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March 18 - March 19, 2021
“Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.” —Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Emergent strategy suggests that we must work hard at getting abolitionist practice functional at a small scale so that large-scale abolition and transformative justice are more visible, rootable, possible.
These teachers also helped me see the limitations of restorative justice—that it often meant restoring conditions that were fundamentally harmful and unequal, unjust. If the racialized system of capitalism has produced such inequality that someone is hungry and steals a purse to resource a meal, returning the purse with an apology or community service does nothing to address that hunger. These teachers brought me to transformative justice, the work of addressing harm at the root, outside the mechanisms of the state, so that we can grow into right relationship with each other.
I want to bring our attention to what generates healing for those survivors who receive and those who cause harm…and the majority, who do both.
Mushrooms are a great teacher in this recentering work. One of our oldest ancestors, mycelium/mushrooms show us that the instance of life we can witness, the mushroom, is always evidence of a much more complex and wider network of connections underground. The same thing is true with conflict and harm—we are all connected to each other, at our best and at our worst.
We won’t end the systemic patterns of harm by isolating and picking off individuals, just as we can’t limit the communicative power of mycelium by plucking a single mushroom from the dirt. We need to flood the entire system with life-affirming principles and practices, to clear the channels between us of the toxicity of supremacy, to heal from the harms of a legacy of devaluing some lives and needs in order to indulge others.
I want to invite us to get excellent at being in conflict, which is a healthy, natural part of being human and biodiverse.
As Maurice Moe Mitchell said, we have to have a low bar for entry and a high standard for conduct.
In the longest term vision I can see, when we, made of the same miraculous material and temporary limitations as the systems we are born into, inevitably disagree, or cause harm, we will respond not with rejection, exile, or public shaming, but with clear naming of harm; education around intention, impact, and pattern breaking; satisfying apologies and consequences; new agreements and trustworthy boundaries; and lifelong healing resources for all involved.
Where we are skilled at being honest, setting and honoring boundaries, giving and receiving apologies, asking for help, and changing our behaviors.
Where we have trust deep enough to grow from conflict, trust that good intentions can yield good practice and radically reduce, even eliminate, harm. Where we trust that we are in such regular practice that we no longer have to be vigilant, to police or punish within our communities.
Holding this vision inside of movements right now has meant feeling not just for what is punitive, but for where there is gleeful othering, revenge, or punishment of others, particularly when these things deepen our belonging to each other, usually briefly, until we too fuck up.
It has meant slowing down our initial collective reactions such that violence is not met with more violence, but with alternative and satisfying consequences that result in the reduction of harm.
We are not engaging in principled struggle, and we desperately need to be. In a nutshell, principled struggle is when we are struggling for the sake of something larger than ourselves and are honest and direct with each other while holding compassion.2 It is when we take responsibility for our own feelings and actions and seek deeper understanding before responding (by asking questions, or reading the referenced materials). It is when we consider that a given organization, formation, or space may or may not be the space to hold what we need to bring, and that side conversations within that
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I heard about how often things are turned into public campaigns of shaming and humiliation before it is even clear if the thing is a misunderstanding, mistake, contradiction, conflict, harm, or abuse. I heard gratitude from people who wanted their humanity restored, and people who want our movements to practice principled struggle and grow our skill at accountability.
do. I will not be perfect, I will keep learning. I will also not be silent, I will keep learning.
As I was writing the piece, part of my issue was that our collective response to…everything…is collapsed. Call outs elicit both a consistent negative and dismissive energy, and a pleasurable take-down activation, regardless of what the call out is addressing. It has started to feel like every kind of dissonance in movements is understood through a lens of violence, abuse, and victimization.
Movements can end up in major conflicts that, had they been caught at the moment of misunderstanding, could have been resolved or avoided.
have had to choose life from deep within me. That’s why I’m still here. I want to live. I want to want to live. I think everyone chooses each day to move towards life or away from it, though some don’t realize that they are making the choice. Capitalism makes it hard to see your own direction.
What would it be like to organize and apply pressure to a government committed to adapting such that the majority of its citizens stay alive, rather than the stubbornness to stay the same?
The U.S., as a nation, does not choose, or love, life. Not in our policies, in our safety practices, in our relationship to the planet and other nations. Not yet, and possibly never before.
Which leads to my next unthinkable thought: do I really know the difference between my discernment and my fear? My dear friend Malkia Devich Cyril teaches me that there is the fear intended to save your life, versus fear intended to end it. What I mean by discernment is the set of noticings, fears, wisdoms, deductions, and gut tremblings that want to save, or even just improve, my life, versus the fear that makes me unable to do anything, that makes me unable to draw on my life force to take action.
Do I think I am being discerning when I am actually frozen in place, scared to change? Am I too scared of standing out from the crowd to pause and discern right action? Am I acting from terror? Am I able to discern a decision or action that makes sense?
We are afraid of being hurt, afraid because we have been hurt, afraid because we have caused hurt, afraid because we live in a world that wants to hurt us whether we have hurt others or not, just based on who we are, on any otherness from some long-ago determined norm.
Supremacy is our ongoing pandemic. It partners with every other sickness to tear us from life, or from lives worth living.
We are full of justified rage. And we want to release that rage. And one really fast and easy way to do this is what I experience as knee jerk collective punishment in movements.
Call outs have a long history as a brilliant strategy for marginalized people to stand up to those with power. Call outs have been a way to bring collective pressure to bear on corporations, institutions, and abusers on behalf of individuals or oppressed peoples who cannot stop the injustice and get accountability on their own. There are those out of alignment with life, consent, dignity, and humanity who will only stop when a light is shined onto their inhumane behavior.
Right now, call outs are being used not just as a necessary consequence for those wielding power to cause harm or enact abuse, but to shame and humiliate people in the wake of misunderstandings, contradictions, conflicts, and mistakes. I want to place my finger on the destructive power of punitive justice currently unleashed in our movements, and see how we bring abolition, vision, and skill to the wounds.
The call outs generally share one side of what’s happened and then call for immediate consequences. And within a day, the call out is everywhere, the cycle of blame and shame activated, and whoever was called out has begun being publicly punished. Sometimes, there are consequences—loss of job, community, reputation, platform. Sometimes there is just derision, and calls for disappearance. The details of the offense blur or compound as others add their own opinions and experiences to the story.
We don’t have a collective clarity about the distinctions between conflict, harm, or abuse, but online, we seem to respond to all of it with the same energy—consistently punitive, too often joyful.
In nature, a feeding frenzy happens “when predators are overwhelmed by the amount of prey available.… This can cause [them] to go wild, biting anything that moves, including each other or anything else within biting range.”
There is an abundance of harm, abuse, and righteous conflict surrounding us right now. But we in movement don’t identify with predators—our historical reality is that we are the prey, trying to defend ourselves, protect each other. There is such complexity with trying to name this dynamic within our movements. I persist in this line of inquiry because it’s also true that we are practicing, training ourselves through repeated motion, a strategy of moving in frenzy towards punitive actions, even as we try to put transformative language on our behavior.
Unless we have an analysis of abolition and dismantling systems of oppression, we will not realize what’s in our hands, we will never put the predator’s tools down and figure out what our tools are and can be.
My third unthinkable thought—why does it feel like we are committed to punishment, and enjoying it? Why do our movements more and more often feel like we are moving with sharp teeth against ourselves? And what is at stake because of that pattern, that feeling? Why does it feel like someone pointing at someone else and saying: “that person is harmful!,” and with no questions or process or time or breath, we are collectively punishing them, tearing them, and anyone protecting them, to shreds?
The first and biggest thing is that call outs never feel powerful to me as a move to resolve conflict, especially when that conflict is unveiled without the consent of both or all parties in the dispute. Call outs don’t work for addressing misunderstandings, issuing critiques, or resolving contradiction.
We need to understand that each call out puts our community members, survivors, and harm doers, on the radar of a state that has a history of surveilling, infiltrating, and otherwise strategically weakening movements that are having, or could have, actual impact in changing material conditions for oppressed peoples.
We have to recognize that we are on dangerous territory that is not aligned with a transformative justice vision when we mete out punishments in place of consequences, and/or when we issue consequences with no inquiry, no questions, no acceptance of accountability, no process, no time for the learning and unlearning necessary for authentic change…just instant and often unsatisfactory consequences.
A moment on this: one of the main demands in call outs is for a public apology. To expect a coherent authentic apology from someone who has been forcibly removed from power or credibility feels like a set up. Usually they issue some PR-sounding thing that works like blood in the water, escalating the feeding frenzy instead of satisfying our hunger for justice.
We end up putting more of our collective attention on punishing those accused of causing harm than supporting and centering the healing of survivors, and/or building pathways for those who are in cycles of causing harm to change.
The additional truth is, we want to distance ourselves from those who cause harm, and we are steeped in a punitive culture, which, right now, is normalizing a methodology of “punish first, ask questions later.” And, because we are in the age of social media, we now have a way to practice very publicly.
want us to see individual acts of harm as symptoms of systemic harm, and to do what we can do collectively to dismantle the systems and get as many of us free as possible.
Additionally, and historically, the presence of infiltration in our movements is documented and prevalent. This also comes to those of us who facilitate movements often—the quiet whisper that someone in the meeting leaked the notes, is antagonizing without principle, appeared out of nowhere and started taking up a ton of space. The reach of COINTELPRO and subsequent surveillance and infiltration campaigns is still being uncovered, and this strategy reaches back as long as humans have waged war against each other. Call outs are an incredible modern tool for those who are not committed to
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Conflict, and growing community that can hold political difference, are actually healthy, generative, necessary moves for vibrant visions to be actualized.
can’t help but wonder who benefits from movements that engage in public infighting, blame, shame, and knee-jerk call outs? I can’t help but see the state grinning, gathering all the data it needs, watching us weaken ourselves. Meanwhile, the conflicts are unresolved, and/or harm continues.
I don’t find it satisfying, and I don’t think it is transformative to publicly call people out for instant consequences with no attempt at a conversation, mediation, boundary setting, or community accountability (which often happens in a supported process with a limited number of known participants).
But being loud is different from being whole, or even being heard, being cared for, being comforted, being healed. Being loud is different from being just. Being able to destroy is different from being able to generate a future where harm isn’t happening all around us.
