Robin D. G. Kelley on 20 Years of “Freedom Dreams”: Occupy & Black Lives Matter Movements, Abolition

Historian and author Robin D. G. Kelley joins us for an extended Part 2 interview about the 20th anniversary edition of his book, “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination,” about organizations, activists and artists who he says are turning freedom dreams into a practice, from a noun to a verb. “The core idea of the book — that is, that radical movements are sustained by a vision of what they wish to build and not just what they want to tear down — was really taken up by activists and artists and turned into action.” We discuss the 2020 racial justice protests, Occupy Wall Street and the debt forgiveness movement, Black Lives Matter, Obama, the resurgence of fasicsm, and disability justice, which he calls “a framework that embraces abolition. That is to say, it demands nothing less than the overthrow of all forms of ableism and the structures that support it.” His book is newly revised and expanded, with a new introduction and a new foreword by poet Aja Monet. “Poetry is not just pretty words,” notes Kelley. “It is a kind of pulling from the unconscious the deep sense of both pain, suffering, but also our imagination for creating something different.”

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