Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

I believe that bold, small experiments rise and fall based on two fairly simple ideas: planning and perseverance. We have to be accountable enough to continue our experiments, to measure them, to hold ourselves to high standards, and to believe in them. Even within projects carried out completely by unpaid volunteers, we are using a very valuable resource: time. Often, those of us with the least money, time, or privilege put a disproportionate amount of our time into movement work. So as we continue our experiments, we need to talk about our goals, the resources we need, and how we are going to distribute those resources equitably.

What has kept you alive so far? What are the lessons and themes and patterns that you can draw from? How can you practice safety? Where can you deepen your knowledge? And what unlikely allies can you recruit as learning partners?

If we are ever to see the dream of transformative justice become a widespread reality, we must collectively resist the culture of disposability that says that people who have done harm are no longer people, that they are “trash,” that they must be “canceled.” While consequences for harmful behavior are a necessary outcome of accountability, those consequences should not include actions that are themselves abusive.

Some people might suggest that people who have been abusive ought to feel shame—after all, perpetrating abuse is wrong. I would argue, though, that this is where the difference between guilt and shame is key. Guilt is feeling bad about something you’ve done; shame is feeling bad about who you are. People who have been abusive should feel guilty for the specific acts of abuse they are responsible for. They should not feel shame about who they are because this means that abuse has become a part of their identity. It means that they believe that they are fundamentally a bad person—in other words, “an abuser.”

The police always use excuses to claim that they can’t get far in their investigations, but it’s because they do nothing to protect the community.

Which is why, when we talk about violence, we always end up talking about everything: slavery, binary gender, the original disconnection of humans from the rest of life on this planet, and so on. Solving violence is rarely as much about the moment at hand as it is about everything else that preceded it. Which is where shame comes in.

As people living within oppressive social conditions, we have all been shaped by the lies of capitalist, eco-murdering, settler-colonial, ableist, white-supremacist heteropatriarchy. This ideology of who is valuable and who is expendable can leave us with shame across the board: both where we have been targeted and denied our full humanity and where we have benefited from unearned privilege.

When disabled folks talk about crip time, sometimes we just mean that we’re late all the time—maybe because we need more sleep than nondisabled people, maybe because the accessible gate in the train station was locked. But other times, when we talk about crip time, we mean something more beautiful and forgiving. We mean, as my friend Margaret Price explains, we live our lives with a “flexible approach to normative time frames” like work schedules, deadlines, or even just waking and sleeping. My friend Alison Kafer says that “rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” I have embraced this beautiful notion for many years, living within the embrace of a crip time that lets me define my own “normal.”