Let This Radicalize You - by Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba (Paperback)

About the Book

Doing Justice: The Revolution of Rescue and Reciprocal Care is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.

Book Synopsis

What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.

Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the convergence of mass protest and mass formations of mutual aid, and consider what this confluence of power can teach us about a future that will require mass acts of care, rescue and defense, in the face of both state violence and environmental disaster.
The book is an assemblage of co-authored reflections, interviews and questions that are intended to aid and empower activists and organizers as they attempt to map their own journeys through the work of justice-making. It includes insights from a spectrum of experienced organizers, including Sharon Lungo, Carlos Saavedra, Ejeris Dixon, Barbara Ransby, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore about some of the difficult and joyous lessons they have learned in their work.

Review Quotes

"Let This Radicalize You is critical reading for anyone wishing the world were a better place than it is." --Inquest
"This is a prophetic work, one that will be pressed with great urgency into the palms of friends and comrades, kin and colleagues, and anyone else ready to rise up against machineries of mass death. With great clarity and generosity, Hayes and Kaba model how participants in movements can be tough on systems while being gentle with one another and themselves, nurturing a "counterculture of care" as an integral part of building the next world."
--Naomi Klein, author, Doppelganger

"In this time of perpetual crisis, when too many of our movements are imploding and the work often feels soul crushing, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba have turned decades of collective wisdom and experience into the text we desperately need right now. This book will radicalize even the 'radicals' by reminding us that to be radical is not to have all the answers or some special portal into transcendent knowledge. It is about seeing and moving differently in the world. It means having the courage to imagine, make mistakes, to trust, listen, learn, think, and rethink; to resist punditry, pedestals, and perfection; to reject cynicism and embrace critical analysis; to plot, to hold on, to care and commune, to show up, to love. They teach us to mourn and organize, and that we who believe in freedom have to rest. And they understand better than anyone what Dr. King meant when he called on us to 'rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.'"
--Robin D. G. Kelley, author, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

"Let This Radicalize You is a rich treasury of practical lessons and insights from organizers and activists across many of today's most important sites of struggle. Through deeply moving storytelling, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba share a stirring vision of commitment and collaboration that is rooted in love, reality, and solidarity--and one that doesn't shy away from the challenges we face inside and outside our movements or the high stakes. This book is a gift for everyone, no matter their level of political engagement, interested in building the new worlds of care and mutual flourishing that we need."
--Astra Taylor, author, Remake the World: Essays, Reflections, Rebellions

"There is so much incredible goodness between these covers. How I wish I had this wisdom when I was young. Everything within fills me with hope and joy for our future. This book is about reclaiming our humanity and care for one another as we seek to heal ourselves and our world. It is an essential work that can change the course of the history we create each day!"
--Lisa Fithian, author, Shut It Down: Stories from a Fierce, Loving Resistance

"Let this Radicalize You is geared toward helping young organizers learn to strategize, make critical analyses, and to act effectively and with integrity in the communities they work with. Perhaps most important of all, it shows the need to go beyond having a nuanced critique or organizing one-off events--it is a text that teaches us how to build a movement. The authors have more than succeeded in meeting their task: Let This Radicalize You should be required reading for anyone entering social movements and wishing to eradicate harm and create more liveable futures. But this book is also a movement encyclopedia for anyone who is oriented toward liberation or even slightly curious about what it might mean for us to get there. This is a necessary text for the freedom dreamers, the poets, the seasoned activists, the rebels, and the community builders from all walks of life, because it shows us what it means to be transformed in the service of liberation. Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba show us that freeing ourselves and freeing one another is work, but, importantly, that it is work that can and must be done together."
--Robyn Maynard, coauthor, Rehearsals for Living

"Let This Radicalize You is a beacon of world-making potential you won't find anywhere else. In the wretched catastrophes of the racial capitalocene, this book is your guide to elsewhere, and it is brilliant."
--Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, coauthor, Rehearsals for Living

"Let This Radicalize You is part handbook, part liberatory vision, designed to inspire you to deepen your involvement in radical movements while accompanying you along the way. Holding hope amid a dystopian world, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba created a book that will serve our movements for years to come." --Ejeris Dixon, coeditor, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

"The compounding crises of this era can so easily drive us into paralysis and despair. This beautiful book pulls us instead toward a politics rooted in our deepest values of care, compassion, and community. Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba have created a visionary and urgently needed guide to cultivating hope and action in treacherous times." --L.A. Kauffman, author, Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism

"Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba have produced one of the most essential treatises on mutual aid ever written. It begins and ends with the reality that any movement that truly wants to remake the world has to be founded on one unshakeable principle: care. Let This Radicalize You is a letter addressed to our vulnerable hearts, reminding us that our love, support, and solidarity really can build a whole new world." --Shane Burley, author, Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse

"[Let This Radicalize You] is both a how-to guide for community activists and a deeply-felt assessment of how we can better support one another to sustain lifelong involvement in progressive efforts.... [The Book] is a well-wrought antidote to the pervasive despair of living in Trumpian times.... Kaba is known for reminding those in her orbit to see crises as opportunities for radical action rather than hopelessness. Let This Radicalize You urges us forward, prodding us to bring the world we want into existence with creativity, persistence and sass." --The Indypendent

About the Author

Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, librarian, and prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionist who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. Kaba is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots abolitionist organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame co-leads the initiative Interrupting Criminalization, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018.

Kaba is the author of the New York Times Bestseller We Do This Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Press 2021), Missing Daddy (Haymarket 2019), Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Faciltators with Shira Hassan (Project NIA, 2019), See You Soon (Haymarket, March 2022) and No More Police: A Case for Abolition with Andrea Ritchie (The New Press, Aug 2022).

Kelly Hayes is a Menominee author, organizer, movement educator, and photographer. She is also the host of Truthout's podcast Movement Memos. Hayes is a cofounder of the Lifted Voices collective and the Chicago Light Brigade. Her written work is featured in numerous publications and multiple anthologies, including Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States (Haymarket Books, 2016), Education in Movement Spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square (Routledge, 2020), and The Solidarity Struggle: How People of Color Succeed and Fail at Showing Up for Each Other in the Fight for Freedom (BGD Press, 2016). Hayes also coauthored an essay with Mariame Kaba in Kaba's book We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021). Hayes's movement photography is featured in the Freedom and Resistance exhibit of the DuSable Museum of African American History.