaker 1: so it's frustrating that people have to be like, man,
Speaker 1: I really have hope in this bill. I really have
Speaker 1: hoping this policy when I didn't have any hope, and
Speaker 1: it was quite bad, actually right, it was pretty bad.
Speaker 1: And then it's just like, well, now what now, what
Speaker 1: do you do? So reform isn't a realistic option, like
Speaker 1: and now he's saying polyst is not realistic. Reform is
Speaker 1: not realistic. You know. It's funny because I have been
Speaker 1: moving myself towards a place where I'm like I don't
Speaker 1: even want to use the terms reform or reimagine, because
Speaker 1: you're reimagining something that is broken, right, Like, how do
Speaker 1: you reform something? How do you reform a leg that's
Speaker 1: been amputated? You don't, right, Like, you need to create
Speaker 1: something different. And I think for me that's why abolition
Speaker 1: in it of itself feels right because it is the
Speaker 1: most honest thing because if you want to if you
Speaker 1: want to create a new system, you don't do so
Speaker 1: off of what is broken, right. You have to abolish
Speaker 1: is what is present in order to create something new.
Speaker 1: And I feel like that's that's where the energy needs
Speaker 1: to be placed, which is that it's not enough to
Speaker 1: just say, oh, we're gonna reform, we're gonna reimagine, we're
Speaker 1: going to reassess, and we're gonna do all of these things,
Speaker 1: which is pretty much playing three card Monte with people's lives.
Speaker 1: You're just moving the cards around the table and you're
Speaker 1: not actually doing anything. It's a bullshit magic trick, right,
Speaker 1: that doesn't produce That doesn't produce anything. When you hear
Speaker 1: the pushback when people talked about defund the police, right,
Speaker 1: and folks had said, you know, we should we shouldn't
Speaker 1: say defund, And to your point, at various points in
Speaker 1: the book, you're like, you know, if we're not, if
Speaker 1: we're if we're if we're talking about reallocation of funds,
Speaker 1: Like then that's the conversation that that's what I have said,
Speaker 1: if we're if defund the police is really talking about
Speaker 1: a reallocation of funds to stop having where I sit
Speaker 1: in New York City a police department that has a
Speaker 1: budget of six billion dollars, Like when when you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. So it's like, it is that language.
Speaker 1: Should it be reallocation, should it be defund? Doesn't matter
Speaker 1: if if we're still again playing three card Monty with
Speaker 1: our criminal justice and policing systems. Yeah, well I like
Speaker 1: defund the police for lots of reasons. One reason is
Speaker 1: because in twenty fourteen, when Black Lives Matter took off
Speaker 1: as a hashtag, people said black lives matter was divisive,
Speaker 1: like it's polarizing, all lives matter. I mean a lot
Speaker 1: of people didn't set that not in good faith. It's like, what,
Speaker 1: I will be on board with police not killing black people,
Speaker 1: but you said black lives matter, So I can't. I
Speaker 1: can't even get it's like, come on, like seriously, So
Speaker 1: if something's black lives matter, it's polarizing that they just matter,
Speaker 1: like it's like the floor the bar is so low,
Speaker 1: like it's so solo. Right. The second thing I noticed
Speaker 1: around Black Lives Matter is that anyone, once it became
Speaker 1: more palatable, anyone could kind of say black lives matter
Speaker 1: and it not really mean anything that much anymore. You
Speaker 1: could say black lives matter to defund the police. You
Speaker 1: can say black lives matter to give more funding to
Speaker 1: the police, and say black communities want this. Sacks Fifth
Speaker 1: Avenue was saying black lives matter. Everyone was just sort
Speaker 1: of saying black lives matter. But guess what, Black lives
Speaker 1: kept dying, right, black people being killed. What's interesting about
Speaker 1: defund the police is that it's a specific policy demand.
Speaker 1: It's like, take money away from the police. It's much
Speaker 1: harder to then just co op something like that. Right.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying it can't be done, because I've seen
Speaker 1: it attempt to be done, but it's much difference. It's
Speaker 1: not as soft as black lives matter, for lack of
Speaker 1: a better phrase right now, And so that's another thing.
Speaker 1: The third thing I would say is that any fight
Speaker 1: towards freedom and justice has always used unpopular language at
Speaker 1: the time of the fight, and then thirty forty fifty
Speaker 1: years from now, what do we do? We say, man,
Speaker 1: I'm so happy that they march for civil rights. Do
Speaker 1: you know what it was like to say that you
Speaker 1: were marching for civil rights in nineteen fifties? Civil rights? Oh,
Speaker 1: you must be a criminal, you're a troublemaker, as if
Speaker 1: they call MLK. You know, it's to say that you
Speaker 1: wanted women to be able to vote. It's imagine a
Speaker 1: man in the early nineteen hundred saying whoa, whoa, whoa.
Speaker 1: I would be on board with women voting, but I
Speaker 1: don't like the words suffrage. Like this actually what we're
Speaker 1: doing when you say if the phrase, it's seriously the barrier.
Speaker 1: So let's figure out how to explain what the phrase means.
Speaker 1: But I imagine I would have guessed that the people
Speaker 1: who actually don't like the phrase most of them, not
Speaker 1: all of them. I've met a couple of people have
Speaker 1: really interesting critical arguments and defund the police and abolition right,
Speaker 1: and they are coming from a socialist analysis. They saying,
Speaker 1: how do we build a broad basis? People who probably
Speaker 1: agree with what you're saying, but don't understand what it means.
Speaker 1: But they are committed to explaining what it means, right,
Speaker 1: which is different than I would get on board, but
Speaker 1: I don't like the language. So you gotta let police
Speaker 1: continue to kill three people a day because of a
Speaker 1: marketing campaign, Well, help us think about, you know, creative
Speaker 1: language and creative ways to explain what abolition is. And
Speaker 1: so part of that is on abolitionists when we say abolition.
Speaker 1: When I say abolition, I mean we need to dismantle, eradicate,
Speaker 1: reduce the reasons why people need police, and we need
Speaker 1: to eradicate the institution of policing, and we need to
Speaker 1: eradicate the violence in society that make people feel that
Speaker 1: they need police. It's both at the same time, and
Speaker 1: it's overtime, right, So that's on us to do that
Speaker 1: on society what people who don't know what that means.
Speaker 1: It's also on them to ask questions, to be curious,
Speaker 1: to critically engage their faith, to read to you know,
Speaker 1: to ask its. It requires both of that. But if
Speaker 1: you are not even open to having a conversation because
Speaker 1: of a term you don't understand, I think that's quite unfortunate,
Speaker 1: and I think there are a lot of resources out
Speaker 1: here to learn more about what that means. I appreciate
Speaker 1: that so very much because I think you know too.
Speaker 1: One of the lies that we continue to tell in
Speaker 1: our society with regard to policing is that more police
Speaker 1: equals more safety. Oh yeah. And the thing that I
Speaker 1: have been saying on woke f you know, interviews with
Speaker 1: former police chiefs, interviews with abolitionists, activists like yourself, is
Speaker 1: the fact that any I grew up in a very
Speaker 1: white suburb of New York on Long Island, and I
Speaker 1: will tell you that I never saw police officers ever, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that was not a part of my data to if
Speaker 1: I did, maybe they were, you know, driving past on
Speaker 1: you know, on the main strip. What I did see
Speaker 1: were clean sidewalks, tree line streets, gated communities, country clubs,
Speaker 1: and resource centers and libraries and all of these things.
Speaker 1: And so, you know, one of the questions that another
Speaker 1: question that I have for you is how do we
Speaker 1: break that lie that gasolight about the fact that when
Speaker 1: we're talking about defund the police, that there's this association well, oh,
Speaker 1: you don't want to be safe, And I'm like some
Speaker 1: of the safest neighborhoods have no police presence. What are
Speaker 1: you talking about? What they do have a resources and access?
Speaker 1: Absolutely yes, So that's and the inverse is also true.
Speaker 1: Right if you look at where I grew up in
Speaker 1: Saint Louis, I did not grow up in the community
Speaker 1: the tree line streets. It was very much, very very
Speaker 1: much the hood still is the hood. We haven't had
Speaker 1: a grocery store since two thousand, the year two thousand.
Speaker 1: Not a grocery store, not a fruit market, not a
Speaker 1: community garden in sight, no health clinics, no jobs because
Speaker 1: the Highway ripped apart the most prosperous place where black
Speaker 1: people were employed by black businesses, ripped all those homes,
Speaker 1: community businesses gone, so people could commute from the suburbs
Speaker 1: to downtown Saint Louis to work, right, And so you
Speaker 1: look at a community like that, we look at Chicago,
Speaker 1: you look at DC where I'm sitting right now, in
Speaker 1: Northwest super high rates of like violent crime, also among
Speaker 1: the highest per capital rates of police And so the
Speaker 1: police presence also doesn't reduce the violence that people fear.
Speaker 1: It's just not And every time, like right now, we're
Speaker 1: experience a murder hike, probably because we're in the pandemic.
Speaker 1: People are stressed out, there are fewer jobs, there's an
Speaker 1: eviction crisis that's happening. There's so much precarity that leads
Speaker 1: people to more vulnerable situations. And when there's a procarity
Speaker 1: and vulnerability and a pandemic, there's violence. Like we know,
Speaker 1: the researchers know this, scientists know this. But then you
Speaker 1: read the New York Times, you read mainstream outlets, and
Speaker 1: it's like, y'all want to defund the police while there's
Speaker 1: a murder spike right now, Well, tell me why with
Speaker 1: a million cops in those places, especially in Chicago, Saint Louis, Detroit, DC,
Speaker 1: these neighborhoods, there's more police than anywhere else, you have
Speaker 1: to murder rate is still climbing. It's yeah, so more
Speaker 1: police doesn't even equate to more safety. What it feels like,
Speaker 1: it feels like, okay, at least somebody's here to do something,
Speaker 1: But it's not uns If cops are standing outside of
Speaker 1: people's homes every night, guarding and stopping violence, that's not
Speaker 1: what's happening, right, So it's it's yeah, it's the inverse
Speaker 1: is not you as well. So it's like, well, what
Speaker 1: actually keeps people safe? You know, resources, strong social networks, education, jobs,
Speaker 1: you know, pushing back on racism, homophobia, transphobia. You know.
Speaker 1: The one of the main reasons why people even kill
Speaker 1: people in the first place is because usually men want
Speaker 1: to control the sexuality of their partners. That leads to
Speaker 1: violence because you've been conditioning the patriarchy. Another reason why
Speaker 1: people end up killing each other is because of petty arguments.
Speaker 1: Usually it's men something said and assulted, but I have
Speaker 1: an idea of what a man should be. Police can't
Speaker 1: stop patriarchy. They can't fix patriarchy, so they can't get
Speaker 1: to the root problem of solving harm. You know, people
Speaker 1: join like street games for protection. And then if you
Speaker 1: arrest people who are carrying a gun on them for
Speaker 1: protection and because they're no jobs, like none of that
Speaker 1: stuff is not our communities. And then they go to jail,
Speaker 1: they come out, they have a record. It's gonna be
Speaker 1: even hard harder for them to get a job, harder
Speaker 1: for them to get in school, harder for them to
Speaker 1: get housing. So they're going to retreat to the place
Speaker 1: where they feel most safe. It's like how do we
Speaker 1: support all of those people. How do we fight for
Speaker 1: broad sweeping changes so that people can be empower and
Speaker 1: have self determination to work in jobs where they have dignity,
Speaker 1: right where they have choices, where they have childcare and healthcare,
Speaker 1: and tuish it like it's all of those answers are there,
Speaker 1: and it's actually much cheaper to just fund police who
Speaker 1: primarily recruited from the working class, to police other working
Speaker 1: class people. It's really really bad. Well, I will say this, Ica,
Speaker 1: is that I believe that your book is incredibly important
Speaker 1: and important in this particular moment that we are living in,
Speaker 1: and I hope that everyone picks up becoming Abolitionists and
Speaker 1: thinks about that word, thinks about that action and why
Speaker 1: it matters, and instead of just shrugging off phrases like
Speaker 1: defund the police, or phrases like black lives matter, phrases
Speaker 1: like you know, abolition, that you actually begin to understand
Speaker 1: and unpack why we are saying those things now and
Speaker 1: why they matter. Dereka Purnell, I wish you the best
Speaker 1: of success with your book, Becoming Abolitionists, and I hope
Speaker 1: that you will join us again when you finish your
Speaker 1: successful tour because I would love to have you back. Yes,
Speaker 1: please have me. I really enjoy this. Thank you for
Speaker 1: all of your kindness and your thoughtful question. I really
Speaker 1: appreciate it. Appreciate you. Thank you. That is it for
Speaker 1: today's Woke f Daily podcast. To hear more from today's show,
Speaker 1: including my full interview with Dereka Purnell, support me on
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Speaker 1: the people and to all the people. Power, get woke,
Speaker 1: and stay woke as fuck.