With all the recent attention on Ferguson and the death of Mike Brown, I hope we activist do not get lost in this single story (however important it may be) and forget to make all the connections. Seeing the big picture is what’s most important. What happened to Mike Brown is only a small variation of what happened to Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Reynaldo Cuevas, Ramarley Graham and many others. Black men are falling victim to police murders as more and more our communities of color are being over-policed and Blacks and Latinos continue to be greatly overrepresented in prisons. We are dealing with a systemic problem. Mass incarceration. Over policing. Vicious cops. And white supremacy.

There are a couple great books that take a critical look at what’s going – again, making connections and seeing the big picture – not the least among such books is Angela Davis’ Abolition Democracy. Abolition Democracy is a small but powerful book of an interview with Angela Davis where she explains her thoughts on racism, police brutality, capitalism (particularly the way prisons make profit) and prison abolition (the idea that we can create a world without prisons). In this book Angela Davis’ poses prison abolition as the solution to mass incarceration and police violence.

Don’t think we can have a world without cops and jails? This video shows Angela Davis speaking about the possibilities which are explored in her books.

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