These last few weeks have been incredibly impactful for many of us. Some of us are processing grief and pain from the most recent cases in our country’s long history of state-sanctioned violence against Black Americans. Some of us are protesting and participating in calls to action, locally and nationally, to fight for racial justice and an end to the deadly impacts of White supremacy in this country. Some of us are encouraging our workplaces, loved ones, and communities to reckon with their complicity in centuries of systemic racism and many of us are reckoning with our own complicity in that harm.
I’ve been reading, thinking, and discussing lots of these topics and especially trying to think about how restorative and transformative justice can be powerful guides in this moment. As demands are being made to defund the police – ranging from calls to fully abolish police and prisons to those asking for significant divestment in those systems and investment in other services and supports – lots of questions arise about what alternative visions we have of safety and community. I believe restorative and transformative justice have much to offer us in the way of these alternative visions and practices. I also know there are many others who have been thinking through these questions far longer than I have and, for this month, I’d like to share a few pieces highlighting those voices.
An episode of the podcast Justice in America, interviewing transformative justice practitioner and abolistionist, Mariame Kaba, where she explains how “abolition is really more about presence than it is about absence. Abolition is a positive project that is focused on not just the dismantling of the current punishing systems, but also the building of something else.” (For a shorter and more current piece, check out Kaba’s op-ed, “Yes,
We Mean Literally Abolish the Police”)Organizer and political strategist, Ejeris Dixon, writes about how “the smaller steps toward community safety,” can be connected to “strategies with larger liberatory movements,” in the piece Building Community Safety: Practical Steps Toward Liberatory Transformation.
A profile of the geography professor and longtime abolitionist, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who asks a group of middle school students: “Instead of asking whether anyone should be locked up or go free, why don’t we think about why we solve problems by repeating the kind of behavior that brought us the problem in the first place?” in Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind by Rachel Kushner.
I hope these pieces offer insight and inspiration to keep fighting for justice.