Alice Kim can’t help but sigh when asked what her parents think about her social justice work on causes like fighting police brutality and ending the death penalty. Her father has passed on, but she answers that her parents, as Christians, were always committed to the idea of helping others. Then she adds with a laugh, “They also were very committed to not rocking the boat.”

 

It was as a student at Northwestern University that Kim first became radicalized by events like the Persian Gulf War and the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion, as well as by her women’s studies professors who challenged students to think beyond the status quo. That lesson resonated with this young Asian American woman, whose parents often told her she would have to work that much harder because she was a minority. By graduate school, she considered herself an activist fighting for social justice. She has been fighting ever since.

 

Since January of 2007, Kim, 37, has served as the director of The Public Square, a nonprofit organization run out of the Illinois Humanities Council that creates spaces for public discussion about important issues of the day in the hope of spurring social change. Prior to that, she was the national organizer for the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, work that helped earn her the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World Award in 2004.

 

KoreAm talked with Kim about her transformative work.

 

How would you define social justice?

It’s about resisting war and occupation, the prison industrial complex, the attacks on our civil liberties. I think it’s also about being the voice of the voiceless, (for) undocumented immigrants, prisoners and their family members and the countless numbers of people living in poverty around the globe. It’s about seeking to understand why and how inequality exists and challenging that inequality.

 

How did you get involved with the national grassroots organization, Campaign to End the Death Penalty, whose board you currently serve on?

Here (in Chicago), it’s kind of ground zero for the death penalty. Back when I was in grad school at DePaul University, there were some instances of higher-profile police brutality cases, and I ended up getting involved in organizing around those. And at the same time, there were innocent men being freed from Illinois death row. I saw a natural connection between police brutality on the streets and wrongful convictions happening before our eyes, and ended up getting involved.

 

Why do you think the death penalty should be abolished?

If you look at who gets the death penalty, it’s punishment meted out disproportionately to poor people across the board and to black people and brown people. If you look at that, you can’t say it punishes the worst of the worst, what it proposes to do.

Why is the issue close to your heart?

 

Working directly with prisoners broke down all sorts of stereotypes that exist in society as to who is behind bars. After first visiting death row prisoners in the late ’90s, I realized they are just like you and me. They’re supposed to be the most dangerous criminals on the planet. But the men who I’ve come to know are human — with talents, flaws, likes and dislikes. The amazing thing for me is that they’re able to maintain their humanity, despite the very dehumanizing conditions on the row.