One thing I do remember being vividly afraid of when the uprising happened, was being teargassed because I was still breastfeeding and I learned that teargas can get into your body, and it’s an abortifacient so it can make you miscarry. As a Black woman and a mother to Black sons, how were you processing what you were seeing and experiencing? You were involved in the Ferguson uprisings in 2014, and have been present for many protests and demonstrations after that. This is what it means to be anti-capitalist.’ This is what it means to move for decolonization. And once we started reading together, we were like, ‘Oh, OK, this is what abolition means. I was part of a student movement and in 2016 we started doing political education we came up with a syllabus and started reading together. I was just very lucky to be around people – especially when I got to law school – who were thinking about police differently than what I had originally thought. Over time, I noticed a lot of reforms were getting adopted, and people continued to die. You had initially rejected the idea of abolition, and you saw it as ‘ utopic ’. But for her, abolition isn’t just about taking away the institutions that give people an illusion that everyone is being kept safe when they’re actually not – it’s about building new structures that remove the need for these violent and oppressive systems to begin with. Today, Purnell’s advocacy work is focused on why structures like policing and prisons can’t be tweaked or “fixed”.
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