Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

I do not need to dictate the strategies surviving family members should use. Instead, I find ways to support them that are in line with my politics because I know that just as punishment does not transform behavior, neither does judgment. When we make judgment into one of our primary organizing strategies, we reduce the trust needed to create safety. When we say “Don’t call the cops,” we usually assume that we’re talking to privileged, college-educated, upper-class, mostly white people who aren’t aware of the impact that calling the police has on communities of color. We also need to push back against our societal conditioning that tells us policing and prisons make us safer. Yet when people of color and particularly Black people choose to call emergency services, it is an inherent negotiation. We come from generations of state violence. Many of us have family members in prison. Most of us have either directly experienced police violence or intimately know people who have. These are not flippant decisions. Yet when we create a culture of judgment so thick that we make it impossible for people to admit that they have called emergency services or needed to, there are critical impacts. I’ve had many queer people of color survivors or witnesses of violence come to me for support, distraught that they called 911. “I heard my neighbor screaming. I couldn’t figure out how to safely intervene. Was I wrong to call 911?” When people who’ve experienced life-threatening injuries or pe...