Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

I don’t think this is a work that is about experts. I want this work to be work that anyone and everyone who wants to try to do it does. And I don’t want people to feel like this is work that you have to get some certification in, in order to be able to do. I don’t want to contribute to that. To the extent that it’s useful for people to have political education together, that’s what we are hoping the trainings we’ve been doing are. That they’re in part political education, in part skill building, and also in part base building, so that we actually organize to be able to end these systems that are based in oppression. That oppress us. So, that’s why. I don’t want to do, like, the RJ thing, where everybody is now taking circle training, and, as a result of that, they think they know everything they need to know about RJ because they went to the circle training. I don’t want to be part of making that for CA [community accountability].