About the book Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, by Brittany Friedman, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2025.
I invite you to come along with me, tapping into an open heart and sense of curiosity. Because then, you never know where we could go.
One of the things I find curious about this phase of human history is that we as a collective are no longer on the precipice of change; we are deep in the weave of awakening. We are “in it” as we might say colloquially. And while skies are shifting rapidly, as we see each day within our communities, the vibrations of life are also shifting at a higher rate eternally.
The world of carceral apartheid is designed to make us feel small, isolated, and disposable. But the truth is: we’ve always had each other.
Think back to where you were individually as a human being only one year ago. For many of us, our lives have rapidly changed.
If you look closely, often it is in times of loss and grief that the seeds of liberation are being sown. When it appears there is no hope, the tides are actually shifting from deep within the earth’s core, and it is our collective calling to hold the line —to release what doesn’t serve us personally and professionally and root into the practices and places that make us feel at home within ourselves.
Sunflowers at Night
At the heart of abolition is the belief that human beings are naturally free. We are not born to obey—we are born to create, to care, and to dream.
In a dark world, we are sunflowers at night.
It is society, through structures of control like prisons, national borders, and debt, that trains us to conform and accept punishment and inequality as normal. Yet, control is abnormal, and freedom is the earth’s natural frequency.
To be free, is to walk the path of authenticity in this knowing. Abolitionist work reminds us that abolition is first an inner journey of self-introspection, and then a collective weaving for our communities.
Holding up a mirror to the self is how we can unlearn that conditioned obedience and return to a deeper, freer version of ourselves – both individually and collectively.
I speak to you now in this conversation, importantly, about power disguised as justice and legitimate authority, and what it means to resist systems we were never meant to obey.
The Authentic You is a Fugitive
We are first taught obedience in the places we’re supposed to feel the safest. Shame is typically the first emotion we are forced to feel when we do not live up to others’ boxes—at the dinner table, in church pews, and in classrooms where we’re met with sharp glances and side-eyes for falling outside of life’s coloring book.
It seeps inward, slowly, eating away at the authenticity screaming to be free.
The authentic you is a fugitive in your own body.
You begin to monitor your mouth, edit your dreams before they’ve taken shape, and prune parts of yourself to fit the box. Adaptation to a prison planet is survival and when everything—from kin to culture, from sermons to screens—tells you to sit back down, shrink, and fall in line, most of us obey.
We grow up in a world where scripts are handed to us before we can write our names.
Go to school. Keep your head down. Fall in love, but not too late and never with the wrong one. Marry. Reproduce. Be grateful for this dream.
Deviation becomes deviance and originality becomes offense. We learn early and often that to live authentically is to risk being labeled strange, dismissed as difficult, or misunderstood into silence.
Artist Shepard Fairey’s iconic OBEY image, with its stark command beneath a looming blank stare face and ode to John Carpenter’s 1988 cult film classic THEY LIVE, isn’t just street art—it’s a mirror and a warning.
Societal obedience appears as quiet violence, promoting normalcy. But in fact, this obedience is curated by the promise of a violence so loud that it silences your screams.
We were never meant to obey is a dare.
Hold Your Sunflower to the Light
As humans we are physiologically conditioned to avoid pain, even social pain.
The path to authenticity often begins in silence and in the ache of being unseen. Within the stones of the quiet exile that comes from shedding your fake skin.
Within this quiet comes an invitation. Will I nourish the wild visions planted deep inside me, waiting to bloom, or will I dim my light to belong to a world of control and extraction?
I believe abolition begins first as the internal practice of knowing we were never meant to obey.
Summon the courage to turn toward the sun of your own vision and to rise in the direction of your truth. When you do, your path will unfold like the most radiant bloom.
Throughout my own path, I have taken risks that felt like an uprooting because I was going in a direction where I couldn’t see the outcome. It was a leap into the unknown and against everything I was conditioned to believe and was taught.
What I found in turn were gardens of possibility. I found my voice, let my curiosity run free, and saw the true shadows of social control for how deep they are within our world.
But I also saw true light. The kind that can never be dimmed because it comes from within and rests at the level of the heart, not just the mind.
We are at a point in our collective history where we are being given an “Invitation to Awaken,” a prompt I elaborate on at the conclusion of my new book Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons.
We are abolishing the shadows, or systems of racialized control that seek to control every facet of our daily lives, from our breath to our choices, to its efforts to limit our imagination and worldview.
Within each of our unique experiences is a particular wisdom we are here to share. And it is from your courage, your unique wisdom, that your abolitionist constellation forms.
Abolitionist Constellations
It’s time for us as a collective to turn from the shadows to the stars. You are being called to draw abolitionist constellations in your own voice. The metaphor of constellations has long guided people through darkness. Enslaved people followed the Big Dipper, or “Drinking Gourd,” to freedom on the Underground Railroad. Harriet Tubman herself is remembered as an expert celestial navigator, herbalist, and freedom fighter.
Black dreamers see this link clearly in our scholarship, writing, and art.
Abolitionist constellations extend this legacy, and I define them as a weave of freedom, woven from living networks of resistance, survival, and direction that stem from our waking and ancestral connections and remembrance, not solely existing as poetic imagery.
The starlight of abolitionist constellations are intergenerational, forming all around us.
Artist and writer Tikkun Bambara reminds us that there is indeed a “constellation of abolition” or a network of abolitionist efforts activated under starlight and celestial navigation that coordinate what they term “clusters of rebellion.”
Historian and social theorist Robin D.G. Kelley inspires us to dream “freedom dreams” because it is through the Black radical imagination that “we know what to build” and not only “what to knock down.”
In the words of Geographer and social theorist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, abolition requires us to be present.
I surmise that presence then, requires authenticity, and authenticity courage. To abolish is to be authentic to the core of human value which is inherent and not earned. Weaving abolitionist constellations requires an awakening to your authentic mind, heart, and spirit, driven by the heart and truth.
Abolitionist Constellations as Instructions for Liberation
Harriet Tubman, as she reflected on leading enslaved peoples to freedom, famously said: “If I could have convinced more slaves that they were slaves, I could have freed thousands more.” Think of the North Star—Polaris. She is constant. Fixed. A symbol not just of navigation, but of humanity’s unwavering hope.
Enslaved people studied the sky for survival because the constellations were never just stars, but instructions for liberation. Today, when we talk about abolitionist constellations, we are invoking that same powerful tradition of celestial navigation and naming the radical knowledge that lives in our bodies and communities. We are weaving together networks of care, aid, memory, and thriving that form new worlds above and beyond the carceral states.
There is power in knowing where you come from because through our lineages we also inherit strength and foresight. It is from these roots we give birth to new places seemingly beyond our wildest imagination.
Abolitionist constellations highlight the way struggles that may seem isolated—fighting incarceration, resisting ecological collapse, reclaiming stolen land, healing from gendered violence—are intimately woven into the fabric of survival. Each sunflower in the dark, each star, are the scattered points we link into meaning. This way of seeing helps us navigate oppressive structures collectively, much like constellations supported whole generations of enslaved people navigating and wielding hostile terrain to their advantage to create new dreams.
Starlight
At its core, I believe abolition begins first as the internal practice of knowing we were never meant to obey. We were born to create, care, and dream. We were born to be in right relationship with nature and our fellow living beings. Abolition is the unlearning of obedience and the return to collective freedom by reconnecting our visions to something greater—a map of authentic living weaved by community, much like the constellations of the stars.
The starlight of abolitionist constellations are intergenerational, forming all around us. You must only look and find your thread.
- In the climate justice movement, where Indigenous-led land back and environmental repair efforts root healing in sovereignty, not extraction.
- In prison abolition work where mutual aid, transformative justice, and care infrastructure are built from the ground up.
- In women’s movements around the world where organizers are forging alternatives to patriarchal violence rooted in safety, education, and love. And in the work of community organizations that bring us together to unlearn structures of control and reimagine what allyship across movements looks like in the creation of a new world.
Each movement is a star. When we begin to link them across space, struggle, and story we chart new paths forward.
The world of carceral apartheid is designed to make us feel small, isolated, and disposable. But the truth is: we’ve always had each other. And we’ve always had the dream. It is within us at birth before society takes its hold.
But we don’t travel alone. We follow each other’s light.
From the shadows we came, and to the constellations we return.
