Be a Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World—and How You Can, Too

When I first started my activist work, I spoke the language of reform. I knew all the stats. I knew the history of our carceral systems. I knew how bloody and deeply broken they were. My writing started with the brutal killing of a Black child, Trayvon Martin, and with the refusal of our criminal justice system to see that Black child’s life as worthy of justice.

I had friends and family who had been beaten by police officers. They had bones broken. They needed stitches. In my first-ever interaction with a police officer as a teen driver, he reached for his gun because I bent over to get my registration out of the glove box without assuring him that I wasn’t reaching for a weapon first.

My heart would race every time a police car pulled up behind me on the road. I would frantically check my speed, hope my tail lights and blinkers were working, try to remember if my registration tags had expired. I would wonder if I should call someone, just in case.

When I was gardening in my yard and cops responded to a call next door, I nervously dropped my pruning shears to the ground, lest they think I was carrying a weapon.

And still, I talked of reform.

I talked of reform not because I didn’t believe in or want abolition but because I didn’t believe it was possible. Because the people who spoke openly or loudly about it were told they were too radical, were often pushed out of the room. And when it came to policing, I desperately wanted change, some sort of change.

So I talked about reform. I talked about oversight. I talked about more Black and brown officers. I talked about more accountability. I talked about training.

I didn’t talk about the thing I wanted most of all: for it not to exist.

Not any of it. The cops, the courts, the cells. I didn’t want any of it to exist anymore.

And that’s because while I dreamed of abolition, I didn’t really understand it. I didn’t understand the work of it. I didn’t get that the same people being kicked out of rooms for talking about a world without cops were also building new rooms of their own. I didn’t get that when they were told they were asking for too much, they were showing us that we were asking for too little.

Then suddenly people were saying, “Defund the police.” Yes, some people had always been saying it. But more people were, and yes, people were still saying it was an unreasonable ask, an impossible one. And yet others were asking, “What do you mean by that?”

And suddenly conversations that had been pushed to the fringe for decades were everywhere. “What is abolition?” “What does it mean to defund the police?” “Do you really mean defund the police?” “Do you really mean no cops?”

And I realized that I had fallen victim to one of white supremacy’s greatest weapons: the war on imagination.

In our heavily carceral systems, abolition requires strength and resilience. But it also requires the audacity of unapologetic imagination. It requires that we cast aside what we’ve been told is possible, what we’ve been told is the best we have to hope for, and try to build from our wildest dreams.

We’re discouraged from even daring to imagine the possibility of such a future. We’re told that this is the best system we can get. We’re told that the alternatives are much worse. We’re fed fear of the unknown. We’re made to doubt ourselves and our capabilities. If we don’t set our imaginations aside to settle for incremental change, we’re punished. We’re disinvited from the table altogether. We’re the reason why nobody gets anything now.

But please believe me when I say this: we’re already living the worst-case scenario. Set aside the fear that has been pumped into us all each and every day and take an honest look at where we are right now.

We live in a country that has the highest incarceration rate in the world. A country where one in eighty-one Black adults is currently behind bars. Where Black people make up over half of the prison population in twelve states. Where police kill hundreds of people a year, and yet only a handful ever even see a trial for those killings. We live in a country with all of this incarceration, all of this police brutality, and yet only 3 percent of rapists ever see jail time for rape. Women trying to leave abusive partners are regularly denied effective protection. In fact, people married to police officers are at an increased risk of abuse in their marriages. Studies have shown that between 28 and 40 percent of officers abuse or have abused their intimate partners or children.

We give up a large percentage of our population—millions of people—to the violence and isolation of prison. We routinely subject disabled people and people of color to violence and even death at routine traffic stops and wellness checks. We live with the reality that one in five women will be sexually assaulted and the overwhelming chances that the person who assaulted us will never face any accountability, nor will anything be done to ensure they won’t offend again. We let our children get dragged off to jail cells from their schools for arguing with teachers or fightng in the halls.

All of that because we’re told it would be so much worse if we didn’t have this system, if we didn’t know we could call a number and someone trained to kill—someone who sees people of color and anyone with a disability as a potential threat—would arrive at our doors.

How much worse do you really think it could get?

If we’re not living the worst-case scenario right now, I argue that the worst case lies in the direction of more cops, not fewer. With more and more people targeted by a system that sees people as irredeemable, that sees a human being in crisis as a mortal threat. As the system sucks up the resources we could use to address the root causes of crime and violence, and uses it to further empower officers who can arrive only after the violence has occurred, and who regularly add their own devastating violence to the situation.

How many more people will be lost to this system of punishment if we don’t choose a different course? How many more of our resources will be stolen from our communities? How many more rights will we lose? Those are the what-ifs that keep me up at night, and yet we’re told that the real nightmare is what could happen if we said, “No more,” turned away from what has always harmed us, and turned toward our belief in ourselves and one another, our ability to build something new and better.

There are people who have been living in their faith in humanity for a long time now, who have been working to build something new and better. And they really, really hope you—and I—will join them.

Excerpted from Be a Revolution by Ijeoma Oluo and reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2024.

Ijeoma Oluo is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race and Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. Her new book, Be a Revolution, is a galvanizing look at anti-racist activism across the United States. Oluo’s work uplifts the ways that everyday people are changing the world.

ICYMI—From The Appeal

South Carolina’s policy on prisoner access to media violates the First Amendment, according to a lawsuit filed today by the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of South Carolina against the state’s Department of Corrections. The suit alleges that incarcerated people are forbidden from speaking with the press on any topic in any real-time manner.