Episode 7: Communicating to Build Power w/ Mariame Kaba
“I never saw social media as opposite to what I’m doing in social organizing. For me, it’s just a tool… it always has been.” - Mariame Kaba
Social media has completely transformed the way we organize, communicate, and connect. This is true in so many areas of our lives, but especially with social justice organizing and global movements for justice.
For this conversation, I’m joined by social organizer, educator, and curator, Mariame Kaba. We consider questions like: How can we engage, collaborate, and connect on social media in ways that remain genuine and authentic? Why do so many people struggle to know what to do as social activists (especially with better access to more information)?
Mariame explains how she entered the world of social media in 2010, why she thinks virtual connection will become even more prominent in the future, and how we can expand our experience of social media in healthy ways.
Listen to the Full Episode
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
[5:40] How a self-described Luddite embraced social media (and why that’s actually a good thing)
[10:41] Why social media is vital to social organizing
[18:40] How to engage, collaborate, and connect in healthy ways (even online)
[25:55] What is “Radical Hospitality”? And why organizers need clear points of entry
[32:00] Why it’s not a bad thing that people leave movements
Featured On The Show:
Mariame Kaba (she/her) is an organizer, educator, and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. She is the founder and director of Project NIA: a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. She currently serves as Researcher in Residence at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and together with Andrea Ritchie, she co-leads the initiative Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action. Mariame is also the author of several books, including Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care.
Mia Henry (she/her) is the host of the Shared Power Podcast. Mia is the founder and CEO of Freedom Lifted, a training and coaching firm that supports leaders and organizations committed to justice and equity.
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Full Episode Transcript:
Mia Henry: Welcome to the Shared Power Podcast, a limited series for organizations and leaders committed to collectively advancing justice and equity. I'm your host, Mia Henry. I'm the CEO of Freedom Lifted, and the daughter of activists, educators, entrepreneurs, and survivors. I've had the honor of teaching, facilitating, and co-leading in nonprofits and schools for over two decades. I've learned a lot, but it hasn't always been easy. There are conversations that I had, or I wish I had, that create the conditions for more effective collective leadership. In this podcast, we will explore some of these conversations, diving deeply into topics that will help us learn to build trust, navigate conflict, and lead in partnership with one another. If you believe that relationship-building is the foundation for effective work for justice, you are in the right place. Join me as we explore the ingredients of leading with shared power. Today's conversation will feature the incredible Mariame Kaba, an abolitionist organizer and prolific educator who was a sage and a guide in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. Mariame and I worked together when she co-founded the Chicago Freedom School and approached me about becoming the first director. Now, because everyone always does anything Mariame asked them to do, I applied, was hired, and had a chance to work alongside her as a board chair for several years. Around the same time, Mariame also founded and is currently the director of Project Nia, a multimodal transformative justice initiative that works to end the incarceration of children and young adults. She is also a researcher in residence at the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Mariame is also the author of several books, including her latest with Kelly Hayes, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care. Mariame has a massive social following and has used this to raise resources and really shift the conversation about the role of policing and prisons in our society. Today, we talk about how activists and movement leaders can engage, collaborate, and connect on social media in ways that remain genuine, healthy, and authentic. Here's my conversation about building power with Mariame Kaba.
MH: So grateful for your time, Mariame. And so you're one of the first people I thought of to talk about this. And I know that you have so much rich experience organizing folks, but also, because I had the honor of working with you behind the scenes to build an organization years ago, I know that you do this – you're about it when people aren't looking as well. This conversation, I want it to be about communication, how we can create lines of communication. I don't want to say always open because people think about that as always talking, but just all the ways that we are able to tell each other, not only what we think about things like our opinions, but how we feel, and how we come to the work and how we dream forward. Just, how do we communicate that? And now, since we worked together years ago, social media has become such a – I mean, it's ubiquitous. It’s everything for organizing, and you have used it so well. Why do you think it's important to have a lot of avenues to reach people when challenging the status quo?
MK: Yeah, that's a great question. I think that for my end, I think people will listen to people who they first and foremost trust, that in the sense here of somebody who you feel is authentically believing what they say. You have to believe that person somehow, and the way you believe a person is you establish, you have to have had some kind of relationship, even if it's a parasocial one, where you've seen this person say a thing over and over again. You've seen how they show up in space over and over again, and then you say, “Okay, I think this person is authentic. And even if I disagree with them, I think they authentically come to their understanding of whatever the situation is, whatever the thing is.” I think that it matters still that you have some expertise in the things that you're talking about, even in the era of this kind of weird social media landscape that we're inhabiting, you have to have some claim to some form of knowledge that you've come to, because you've done something around that. I know there's a lot of talk about like, anybody can come on the internet and make themselves look like an expert. That may be true. That doesn't last long. People will find you out because over time, you're going to spectacularly implode, or you're going to make a mistake, or you're going to do something, and people will find out that you didn't really know as much as you proclaimed that you knew. But you can do it in a short burst, but you can't do it long term. I got on social media quite against my will, because I'm actually a Luddite. I still have a flip phone. I don't have a smartphone, you know, all these things that I have. So I came to social media because a young person, you won't be surprised, is the person who said to me years ago, “Miss Kaba, you should have your own blog because you've got stories and you can talk about all the stuff you're doing” and all this other stuff. And I was like, I'm not getting a blog. Okay, I'm not getting a blog, I don’t know what a blog is, I'm not doing it, I don't know how I would even work it, like, what is it, you know, what I do, the technology, I'm not doing it. And this young person was persistent, and said, I'll make it for you, and I was like, I'm not gonna use, you know, whatever. So one day, they came to my office and they helped me set up this blog on Wordpress, which turned out to be Prison Culture, which tells you everything you need to know because I didn't name it after myself. I did not use my name in the blog. I was blogging anonymously, and it was that young person who connected the blog automatically to Twitter. That happened in 2010. And so, when I would blog a post, it would automatically post to Twitter.
MH: I did not know that.
MK: Yes, that's how that happened. So, I didn't even, I didn't go into, like, the thing. I used the blog exactly as the young person suggested that I ought to use it. He was like, you should blog about the work you do. Because this is a young person who was in conflict with the law, who I was working with through Project Nia work. And you know, would hear me tell stories about various things and people and stuff like that. And he was the one who really said, you know, I really appreciate the stuff I hear from you, the stories you tell, and I think other people will as well. And what that just showed me the importance of, is that the intention behind the medium of communication that you're using and kind of what you're trying to do matters quite a bit because I was not intending – I used basically this blog as my work journal. That's how I saw it. That was what I was using it for. I wasn't using it to build a platform for myself, or do anything really besides like, post the things that I was doing work-wise and kind of movement stuff together in one place that was just not my journal, but was like a place that was more public. I never anticipated that a lot of people would care about it. That wasn't why I did it. And so when more and more people started caring about it, then it was interesting to me because the other thing that I think is important to say is, by the time I started Prison Culture, I'd already been organizing for decades. Like, I had already been doing the work I was doing for a long time. I wasn't a young person. And I think that also mattered. I got on social media when I was already, at that point, almost 40. I think at that time. Yeah, that would have been right. I was almost 40 at that time. And so I already had a life. I already had been doing a lot of things. I already had something to talk about. And I think that also made a difference as to people hearing what I had to say, and believing that I had done the things that I had said I had done, because there was actual proof of those things in the world, you know? And so all of that stuff around communication, I don't think you can just talk and invite people to do stuff if they don't trust you. I don't think you can just invite people in to do stuff. Maybe you haven't tried anything before that they can look back on and say, “Oh, this person has a potential track record about this stuff. Maybe I should join in on what they're doing.” And then you can't invite people if there isn't a sense of radical hospitality. I really believe in that. I think the invitations have to be consistent. You have to offer them over and over again. I think you have to be in a position in a place where, again, people think you know what you're talking about, or at least you know what you're doing in some way in order for them to join you. I think that makes a difference. So that's what I would say about how I've been using social media to invite people, and I also never saw social media as something that was opposite of what I was already doing in general organizing. For me, it's just a tool. It always has been. It's like we say in organizing, meet people where they are. Well, there are a lot of people on social media, right? There are a lot of people who exist there. So why wouldn't you try to rally them or mobilize them towards an action? If you are somebody who wants to transform the conditions in which we live, if you are trying to do stuff in the world in some way, why should social media be not an important site of struggle? It's a site of struggle like every other site of struggle we engage in. Our neighbors are sites of struggle. Our institutions are sites of struggle. Social media has to be, I mean there are millions upon millions of people on social media. To say that you're just not even going to engage there is silly. If you're an actual organizer, it doesn't make any sense. So you have to engage. There's many ways that you can do that. It doesn't have to be all on a platform that's owned by somebody else. People are creating discords. People are creating smaller communities. People have created gaming communities. All sorts of communities exist, and I think there's a lack of differentiation sometimes when people pick one platform and they're like, “Oh this place is horrible.” Well, a blog is a social media platform, you know?
MH: No, I totally agree. I mean, you've talked, talked about so many things, and it's just so wonderful to hear you recount your journey to this, to using Twitter. Because I think that people think think everything's happened overnight.
MK: Nothing happens overnight.
MH: So for me, when I saw you getting such a huge following on Twitter, it was anyone who's known you was just relieved and happy. Because I'm like, thank God, you know, someone who does the work is putting things out there and people are listening, and paying attention, because there's a lot of other things going on. In the media, it's a noisy space. And I really appreciate you expanding the definition of social media for people who organize, because I know I've struggled with the different platforms and trying to figure out what makes sense and being kind of overwhelmed and feeling pressure even to be on all the things everywhere.
MK: You don't need to, you really don't need to.
MH: And, you know, I have had a lot of small gatherings of a few people on a regular basis for years. And that is part of it. That's part of it too. It's using a medium to be social.
MK: It's using a medium to be social, and it's also uplifting the virtual space. If we have learned nothing from the last three years of being in a global pandemic, it's how incredibly critical the infrastructure of the virtual is, and how it will only become more so in the future. It isn't going to get less so. And I'm not of the belief that people have, which is that everybody got so zoomed out that now they're not going to be on zoom, and everybody is going to be quote, “in real life.” It's the same conversation that's being had about remote work, as if the remote work isn't here to stay. Remote work has been here to stay, and it's just going to get more and more real as more and more people become more global in how they do things and where we actually have to figure out ways to communicate with each other across borders. You know this stuff is here to stay, and we're going to have to figure out how to use it in ways that are healthy rather than in toxic ways. Which some people fall into online because of the anonymity that it can give you and the license that it can give you to act out of your values as a result of that, you know?
MH: Yeah, absolutely. Oh, I can't – just putting a lot of the content that I used to do in trainings online – you know because I've partnered with you and you have the just practice, good people, just practice have put so much asynchronously as well. And that was just a game changer for my work, giving people time to process things on their own and their own time too.
MK: That’s huge. Going at their own pace, not like the fake going at your own pace. So I think it's safe to say though, with the language that people use today, I think it's safe to say, Mariame, that you're an influencer, whether you like that term or not.
MK: No, what a mess.
MH: I know, you know, people respect what you believe, and they do what you say. And I know that this is not all that is cracked up to be, right? People try to put you on a pedestal, I'm sure. And then you get on the pedestal and then you can be either worshiped or they can come for you. And I know celebrity hasn't gone to your head. It will not, and it has not because I know you. And then you've taken this time to talk about the roots of how you came to be known in such a broad way to so many people. You use all this power to pour right back into movement work and it's something I deeply respect and I don't think I've ever had a chance to tell you that. So I want you to know that. And I see it, and I know others – all of us, who've known you for a while, see it and appreciate it. It's so critical because once people are able, they try to make you an individual and not part of the collective. You know, it leads to the problems of envy and status scrambling and all this stuff. And we know that this historically, you know, runaway egos, will kill our movements. Guaranteed. We're not naming any names. We just know.
MH: Just a quick break to note that the Shared Power podcast is sponsored by Freedom Lifted and our flagship training program, Justice at Work. Justice at Work offers blended learning and professional development. For organizations and individuals who are strengthening their commitment to justice and equity in their workplaces and in their communities. This training combines discussions with online modules that teach frameworks and critical history to help you examine the relationship between identity. and power. You'll even have opportunities to join live group discussions facilitated by me, Mia Henry. Go beyond diversity and inclusion to find your role in building a more just and equitable world. Learn more and sign up at freedomlifted.com.
MH: So how do you always make sure that the messaging stays about the message, and not the messenger?
MK: That's a hard thing. I mean, I feel like I don't control what other people think of me. I think that what is in my control is how I show up and who I am and whether I can work towards shrinking the distance between my values and my actions every day. And I try to really live into that at every turn. I think people sometimes think that people have a persona online, and then they are themselves in a different place. Like how exhausting might that be to actually do that? I have too much going on to have to have like many different personas, right? You know what I mean? Like, I have enough going on. So for me, it's like, I am me wherever I am, wherever I go, there I am. And so that's what I take. I also am deeply, as you know, it matters to me a lot to do things with other people. I like it. It's how I think we should live in the world. And so I collaborate a lot with many different kinds of people. So therefore, if I'm in the process of doing something, it's not me alone. It's other people doing it with me. And so I'm always going to bring the whole entire group of folks that are doing that and lift them up alongside because their labor is why we're able to produce anything at all. So I really take that quite a bit seriously, and in terms of using social media to put a light on things that I think matter and are useful. Why, if I actually have a way to get people to connect around something or to be part of something, why wouldn't I take that opportunity to actually use whatever it is, like that people's trust in me or people's valuing what I have to say about something, to actually bring other people into the mix as well. So, “Hey Everybody, there's this really good work going on here. Please pay attention to that, too,” is like the very bare minimum that I ought to be doing all the time. And really, honestly, none of this is about me as a singular person, as one individual. I don't want to think of the world as individualistic in that way. I believe in the fact that connection is our currency. That really means something to me in a real sense, and that connection is how we survive, right? We come into the world already part of a community of two. We are connected to another human when we come into the world. That is actually something that should tell us that that is the way we have to be in the world, is in community, in connection with others, and that that's the only way we're actually going to survive. So I take that to heart, and that really guides how I am. In social life, in social media, in my private life, I really try to live by that. So, I think that's what's kept me connected because I'm connected. You know? Like people would tell me, what the hell are you doing? There are people in my life, many, who would intervene. If they saw some shady things going on, or me doing something that kind of is out of pocket for me, like, what are you really about here, Mariame? Like, what's going on? We see you doing this stuff out in the world, and it just doesn't feel aligned, or, like, is this really what you want to be into? I have people all over me, like, all my close friends, all my comrades, my family members, who aren't afraid to ask me questions, ever, about anything. Or to bring up, like, hey, maybe consider this, right? So that's a big part of it, is like, when they say, you know, do you have people? I have people. I really do. They wouldn't allow me to be going off randomly, half cocked, doing a bunch of horrible things in the world. It wouldn't happen. It wouldn't sit well with them, you know?
MH: Yeah, that to me is the shared power piece. It's having what you described to me as having that ethos, that value, you’re anchored in a value. Power is always shared, right? We're going to move forward. And then you talk about having people, and that's when I see people kind of spiraling, or these things getting to them – the attention, right? I do sometimes feel there's a sense of loneliness there.
MK: Absolutely. And of not caring, not meaning them not caring, but of people not caring about them. And I think that's the saddest thing ever. When I see things like that, I'm like, where are people's people? And I know you're a human being and you have agency, and not everybody can tell you anything or everything. But it just seems to me that if you're unconnected to a whole, if you're out there spiraling and no one is coming for you. You know, no one cares enough to step in and be like, this is a problem and I'm concerned. And they’re willing to break the relationship in order to be honest.
MH: Yeah. A pull aside. In private.
MK: Yes. A check in. Is this really where you want to go with this? Are you doing okay? What's happening? And also people have to know that it's out of character for you. So how do they know that? They have to know your character, right?
MH: Yeah. Wow. Well, thank you. Thank you for that. I think that's such an important thing for us to all keep in mind, especially when you don't know, like you couldn’t anticipate the attention that Prison Culture would get.
MK: I could not, I could not anticipate it. I did not anticipate it. And more than that, I did not actually, I didn't actively court it. Like I don't actively go out of my way to try to be something that I'm not. I really value my privacy. I do. Sounds really weird to say that that's the case given that I'm public in that way, but I'm only public in a certain way. There's a huge part of my life that no one knows anything about, as it should be. And again, I said before that it matters that I was older, because I already had lived my twenties and thirties by that point.
MH: You know, you lived them and you already had your people. Your people weren't coming through the platform. You already had them.
MK: That is so critically important. They were my people before, and they're my people now, and they will be my people forever, you know?
MH: Yeah. You know, you talked about radical hospitality before, and, so I want to move to this, how you communicate to invite people in, to how you communicate to inspire people to act. And that radical hospitality that you mentioned before to me is connected to this, because I saw it first hand working alongside you at CFS, and it wasn't certainly with the Freedom School, but we had a space where you were able to experiment and start a lot of other things happening in the space. And so it was always like you had a way to not only invite people to think differently, but find ways to get people to get involved and act. And I sometimes really struggle with this, Mariame, because I want people to just look around and see what needs to be done and do it, but you really understand that people don't always see what needs to be done. And they need to be offered some action steps. So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about some of the ways you communicate strategically, you know, to inspire people to act.
MK: Yeah, it is my deep belief for me, it's been borne out that most people don't know what to do. And I think that's not a knock on human beings. That's more a knock on the fact that we shouldn't have to do the things that we are doing in order to live. In order to live with dignity, we shouldn't have to struggle and fight so hard. And so, the fact that people don't exactly know how to step into taking action is not shocking. In fact, that should be like the de facto norm is people are just trying to live. And so to ask them to also come up with a plan for how to do X, Y, Z is unfair in my opinion. Like actually it's unfair. So them not knowing where to step in or what a point of entry looks like is normal, and we should, therefore, those of us who maybe can think in a broad way, or are feeling like we can intervene in those kinds of ways, we should be open to asking and offering entry points to people at all times, and it has to be consistent and often, and we have to share them over and over and over again. Repetition here is key to the communication. People have to feel like if something's going on, maybe they can even look to you to be like, Hey, I don't know where to go here. Can you support? Can you help? Like, I see that as just part of being a person on the earth. I don't see it as an imposition. I don't think it's a burden. I think some people know how to plug in, and that's great. And I think other people don't know where to plug in, and there need to be people who are offering themselves up as a guide, or as, “Hey, I'm doing this, come in, join, be part of this with us.” Doesn't mean everybody will stay. They often will not. Retention is a reality of its own work, but at least they might come in the door and you might have a better shot at being able to do something that is much more impactful because more people have joined. We always need more people. So we have to do constant invitations and those invitations have to come with, you know, if you come here, I guarantee that at least I'll be present alongside you, to be able to do these X other things that are happening. You know, if you come here, we'll have a place where we'll have food. We'll have a place where we might have other kinds of fellowship develop. Doesn't mean we'll all be friends. That's not the necessary. We don't have to be friends to work together. We might just be comrades. So yeah, so all of those are things that I find to be important. But the most important point I just want to raise and put on the table is to me, it matters quite a bit that we actually offer points of entry because people don't automatically know how to connect. And if you don't know how to connect, or you don't know what you don't know, having clear points of entry is really, really helpful. Because it allows more people to step in to do this work with us to be part of these spaces with us. And I don't see that as an imposition or a burden. I see that very much as part of the work of doing this kind of work.
MH: Once people come in and they have something to do…
MK: That's a small part. That's a tiny part of the ongoing stuff. People come in and they have stuff to do. And that's not the end at all. That's like the beginning of the beginning.
MH: Yah, and I think that all of your work when you're writing and your speaking sas always been like, do something, you know. Just do something. I was on a webinar recently, hearing you, I think it was – well, it was definitely for, and I just wanna, again, congratulate you if I hadn't done it already – you and Kelly Hayes. Amazing, Kelly Hayes. On the Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care. So I was in a virtual launch for that. And then I was in something else you were doing for libraries because you are starting the For The People Libraries, or has started the For The People Libraries work. And it's always like, you know, just, we got to – you got to do something. And you said earlier too – and I think about this a lot – people come in, they may not stay for a long time, but they may come back. If we are treating each other well in the movement, our capacity changes over time and in life, but we know what's possible when we work together. So we come back because there are entry points throughout our lives. It's not just now or never.
MK: And you should also never be upset if people move on, especially if they're moving on for their own reasons. And it's not because of a main conflict or something that is, you know, negative. Things ebb and flow. Our lives ebb and flow. People move to new places. People have children. People get into new stages of their lives. It isn't a failure to not have people stay a million years in one thing. It's actually a good thing to have a constant dynamic space and a dynamic organization, but you have to have the infrastructure to support that. And that's the point. That's the thing that I've struggled over the years to try to figure out is like, how do we keep the welcoming committee group going? How do we onboard people regularly? How do we orient people to what our values are regularly? How do we make that part of the work happen? That's been the hardest thing I see. And that's where a lot of problems I find locate themselves. It's like, okay, people have come in. You may have had the original orientation, you may have set the values, and then you still need all this infrastructure to help people stay in the work, and that is exhausting because that can then take up all the valuable energy and time from doing the actual work you came together to do. And that's always a struggle in organization. And I'm still really working on that and trying to figure out those parts of the work. And I know that the same people shouldn't have to do everything, but often we don't have enough people within our organizations to do everything. And so it ends up taxing people and that's a struggle. That's a struggle.
MH: Yeah. And it's hard for us to give up things when we don't have enough people. Sometimes we need to just pause on some things when we don't have enough. And that's difficult to do because everything feels necessary now.
MK: Everything seems urgent. Everything feels urgent. Some things are urgent. But we also have to be committed to getting some work done that we said we were gonna do together. There are other people on the other end of that work that need us. And need us to be consistent and trustworthy and showing up too. But it's hard. It's hard all along. All along the way.
MH: Yeah. Well, this has been such a gift to be able to talk to you about these things. And again, people, this podcast is for folks who are working primarily in organizations and collectives, trying to anchor themselves in justice work. And I hope thinking about power with, and even in our, how we relate to ourselves and each other in every day.
MK: I love it. I love it. I can't wait to hear the other episodes in the podcast. I'm gonna share it with other people in organizations because we need these conversations. We need these spaces with each other to be able to think through what we've done, where we've gone wrong, where we can build and learn again and do better next time. And in a way that's not about, how we say, like evaluation is about improving. It's not about just listing off all the things you've done wrong, and it's not about a punitive mindset. Evaluation is for improving, doing better next time, engaging, always going to the next level of improving whatever is going on. That's why evaluation, as you know, I think about it. It's so incredibly important in our organizations, but not the way that the capitalist model has imposed evaluation on us. And we always feel like we're being judged and we're being bludgeoned with like a whole bunch of tools that don't even help our work to grow, right? Like, no, it should be like a bottom up, you know, we want to ask questions because we want to continuously improve and figure out better ways of relating with each other.
MH: Thank you so much, Mariame. Is there anything else you wanted to share with people about how to communicate either internally or externally?
MK: Well, yeah, I just want to – you mentioned the new book, Let This Radicalize You. We have a section in the book. We have a lot of sections in the book that speak to some of what we talked about today, including a section pretty early on that says that facts are not enough. Which again, speaks to a lot of organizers who think like giving everybody the facts means all of a sudden that you're going to get people to act and more importantly to act in the ways that you would like them to act. And that could not be a bigger fallacy for many reasons, including the political psychology of how we think and how we work as human beings. So there's a lot in the book, that if folks want to pick it up, you're welcome to it. And I think it'll support some of the stuff we talked about here today.
MH: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Shared Power Podcast. This podcast is a production of Freedom Lifted, a company that provides training, facilitation, and coaching for leaders rooted in justice and equity. It is produced and edited by Cassandra Sampson at It's 97. Production support also provided by Alicia Tate, Amber Kinney, Alicia Bunger, and the AK Collective. For more information about our work, visit freedomlifted. com. Or follow us at Freedom Lifted on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Join us next time as we continue to unlock the ingredients for leading with shared power.