Rambling

Book Thoughts: An Abolitionist's Handbook by Patrisse Cullors

After I read a book, I generally email my thoughts or notes to a friend. I'm now also copying these first emails to this blog since it's easier to revisit. The following may have a lot of quotes and random commentary. Commentary is marked in darker blue.

Original sent date: Feb 23, 2025

This is written by one of the women who started the Black Lives Matter movement. It gives basic principles and each chapter has a section where she talks about how this principle has been important in her work, who else we can look to for using this principle, what else to read or review, and finally guiding questions for the reader to work through themselves.

As a handbook, it insists that it isn't just read and that people do the exercises. Me being a snob with my time, I did not do the exercises (the guiding questions). I looked over them, all right, but number 1 is that I'm not involved in any movement or real community so I just felt like there wasn't much for me to say when I can't even get to the starting line.

The 12 principles along with some examples from the section:

1. Have Courageous Conversations

Having hard conversations about things you need, asking for the others' thoughts, making a plan. This runs counter to how a lot of people from marginalized communities working on survival (in this context, specifically African-Americans) have grown up without voicing things and to hide vulnerability. Courageous conversations are a chance to "acknowledge neglect's impact, its trauma, and that lead to a request for help". This is about the courage to be honest with yourself and others and to try to work towards something better. The examples given here were Cullors' conversation with her mom in telling her that she was writing a book that would include stuff about her mom even though her mom was initially blanket against the idea, and Mamie Till Mobley, who was one person who spoke to millions about her murdered son Emmett Louis Till and opted for an open-casket viewing. Because of her work we know his name. (Speaking of which, I believe there was a movie that came out covering her work in recent years, but I haven't watched it.)

To practice courageous conversations, we must first build a foundation for them in our interpersonal relationships. How we communicate with one another impacts the way we move in collectives and within the community. If we live in a community that centers secrets, gossip and rigidity, then we are setting ourselves up for a very toxic environment that is truly antithetical to liberation of self and the people around us. When we are unable to identify harm caused, name our needs and communicate them clearly and directly, our ability to be in authentic relationships with ourselves and others is hindered.

She then goes on to clarify that she means you should be having these conversations with people you already have a foundation with rather than strangers. Then says that you should identify the intentions behind the conversation and what you want from it. She encourages you to write it all down to have notes to reference. And then:

Remember this: the person doesn’t owe you anything. Just because you’ve asked and you want to have a courageous conversation, this person doesn’t have to apologize, grant your requests or be in conversation with you. Your goal is to come from the right place. You can’t create expectations for the other person.

↑ Thought that was really interesting since I've seen some pushback against the idea that people don't owe you anything lately since people do feel that they are owed respect, kindness, and that when they're talking with deeper relationships it is ridiculous for the other person to just say that they don't owe you anything. I think the idea behind this that people aren't voicing is that when you have a deeper relationship with someone you have an obligation to them and that's how communities and the like run. We've talked about obligation and my mixed feelings about it (and distrust to some degree of its principles). So anyway, thought this was interesting to see. I guess in a purely effect-mindset you're unlikely to approach the other person with actual listening and understanding if you feel deeply that they owe you, and thus their refusal to provide you with such things when they never agreed to it to begin with will probably hurt you more than anything and lead to bad coping skills.

(Though, of course, again some people do feel that there are things that we've agreed to by default when in relationships. I guess it's hard to know what needs spelling out and to what degree since everyone and ideas of relationships are different and ultimately individual.)


2. Respond vs. React

Makes the distinction between "responding" and "reacting", which is committing to grounded responses vs reactionary vitriol. "Too often we have been taught that our big emotions justify hurtful and sharp responses." Tactics like "shaming" elected officials or other public shaming should only be done after you've tried everything else. Such as an outreach letter, one-on-one face time to make specific demands, then analysis to see if the entity has made any changes.

Reacting and responding can get the same results, sometimes. But it’s not likely. The effort you put into reacting can end up harming you and your goals.

The work of abolition is hard enough on our bodies and our minds—there is no need to make it more difficult by reacting rather than responding, especially with our fellow abolitionists. Abolition is about getting free. Reacting abruptly is not freedom. For you or anyone else.

We can want the same things—freedom and abolition—and still not have the same ideals. We have to respect each other. We don’t have to agree.

As an example, she talks about how Malcolm X thought MLK Jr.'s March on Washington was ridiculous. But instead of "reacting" to the march, which could be trying to take the march over or cause a commotion about it, he "responded", which was to just watch on in distaste, since he "understood that King and his followers would act in accordance with their own ideology."

We, all of us in movement life, will not always see eye to eye. Sometimes, we’ll actually feel like enemies. Sometimes, we’ll feel like the people who should be closer to our side are actually closer to the side of our enemies.

Sometimes, and this is perhaps most difficult of all to parse, the people in your own organization have to be responded to—rather than reacted to.

Her examples include:

I choose to communicate with the person who I feel has harmed or hurt me no matter how small or big the issue is. My grounded response reflects my belief that we must have a bigger vision for our communities and the people who make up our communities. Unless you are a troll, I don’t block a community member from social media.

If we implement a new practice that is centered in care and dignity, we might find a practice that challenges our instinct to “cancel” each other. Abolition is about how we treat each other. It is about how we show up in relationships. Abolition is about how we respond to harm caused and how we respond when we cause harm.

Cullors suggests writing down things that are upsetting you in the moment or leaving and taking a moment and then writing things down or taking a voice memo, to slow down reaction time. The note can serve as reference later when a courageous conversation needs to happen. You can also share how you were feeling with the person before you chose to respond, which will let them understand that you are coming to them intentionally now.

This next segment was interesting:

Because most activism begins in a grassroots scenario, it can be disconcerting when donations begin to come in and the organization becomes well known. How do you make sure you don’t become the very thing that you are fighting against?

Many organizations that I have developed and worked for have been criticized for how they spend their money. There will always be some tension between volunteers who work very hard and salaried full-time employees who do the same. All you can do is make sure the team is tight, honest and follows all the rules both internally and externally. Be as transparent as possible—but make no apologies for salaries and other expenses.

I have felt tension as a volunteer for [organization] when I've had to put in a ton of extra hours, going as far as to man the help desk every single day during election season because we didn't have enough volunteers since the management was spread too thin that they couldn't get us more people on the help desk. There were times where I was bitterly wondering why I wasn't offered to have an actual job here considering how much time I was putting in. Due to my mental limitations I can't even get a real job to begin with, but I can do the work of a real job and receive no pay for it because volunteers are taken for granted. Is how I felt, anyway. But most nonprofits and the like have very little budget and are sustained primarily on unpaid volunteer work. And no organization has really solved this because money is a finite resource, and sometimes people really do want to help. I mean, I do like helping, but I also like not having to spend as much time as a part-time job without pay. I guess part of that is also because I'm wondering nowadays how useful letter writing really is. It feels easier to not really care when I don't have to put in as many hours, though.

In regards to the BLM using ActBlue:

Because ActBlue works with Democratic organizations and some candidates, the story became that BLM was just a shell and all of the money was going straight to the Democratic Party. Over the past few years, that rumor, completely baseless and easily resolved with a single web search, has grown louder and louder. If we speak up and deny it and correct it, the story gets bigger. If we don’t respond to the false allegations at all, the story will still get bigger.

This is an interesting problem to deal with when it comes to misinformation. Sort of related but not a completely similar situation: reminds me of when [translation group] was accused of having a pedophile and initially I thought people were just making shit up because people kept doing that about us. Ever since the translation group became known to be the main translation group in said fandom, people have just constantly talked about us like we're some actual group with power, when I literally don't have any social media or engage with people (and most people forget I exist in favor for a few members that actually do actively talk on their social media). People will really just make shit up about things we do or don't do or opinions we have or don't have without even asking us.

So I really did think that was BS when I first heard it, because no one who actually had the information came to anyone in our group about it. In fact, they could have just reached out to me (as I did have a social media at the time, and my Discord was linked, as was the group email), but they just didn't. No one wanted to have a courageous conversation with us so instead it just blew up and we ended up reacting by basically dragging the wrongdoer (after finding evidence) into a quick conversation in which we told them that we were removing them from the group and making a public post about it. There was a whole lot of other stuff that happened on the side with like someone related to the person harmed accusing us of not listening and everyone wanting the whole situation to be handled as soon as possible.

It really is true that people resort to trying to get rid of a person or group for not being perfect rather than trying to work with what they've already established first. It is tiring, and I don't really know whether this will ever change given what social media algorithms reward and the like. I think there's a book that people often recommend, Conflict is not Abuse, that goes into this but I haven't read it. But also at any rate, I think this incident is what led me to really give up on having any sort of public social media presence. So I guess they got part of what they wanted, which was me disappearing even more (not that they even were aware of my existence to begin with, they just hated the Group as a nebulous concept). I also wanted to just shut the group down but I didn't because #OCPD, I need to finish my projects or I'll die or whatever. I keep saying I want to quit and then I don't because there's no good replacements for me and this has gone on for years and years. Alas.


3. Nothing is Fixed

Nothing is permanent or absolute, and nothing in the system is fixed. So you should experiment.
Examples:

She mentions that the media can feel fixed, but the movement needs media, so you have to ask whether you're spreading the message or giving legitimacy to a corporation that doesn't deserve it, and to keep your own personal schedule also (responding and not reacting). And that you don't always get it right because nothing is fixed.


4. Say Yes to Imagination

I once read that people will always lean toward joyful things. So we must make seeking justice joyful. Where is that world? We live in it. We just have to imagine it.

Interesting, because it does ring true. I think when people are running away to escapism, for instance, it's because it's more enjoyable than whatever they're having to struggle through currently. Likewise, people gravitate towards fantasies that promise them things even if said thing is based in nonsense, like people who leap at the chance for scapegoats because they can then live in the fantasy that everything would be perfect if those people were gone, regardless of how much those very people are needed to uphold the system they want to see with their labor.

We have to be aware of everything we're doing that supports the white capitalist patriarchy and then pick our battles.

Yes, it can be overwhelming. Much of abolition work is. It’s up to you to figure out what you sacrifice and what you don’t. No one is making a daily tally of your commitment. (Actually, some people might be. I know some are committed to tallying what I do. Gotta let that go.)

All we can do is be ever vigilant and aware. Whether it’s watching football or eating pizza, there’s a level of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that we are supporting. If you’re aware, you can make tiny—and then major—changes. Then help others do the same.

This same friend has a partner who watches the NFL. He knows full well that it’s supporting everything that’s wrong with white supremacy. The NFL is an organization that has not supported Colin Kaepernick, has a dearth of Black coaches, and has been consistently racist since its founding in 1920.

Dr. Robert Turner is an assistant professor in the department of clinical research and leadership at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. His book Not for Long explains racism in the NFL and how it affects current and former players. According to his research, Black men, who make up just 6 percent of the population, comprise 70 percent of NFL players. The average player makes about two million dollars per year, ten times less than owners. Then they leave the sport in grave risk of developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). The lives and bodies of Black men are risked every season, and the NFL owners and management could not care less.

They don’t care about representation, either. In 2002, the NFL enacted the Rooney Rule. Football teams have to interview at least two “ethnic minorities” for vacancies in senior-level positions. Just interview them, not actually hire. That was almost 20 years ago. How many Black and Latinx head coaches are in the NFL this season? Three. [Note: this was written in 2022] Yet, her partner watches, knowing how disrespectful the NFL is toward its players.

How do we exist within this framework? How do we make sense of it and slice into it and keep abolitionist ideals? We can’t judge Black men who watch the NFL. We all have our own things with similarly problematic ideals.

It is true that no one can keep up with everything and live a problematic-free life. I think social media discourse tends to encourage doing so though, with the threat of pile-ons.

Cullors points out that people used to laugh at the idea of abolition, but after years and years of work it's become one of the major ideas in discussion.

Examples:

This latter example is kind of weird because it's mostly speculation about what Baldwin actually did imagine in terms of negative stuff. Not exactly sure how the negative imagination is useful either. But regardless, Baldwin keeps coming up in talks about hope and the like so I feel like I should actually try to read his work in the future if I can remember to get around to it.

This is the tricky thing about imagination. It’s yours to interpret. No one else can tell you it’s too big—or not big enough.

Yes, you need to think big. But be careful about what you think big should look like. Only you can determine what your imagination should bring to you.

The example given is of someone she knows who quit law to become a hairstylist, a dream she had since she was 5. But she was told that she wasn't thinking big enough at the time. Her salon eventually became a creative hub for the community (though Cullors says it would have been fine if that hadn't happened).

Whatever and however you believe you will do best by your imagination, that’s your path. In addition to being flexible with your own life, make sure you try to have that flexibility for others in your life.

Another example is of adrienne maree brown — who wrote "Pleasure Activism", a book that whiffed with me in every possible way as an asexual person. So, lol. Cullors relates that in brown's work as a facilitator with the Ruckus Society (harm reduction with substance users and sex workers)...

She noticed that oftentimes people could readily diagnose, analyze and tell a whole history about the problems in our society—but rarely could they envision the world beyond the pain of injustice. Even more alarming, she observed that the well-meaning people in the room were quick to separate themselves from the “bad people” and place all blame on the “other” without taking our human interconnectedness into consideration.

brown is likewise of the idea that people do what is pleasurable so the fight for justice should be made pleasurable.

The suggestion here is to start from imagination and go from there. What if you could have everything you wanted. And then see where it takes you.

Then there's this section about the idea of "unschooling" or "deschooling" where students lead and develop their own curriculum.


5. Forgive Actively, Not Passively

Forgiving passively means you accept and forget. Forgiving actively means you become part of the process, even if it's uncomfortable.

Let’s say a friend doesn’t hold up their end of the bargain on a project. They apologize. You accept and move on. Except, it then happens again. Because you were passive with your forgiveness, you never got to a step where it was healed, not just scarred. The best apology comes with action. Forgiving someone actively comes with action steps. If you truly want to forgive someone, you want them to be better.

Forgiveness is rooted in the idea that we value each other and we are committed to each other’s growth, healing and transformation.

Forgiving actively gives the forgiver an agency that is often unmet when we hold on to what or who has harmed us. When we are unable to forgive or when we are hell-bent on holding on to a lack of forgiveness, we create a cycle of apathy at best, revenge at worst.

We are taught to forgive the person who committed horrific acts of harm against us and our community, and we are taught that the person who committed those harms doesn’t have to be held accountable. We are taught a forgiveness that doesn’t honor our own pain and hurt but focuses solely on the person who harmed us. In fact, forgiveness is often offered as a way to get out of accountability.

When we are in the forgiveness driver’s seat, we begin to see that through forgiveness we are allowed to forge new roads that are paved with compassion, decisiveness and love. Forgiveness is not about cowardice or catering to our oppressors. An abolitionist’s forgiveness identifies a move away from holding on to the toxicity of sorrow and victimhood. Abolitionist forgiveness becomes a pillar and tool we can use to create the healing conditions for our loved ones, as well as make demands for accountability for harm we have experienced. We also don’t want to practice forgiveness prematurely.

Interesting to see victimhood described as "toxic". It is something I've noticed, where people think that they're in the right to hurt others because they themselves have been hurt and their categories of identity indicate that they're on the worse end of societal oppression (though, as we know, broad trends across groups cannot simply be transferred to an individual because an individual is always a unique combination of circumstances). These people I think do hold onto victimhood, maybe because it validates their feelings and gives them a pass on working to make things better, whether or not they're aware of it.

Given that abolitionists don't believe that there is any such binary of perpetrators and victims, it makes sense that they would also believe that framing yourself as a permanent victim would stunt your growth and ability to participate in community. Just off hand, anyway, people who are coming from this framework in my experience do tend to approach things with a "Give me everything that will placate my emotions or I will blow up on you and try my best to ruin you, because that's what justice is, and anything time you take to think it over is you dodging accountability, and by accountability I mean you should disappear from any sphere I exist in, forever," mindset. It's a permanently paranoid mindset.

(...)

In chapter two, on reacting vs. responding, I shared an uncomfortable moment I had with my mom. It turned into an ugly argument, and we went several days without speaking to each other (and keep in mind, we live very close and usually speak a few times a day). After almost a week my mom reached out to me. She apologized. I apologized, too, and focused on forgiving actively and not passively. I didn’t toss off an apology just because she did or so we could move on from the situation. That would be forgiving passively—and not in a way that would truly bring closure. As with all of our exercises, take a beat before acting. Does the person deserve forgiveness? Do you deserve forgiveness from this person? Are there courageous conversations that need to be had first?

My mom reached out to me first. If she hadn’t, I would have eventually reached out to her. Not to forgive or be forgiven. I would have asked her for a courageous conversation so we could discuss how we got there. Sometimes, forgiveness isn’t even necessary. Sometimes, forgiving someone is a shortcut when what’s really needed is a conversation about what happened. You can apologize and forgive and apologize and forgive and apologize and forgive over and over on the same topic. Sometimes, there needs to be an in-depth discussion or you’ll be in a passive forgiveness loop forever.

Here’s the other thing about forgiveness, both active and passive: sometimes, it’s just not going to happen. There are times when the conflict just ends with conversation and moving on. I’ve been in situations where I had to actively forgive myself and not necessarily the other person involved.

I’ve had conflicts that ended with me thinking to myself, Was I wrong? Should I apologize? Should I ask for active forgiveness? Sometimes, the answer to all three of these questions was no. Again, I’m human and so are you. You won’t always be able to be the bigger person. I’m not even going to tell you I have some kind of magical method to be able to do that. Because it doesn’t exist. You can try. Sometimes, the person you have to actively forgive in a scenario is yourself.

For example, if a third party asked me to recommend someone for an opportunity and I know this once-upon-a-time person would be perfect for it, would I recommend them?

If I have forgiven them passively, I probably would not. This person hurt me. I’ve forgiven them, but that doesn’t mean I’d present them with a positive opportunity. In all likelihood, that person I forgave passively probably wouldn’t even cross my mind.

If I’ve done the work to forgive them actively, pushed the tough conversations with myself and them, talked out forgiveness with myself and them, I could get to a space where someone who once hurt me could still be someone I support.

Does it mean my relationship with the person would be the way it was before the conflict? Likely not. You can actively forgive from a distance if you need to stop a cycle of harm.

No real comments here. Just find the active/passive forgiveness interesting. I don't actually feel like I do much of active forgiveness because I just believe people are the way they are and I don't actually want to bother them with being a way they're not. I guess that's trauma speaking and also saving me from putting in the work just to be disappointed. But also I'm someone who believes that everyone will eventually leave me anyway, so like why even bother? I help other people make it through their day. I remember how they hurt me and just keep that in the back of my mind forever as reasons why it'll be good, actually, when the relationship ends, because then that thing will have reached its natural end point. I never bring it up to the person again, of course, because that would be cruel and low-minded of me, but I don't forget. I also don't forget when I hurt other people if I'm made aware of it. That also goes into the tally of the eventual "Thank god the relationship is over! Now there's no more of this anymore and it's entirely their responsibility to forget my sins if they want to move on. Not my circus anymore."

In fact, I'm pretty sure that one of my friends has actively forgiven me for something but I don't because I acted really badly then. I keep hoping that someday she'll find a friend that is much, much better for her, supportive in all the ways that I try now, who never displaces their frustration onto her just because she was a safer target than the acquaintance that actually pissed me off. Then I can retire in peace and get a new, blank scorecard.

I'd always rather be the person hurt than the person hurting someone else. I feel like passively forgiving is as good as it gets and it's not up to other people to make anything up to me (but it is up to them to make it up to other people or the group or whatever), and it is up to me to make it up to the people I hurt. I guess this is a survival thing regarding my parents and also I'm very cynical. I nudge people towards change as kindly as I can, all the while always believing they'll never do it and they'll always be stuck in their same bad emotional cycles forever. I mean, what have my parents taught me besides that? (Many other dysfunctional things, of course.)

Anyway, I'm very bad at this one. I still feel hurt if I think about how people hurt me for too long. My solution is simply don't think about it, I got other shit to think about.

(...)

The best way to topple an organization (or a family, or a friendship, or a relationship) from the inside is to provoke the emotions that cause the most consternation and pain—jealousy, greed, pride, insecurity—and then just allow people to fall short of their goals or attack their comrades. All of these things can be dropped into a relationship and cause it to falter. What can help is active forgiveness. The conversations that lead to active forgiveness are the things that keep people in accord.

Then uses John Lewis as an example because he forgave the people who wronged him and had an ability to believe in people's capacity to grow. (can't relate.)

Pretty much everything you do in abolitionist work will be dependent on caring for yourself.


6. Allow Yourself to Feel

Talks about how the Black community has often taught themselves and their children not to feel as a survival tactic, but you need to feel to grow.

Consider this: so many of us have had that relative. It’s an elder, of any gender, who doesn’t easily communicate with their partner or children or families. At a family gathering, they are silent, perhaps speaking solely to chide someone or complain. They don’t seem to have any emotions except annoyance. Whether it’s a graduation, wedding, funeral or holiday, they don’t have much to say. You can’t ask about the family tree, you can’t ask about the good old days or family recipes. These are the family members who are surviving the impact their trauma has had on them. Sitting on the tweed couch with plastic slipcovers with not much to say.

We know why this is. It’s because so many of our elders have had to bind up their emotions tight, like a bandaged rib, for their entire lives. Any emotion, positive or negative, was blunted over the years while they just tried to survive.

↑ Just an interesting thing because I don't really have a similar experience. I'm not really connected to my relatives in general.

"We owe it to our ancestors to feel. Feelings were a luxury for many of our forebears. It’s literally a luxury to be sad, disappointed or upset. For people who lived under constant fear that their families could be dismantled at any time, to feel could be to lose your life."

↑ This also. And the following is just more cultural stuff.

On May 31 and June 1, 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a massacre was enacted on Greenwood, a Black neighborhood, leaving dozens dead and millions of dollars of property wiped out. It began when a Black teenager falsely accused of sexual assault was imprisoned. A group of armed Black men stood watch outside the jail to make sure the young man was not lynched. The group was asked to disperse, which they did. At some point, there was a scuffle with white men nearby. Someone’s gun discharged. That was it—for the next 48 hours, there was loss of life and property.

But this is the true horror of that moment: Thousands of residents left Greenwood, and most of them never spoke about what happened over the course of those two days and why they left their entire lives behind. Those who remained never spoke a word of what happened. For generations. Most who lived through it took the stories, the atrocities, and the memories to their graves.

Try to really envision this: people are dead, homes are destroyed, and no one speaks out. No one demands justice. It is not discussed, even privately. It is folded up, placed deep inside the breast pocket of the community, white hot and painful. For decades, no one feels it because it’s wrapped up so deep no one can even find it.

In Judaism, mourners who suffer a loss sit shiva for seven days, which means that the grieving stay at home, receive visitors and mourn. It’s a set time to lean into the feelings that come with mourning. Whether you’re completely devastated or only mildly sad, you have this seven-day period to allow yourself to feel. It’s socially expected to take time and process. In various cultures, this period can go for as long as several months. In some cultures, it’s literally looked upon strangely if someone doesn’t wail and cry and show feelings over the death of a loved one.

Black and Brown folks have their own ways of dealing with grief depending on where they are from geographically and other markers. However, a wake, a service and a repast are common. The wake is usually offered in the evening, for those who can’t attend the more formal funeral service, which ends with a large meal called a repast.

These things differ depending on who has passed away and what the circumstances were. The older the person who has passed and the more expected the passing, the more likely there will be traditional markers.

She then introduces this stew metaphor that is kind of weird to me:

It’s been said to think of all of our feelings as a stew, forever bubbling in an old-school cauldron. The pot has to be continually stirred, over and over. That’s the equivalent of checking in with ourselves. You would never leave a boiling dish on a stove indefinitely. Our brains are the same, and we constantly need to make sure they’re not bubbling over.

We add feelings to this stew. We build connections. We grow our families. Keep stirring. We enter relationships. We become abolitionists. We change laws. We dismantle systems of oppression. Keep stirring. At no point do you ever just walk away from this pot filled with all your feelings. You will always make sure everything is simmering at the right temperature. Sometimes, you’ll take things out. The way we scoop out a bay leaf at the end of making spaghetti sauce. Some things remain in there forever. What’s important is that we measure what goes in and comes out. Keep stirring. Keep it all balanced.

An example is Prentis Hemphill, "a movement facilitator, Somatics teacher and practitioner and writer living and working at the convergence of healing, individual and collective transformation and political organizing. He spent many years working with powerful movements and organizations, most recently as the Healing Justice director at Black Lives Matter Global Network." "Prentis is the founder of the Black Embodiment Initiative and host of the Finding Our Way podcast."

I guess if we ever want to look into his stuff.

Remember what white supremacy is. It’s the belief that white people are superior and that they should dominate. This has been sustained with many different methods, abject fear and terror among them. It feels as if we can’t overcome things like white supremacy. So it’s important that we figure out how to put those feelings to work. Abolishing white supremacy and the patriarchy depends on not necessarily controlling your feelings but understanding them and knowing when and how to expect them. If you have feelings of rage because of things you see in your work as an abolitionist, how can you make sure you process them properly if you don’t know how to process joy or simple annoyance? If it’s in the stew, it needs to be properly handled if you want to be able to go out and handle the bigger stuff.

Bracketing your feelings also helps you understand how white supremacy and patriarchy work. This work will not always bring feelings of joy or peacefulness. You have to be able to identify, process and move on. You are literally fighting for the right to exist. You are fighting for the right to emote. You are fighting for the right to speak up for what is needed in our communities.

You have to be able to feel in order to get others to understand why you should be able to feel. When you can feel free, you can feel.

This book uses the term "women and femmes", which is in relation to being raised with the expectation of nurturing others.
"Women and femmes" is always such a weird term bc i get what it's trying to articulate (people raised with expectations of nurturing and stringent beauty standards + those who may not have been raised with that but now occupy the same position) but like there's plenty of nb butch people who fit the former category but they're basically rebinarized as "woman" in this. But I also don't have a better term suggestion.


7. Commit to Not Harming or Abusing Others

You can never just assume you won’t harm someone. So consider this chapter to be car insurance. No, you don’t want to have to use it. But if you don’t have it when you need it, the fallout will be a lot worse.

Violence doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It is connected to the conditions that we live in, and we all participate in creating those conditions, and we all have a collective responsibility for ending violence, harm and abuse.

This makes people uncomfortable. I’m not responsible for violence! Why do I have a collective responsibility for ending violence, harm and abuse? The answer is simple: You are a decent human being and you live in a world where we all need to perpetuate an anti-harm environment.

This principle may seem like a no-brainer. However, I want us to take a moment as human beings to realize that harm and abuse exist in multiple ways. We all have the capacity to be harmed and also have the capacity to cause harm. The sooner we are able to understand that the dichotomy of abuser and victim is inherently false, the closer we are to understanding how abolition can, will and does support moving all of us toward a healing path. Abuse is a reaction to the set of conditions we live inside of. The United States was built on harm and abuse. This country stole land through physical and sexual violence; it stole human beings and forced them to labor while labeling them as three-fifths human. It used violence and aggression to create a world of harm and greed.

"What is an abolitionist space? It’s a place that practices safety. It’s a place where all are intentional about not causing you harm. An abolitionist space is not always a physical meeting space for a large organization. Sometimes it’s much more subtle than that, especially in the beginning. Sometimes it’s a classroom. Sometimes it’s a living room. Sometimes it’s a break room. It’s a place where you are cared for. Our goal is to be caring. That’s what makes it a space to practice safety.

Example of a friend who hired an assistant who was really good but then started doing really badly for a month. The friend checked in with the assistant, heard that it was because it was the anniversary of a really bad event in the assistant's life, and gave the assistant a full week off even though it was hard with all the stuff to manage. The assistant came back and did just as well as before, now with the knowledge that she could talk about her feelings.

We must remember, whether we forgive or not, corporal punishment was a survival tactic from our ancestors. Keeping your child quiet, by any means necessary, was literally often needed to stay alive. Using nothing but a stare to make sure your children stay completely silent has also been just a normative part of parenting. Many of us have stories to tell about going to markets and stores with our parents and seeing white children acting out in ways that would bring us bodily harm if we were to try the same behavior with our own parents.

Our parents thought they had to harm us in order to make us listen to them—so they could keep us safe. Many of us were trained with violence to listen and to obey.
We were harmed. We must decide to passively forgive, actively forgive or do neither. We must remember where the abuse came from.
We must commit to not harming and abusing others. If necessary and possible, we have to let go of what harm and abuse influenced us in order to make sure we don’t do it again.

What some parents really want is for their children to have that abject fear of them; but that only means kids do things in secret and are afraid to ask for help. Making the decision not to spank is not an easy one, especially when it’s been an approved and accepted and expected part of parenting in your culture for generations.
I want my nephew and all Black children to stand up tall and walk this earth like they mean it. If they cower in fear of their parents, instead of contributing to being parented, they will cower in fear of all authority while defying it, as well.

↑ Very interesting point about learned helplessness. Part of the reason why I'm so ineffective as a person and in any realm of activism is because I've internalized not to defy authority and I get extreme anxiety reactions when I do so. I honestly probably will never be able to do that on a meaningful scale. Thank you, parental and school neglect. Couldn't have done it without you.

Be honest, do you ever gossip about your friends or frenemies? Do you sometimes use social media to cut down someone else’s hair, clothes, relationship, career? Can you be judgmental about the choices your friends and family make? Just because you’re not critical to someone’s face doesn’t mean you’re not causing harm. In fact, if you’re whispering behind your hand to someone else, you’re giving off negativity to them as well, which is another way of causing harm.

Also an interesting concept. I'm guilty of doing this when I vent, I guess, because I feel like talking to the person is not an option because they don't have the resources necessary for change. I also do comment about opinions I think are dumb that I see on social media. But I also feel like part of that is discussing ideas or whatever. Over the years I've been working on just accepting that people will be "wrong" and that their existences don't necessarily threaten mine, especially if I just unplug. So now it's like (sees something stupid) (gets annoyed for a few minutes, maybe expresses said thing) (remembers that I don't actually have to care and just forgets otherwise). Is that living in line with this principle? No clue. Maybe not!

As for being judgmental, I've been working on that too and I don't really judge people as much anymore because honestly, who am I to judge when I'm already failing more than anyone else around me does. It's fine. I hope they eventually realize that some of the things and relationships they have (including with me, maybe) are not serving them as good as they could be and that's probably because they're reaching towards said things as a band-aid to feel better in the moment. As always, I just believe people do things because they don't really have any other options, and were I to tell them that they may that might be presumptuous of me because I don't know their whole life. They're probably already doing the best they can.

We’re human. There’s so much about our everyday life that could be considered causing harm. Like we just discussed, we all have feelings we try to adjust to on a daily basis, and we’re by no means perfect. You could be cross with your child because you’re just exhausted. You could set unreasonably high expectations for your partners and then not be kind when they can’t measure up. Your puppy could be taking too long to get the hang of Wee-Wee pads. A parent could be making you feel guilty for not calling more. Whatever our interactions are with the people in our lives, we need to be sure that our reactions are not harmful or abusive.

Lol. I will not OCPD spiral about this. I will not OCPD spiral about this.

I know a mom whose 13-year-old can be challenging. She’s not completing all of her homework assignments and chores. The mom took her phone away as a punishment, which made the child’s attitude even worse. Is there harm or abuse happening here? Is the teen, who often exhibits challenging behavior, actually harming her mom? Or is there something missing in the relationship that’s causing the disconnect? This mom goes out into the world on a daily basis to fight against a white supremacist system. Yet, some days, the fight is even harder than it should be because of the fights she’s having at home.

Harm and abuse are not always easy to spot, gauge or avoid. We simply do our best. You must always be ready to put into practice active forgiveness, when possible, including and especially for yourself.

:/ I just don't think I'm ready for this either. :\ I feel like I'm already doing my part by trying not to hurt other people, and I actually do want them to drop me when I do so I don't have to deal with the knowledge that I did bad forever. :/

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, an activist whose work is both far-reaching and healing, has developed insight and contributions to disability justice, specifically when speaking on neurodivergent, sick and disabled people. They elevated my understanding of the complexities of harm and abuse and our responsibility to forge healing systems collaboratively.

Healing is a rigorous practice that can only be effectively done at what Leah calls the “speed of trust.” To commit to not harming or abusing others means that we are taking a closer look at the larger structures of violence that we have survived and all the ways we have internalized that violence.

Piepzna-Samarasinha is another big name who wrote "Care Work", which is yet another book that didn't hit so well with me. It was interesting (if I can even recall much of it because I didn't take copious quotes / thoughts like I am now), but the number one feeling I had walking away from that was like, "Oh man, I am not femme." Because there was a lot of that same kinda women and femmes thing going on along with stuff that kinda felt like the divine feminine. Which like, I'm sure works for some people but not for me.

Things like disability justice also often emphasize that radical change can start just from having a space where you treat like 3 people better, and no matter what I cannot get myself to believe this because I'm always thinking about scale. I guess the frame I take is too big in general and I think of a lot of lives as ones that will ultimately be forgotten. People aren't expendable but also are not everything, and if only 2 people survive and live lives to the fullest while others like them suffer on a grand scale that is a loss to me. But I guess thinking like this when you have very little power to influence anything due to your own shortcomings to begin with is just a recipe to make yourself give up and isn't very healthy.

Abolitionist work could be called Reduce Harm and Abuse because essentially white supremacy is harmful and abusive and uses that harm and abuse to maintain itself.

Book goes into the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and J. Marion Sims of gynecology experimenting on Black women. As an example of the abuse Black people live through that echoes today and needs to be addressed.

After Brown v. Board of Education was passed, many white cities and counties took things into their own hands to make sure their children would not attend integrated schools. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, they literally just shut down all public schools for five years to avoid having to integrate them. They used taxpayer dollars to establish white schools that were held in private buildings like churches. When the courts ordered that taxpayer dollars could not be used this way, white residents just put their kids in private schools.

The Black folks in the county didn’t have options for private schools. Many Black students were just out of school for several years. Just straight up, no education. Parents tried to gather their children as best they could and find family and community members who could tutor. But it was nothing like what even the segregated schools could offer.

At one point, when white citizens in the county were trying to get around trying to have Black students in their schools, other plans were discussed.

An attorney for Prince Edward County was quoted as saying, “Negroes could be let in and then chased out by setting high academic standards they could not maintain, by hazing if necessary, by economic pressures in some cases, etc. This should leave few Negroes in the white schools.”

Unfortunately, many charter schools have similar policies that result in this kind of harm. Often, children with special needs, language delays, or bilingual needs are shut completely out of “choosing” schools that have higher scores and stats. And just as the white people in Prince Edward County sought to block Black students by making the academic requirements too rigorous, there are many cities where Black children aren’t “good enough” to go to the very schools in their communities that their parents and loved ones support with tax dollars. Being left behind by a lack of educational support is harmful. We must fight it in every way we can.

As abolitionists, we know how important parenting is to everything we do to center our communities and make them whole. Every one of these 12 principles begins with the practice of being a whole and healthy person.

Look around your community. As best as you can see, what needs to be done? Can you do it on your own? Probably not. Can you do it with the help of your abolitionist community? Absolutely, you can.

Whether it’s the material on your airwaves, the food in your grocery stores, the medical care in your city, the transportation for workers or the school system for students—and beyond, you can make change. It’s worth looking over it all to see how we stop harm from happening and stop the harm and abuse that already has.

When we talk about transformative justice, just like when we talk about abolishing prisons, why is it that people immediately focus on what they think can’t be done?

What if a serial killer who kills for fun is in our community, then what?

Yes, of course, communities must be protected from this harm (and these people need to be protected from themselves). But let’s start with what we see and hear and live through every single day that can be managed with transformative justice and prison abolition.

Do you scroll your timelines on social media, sneering at folks you call your friends? Do you screengrab posts and text them to friends, discussing someone’s new hairstyle or new partner? Are you petty? The definition of petty is something that’s trivial or of little importance. And that’s why pettiness is important for this chapter. When you think of not harming or abusing others, you usually think of large-scale examples of harm: physical, emotional and otherwise.

But for some of us, even the ones who are committed to not harming or abusing others, social media is where pettiness can rear its ugly head. If it’s unchecked, you can harm and abuse others without even realizing it. You may write a nasty subtweet or post, or you might engage in cyberbullying.

Well, I definitely don't do this! But I think I did when I was like in middle school (maybe high school for vague posting where someone could see it? unclear). RIP.


8. Practice Accountability

When I was a child I was taught to apologize if I hurt someone physically or emotionally. It was usually an adult dictating what that actually meant, and I wasn’t given practices or tools to be accountable for the harm I caused. There was often a lot of shame associated with behaving “badly,” and so most of the time I would hide if I did anything that would have been perceived as “bad.”

As an adult, I’ve learned that wronging someone is broader and more complex and nuanced than just doing something bad. Our actions are rarely that bad. We don’t spend the day doing good and bad things. Plenty of our encounters fall somewhere on a spectrum.

The culture we live in teaches us to say “sorry” but also simultaneously teaches us that when we cause harm we are bad and unable to be redeemed or transformed. Whole groups of people in our culture deny harm caused just so they don’t have to feel the self-shame that is associated with that harm they have participated in. We hear this from white folks and men and cis people. The moment that groups who hold privilege are asked to be accountable, there is a deep resistance to recognizing and then apologizing for that harm.

Different types of harm caused can lead to different ways of accountability. For example, we talked earlier about gossiping and backstabbing and backbiting, even (and perhaps especially) in jest. Do you need to approach the person you’ve spoken unkindly about? Not necessarily. Especially if they don’t know. What you can do is commit to not getting pulled into that sort of harm. You don’t have to speak highly of every person on Earth, of course. You don’t have to make your mouth a weapon, either.

How do you know when you’re truly practicing accountability? Well, is it uncomfortable? Then you’re probably doing it right. True accountability is not easy to do and takes effort. Expect to feel some discomfort.

Abolition is about righting injustices in a way that is sustainable. It’s not giving someone the tools they need to exist in a racist system. It’s doing away with the racist system. So in abolition, we are constantly looking for systems rooted in racism and patriarchy and dismantling them. We expect more than just a check and an apology for certain atrocities our people have dealt with.

For some, seeing someone getting emotional is hard to take in. So we rush to apologize in the hopes that they will stop crying and return to “normal.” We’re taught to push back discomfort as quickly as possible. We try to apologize and hug to make it go away quickly.

But as abolitionists, sitting with discomfort is critical for taking accountability. Imagine that you have harmed someone. They confront you and tell you their thoughts. The most important thing you can do if you want to take accountability is just listen. So much discomfort and discord comes when people feel like they are not being heard. Often because someone wants to rush through the discomfort and skip to the apology.

Accountability means you’ll be willingly and unfailingly honest about whatever your scenario is. Accountability means you won’t procrastinate on righting the wrong or harm. Accountability means you must also explain how and why it won’t happen again.

Instead of leaning in for a hug or to somehow comfort, listen. If that means there is anger, accept it. If that means there are tears, accept them. Sit with the discomfort of how this person feels. When it’s time, you can ask, are you okay? Or, is there more you need me to hear? Be ready to hear them completely through. Sometimes, being present in that moment can look like you don’t care or that you’re being cold. Practice this. Practice doing things differently from how you may have been taught.

While someone may find it jarring that you’re not swan diving into an apology but are instead standing up and being accountable, they will understand. They may very well do the same the next time they need to be accountable.

Don’t confuse accountability with making amends. They are both worthy skills to have, but they are very different. Accountability comes first. It’s actually the easiest of the two to begin to use. Accountability says, I have harmed. Full stop. Making amends comes later, sometimes immediately after, sometimes not. Amends is making a plan to undo or heal the harm done. First, you show up and hold yourself accountable, whether in person, via electronic correspondence (including social media, if that’s how the harm was caused) or a handwritten letter. You let it be known that you are the person who has done the harm and explain that you’re ready to take responsibility.

The reason why amends is separate is what amends looks like varies depending on the harm caused and what the person harmed needs to heal.

Interesting distinction between being accountable and making amends.

Remember, you want to get accountability right, not just for the person you harmed—but for yourself. These situations don’t disappear and you may end up continually offering accountability for harm you’ve caused in your past.

Oof. I think I would rather just disappear forever if I really did something so bad that other people continue to need my accountability for it? I just cannot imagine a world in which that would be true and in which my contributions or being would even be necessary at that point. Like I'm pretty sure they would just do better without me then.

Book goes into how to take accountability with "I" statements but I don't think that's new information for either of us so skipping.

Then introduces the concept of being accountable to ourselves.

The most important (and difficult) aspect of accountability is being accountable to yourself. (Ack, I know.)

What does that look like?

It looks like intention. Do you want to wake up early each morning to do yoga? Work backward and see what steps are necessary to make that happen. What usually gets in the way? Do you stay up late binge-watching your favorite shows and then wake up late and miss your yoga class? Are you snacking heavy at night, which makes you not feel much like moving around in the morning? Are you over-extended in work or at home, which makes it easier to make plans than to execute them? Move back to the moment you make the intention, and think about what’s happening at that moment that makes it difficult to have accountability for the things that harm yourself.

Writing down what your intentions are is a good step toward accountability. Erykah Badu once tweeted: “Write it down on real paper with a real pencil with real intent and watch it get real.” It’s true, the first step to accountability is holding yourself accountable at the very beginning. Write down what you want to see happen, how it will look throughout the process, and how you will keep yourself on target."

Uhh. I will not OCPD spiral over this. I will not OCPD spiral over this. As someone who can't fucking get up in the morning for shit due to insomnia, despite multiple medications and the like. This is kinda triggering my "oh boy I'm not doing enough" feelings though lol. I will not OCPD spiral over this.

Reparations offer a real process for accountability. We can look at local reparations campaigns, like the one in Chicago. This campaign is led by Black organizations fighting for and alongside survivors of state violence to receive monetary reparations, a memorial, a torture survivor center and more. In Chicago, in the 1970s and 1980s, Commander Jon Burge tortured Black men in order to get them to agree to false allegations that were put on them by the Chicago police. This led to the incarceration of over one hundred Black men. After a hard-fought campaign, the Survivors of Torture by Jon Burge and the survivors’ descendants were offered what they’d fought for. This is what being accountable looks like. Admit to harm caused, apologize for harm caused, seek to repair the harm and then implement the repair.

Book quotes Mia Mingus, who is one of the architects of disability justice.

Mia continues to encourage us to practice accountability and create spaces of much compassion and grace as we reflect and pivot to a much more inclusive liberatory practice within our social justice movements. Mia proclaims that “practice yields the sharpest analysis,” and while our movement spaces are not perfect, Mia reminds us that the goal is not perfection but a commitment to the real work of transformation. The work of accountability is complex, non-linear, and constantly shifting. There is a great fear and shame that is ingrained in movement spaces to always get it “right” in order to merit our credibility—but this allegiance to perfectionism misses the mark."

When it comes to keeping others accountable, insist on courageous conversations and listen closely to what they’re saying and offering. You don’t have to accept anyone’s approach to accountability if it doesn’t seem genuine or is flawed in any way. When someone harms, it’s not up to the person who was harmed to figure it all out, make a judgment call and make a decision on if it’s over or not. That happens when the person who has been harmed decides to let it go—if at all.

Accountability doesn’t have a due date. There’s no time or space where you have to say your feelings have changed or you’ve made a particular decision about anything. Yes, this includes when you’re being accountable to yourself.

Remember, this principle is not about giving or receiving apologies. This is about discerning culpability for harm in order to figure out what the next move is.

Keep track of your progress in this area. The more conscious you are of the large and small ways you work on this, the easier it is to practice.

I’ve been in healing circles, ones where I have been called out and encouraged to be accountable for my actions. This does not feel good. Especially when the people surrounding you are ones that you know care for you, implicitly and explicitly, and only want the best for you. When you have to look into those eyes and see where you have fallen short, it makes you see things very clearly. You want to be a loved and trusted part of your community and you’ll do whatever’s necessary to heal your community. It is a very different feeling than depending on the state to determine your status. Most of us are much more likely to hold ourselves accountable to our community when it’s coming directly from our community.

Scary. To begin with, I don't believe anyone in the world only cares for me and wants the best for me. Maybe you do, but that's also because you're weird. If people called me out like this I would just assume they wanted me dead. Maybe it would actually be better if they did want me dead rather than knowing that I have to live imperfect in their minds forever as someone who has done a big Fuck Up. I guess that's because I believe that at any moment someone can pull out that Fuck Up and then just be like, btw this is why I'm dropping you, and I would have to be like, yeah, okay, that makes total sense, and then I would feel stupid for ever thinking I could get away from my mistake like that when obviously hurting other people is something impossible to come back from. I think I would serve out my duty to do whatever they wanted me to and then make my escape as soon as it seems like they don't need me to perform my repentance anymore.

Man, the more I read the more I just do not believe I can possibly be in community, at least not to this degree. I think I have too much wrong with me for this. I don't want people who I've fallen short in front of to want me around, I want them to find someone better.


9. Embrace Non-Reformist Reform

The idea of non-reformist reform is something that’s hard for some to get on board with. Especially if you don’t have a history in abolitionist work. To make it simple, non-reformist reform is the idea that we’re not fighting to improve an existing, failed system. We are fighting for what we actually need within a brand-new system.

Think this was basically covered in We Do This 'Til We Free Us.

This book talks about how body cams are a reform and how they've failed greatly in doing anything besides giving police more money.

André Gorz, who coined the term “non-reformist reform,” had a very simple framework for action. He believed in creating communities and societies that were based on human needs, not on economic systems.
It may be hard for some to understand that non-reformist reform is absolutely doable. Not only is it doable, it’s crucial.

What also must be understood is that non-reformist reform does not come from the top down, economically. This is not a theory where you assume the high-end capitalist society will support change. Also, the people most in need of change are completely capable of changing these systems themselves. This is not a situation where a certain group sits in a conference room or a lecture hall and works out how to enact non-reformist reform. The people on the ground can build this system. According to Gorz: “The people are active in reordering social relationships, diagnosing social inequalities, and mobilizing for a better way of socially organizing the world.

A common example of non-reformist reform is the idea of strikes. For hundreds of years, workers going on strike to gain things like higher pay or safety measures has been a mainstay. Over the years, organizers have helped strikers with their demands and seeing them through. But ultimately, strikes only keep capitalist ownership in power. A strike is coming, they know what to do, they meet the demands—or not—and life goes on. But if the employees demand control of what happens on a day-to-day basis, it’s a different world and more sustainable model. In that case, empowered workers have an ongoing initiative to constantly improve the workplace, instead of simply waiting for when a strike is needed. This is stirring the cauldron—instead of just letting it boil over and cleaning it up, repeatedly.

Sometimes, the idea of non-reformist reform is difficult to put in place because it’s believed that the current system is working. An example is the Red Cross and NGOs, which work in places like Haiti. After the 2010 earthquake, $1.4 billion was donated to Haiti from Americans alone. Even two years after the earthquake, however, many Haitians were still living in substandard housing with little access to clean drinking water.

After the celebrities and politicians left the country, the people of Haiti were out of the media spotlight. The money was still flowing through, but it was still not changing their quality of life.

The fact is that most organizations were best at day-one planning. They were giving out tarps in the days, weeks, and months after the earthquake but not working toward better, permanent housing, using the people’s ideas as a gauge of what could and should be done—and how. Non-reformist reforms are about structural change rather than putting a Band-aid on the wound. We have to uproot systems and build something new."

What I Know: For over a decade the LA No More Jails campaign (now known as Justice LA) has organized against the $3.5 billion jail construction plan looming over the Los Angeles community. For more than a decade, the Los Angeles–based coalition worked alongside over 15 organizations to push the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department to stop wasting billions of dollars on incarceration and criminalization and instead reallocate those dollars toward community resources.

For more than ten years LA No More Jails was essentially laughed at, and we were told our vision for Los Angeles was naive and uninformed. After every single meeting we had with an elected official who told us we would not be able to win over the community with the No More Jails message, we organized harder. We never relinquished our vision of abolition, and in fact we continued to organize ourselves toward non-reformist reforms.

We knew that the only way to fight against jail expansion was to keep organizing, keep getting stronger, and leverage every opportunity to remind the local government that the fight against mass criminalization is a fight we would continue until they officially stopped jail expansion in Los Angeles. By the time 2016 rolled around, we were being told that the building of the new women’s jail, the closure of the men’s central jail and the rebuilding of a mental health jail were official and there was no more room to fight against the jail plans.

Many of us saw an opportunity with the election of Trump and the election of a new county board of supervisors. These supervisors had inherited the jail plans and they could, in theory, not only reverse the plans but chart a new way forward.

In 2017, a group of us rebranded LA No More Jails as Justice Los Angeles. We wanted to develop a broad-tent coalition not only across Los Angeles but also across the country. There were multiple counties fighting against jail expansion. We saw ourselves situated as part of a national fight against the criminalization of our communities. Justice LA launched in the summer of 2017, led by powerful young leaders directly impacted by the carceral system. The launch was multi-pronged.

We used art—100 replica jail beds placed in the middle of Downtown Los Angeles in front of the county board of supervisors building. We used public testimony—300 people went into the board meeting while many of us protested outside its doors; and we used mass engagement—we brought some of the best thinkers and cultural workers together to launch the Justice LA campaign. We knew this launch had to not just feel big but also be big. We needed the county to understand that after ten years of fighting us, they needed to move forward with what the community was demanding.

Our combination of direct visual art, words from the community and hundreds of citizens inside the meeting and more outside felt like a ten-year effort—because it was.

Dignity and Power Now, Youth Justice Coalition, La Defensa, CURB and Frontline Wellness Network have become the central organizations that led the Justice LA Coalition to victory.

Cash bail is a complete failure in most cities, and you should look up what’s happening in your city/state. Some governments have started to change the system, but there are many more places where it needs to be abolished.

In most cities, if someone is represented by a private lawyer, they will see a judge within 24 hours and then some sort of conditional release will be arranged. Most cities have many options for this release but lean on the one that brings in the most money: cash bail. If you don’t have the cash (and the average bail is $55,000, more than the average American citizen makes in a year), you sit in jail until your court date or plea bargain. Or, if you have the option, you can hopefully have someone put up collateral to guarantee your appearance in court. Almost always, there’s a bondsman in the mix, and their office will get 10 percent of the bail amount; whether the person is later found innocent doesn’t matter. It’s a billion-dollar industry made of amounts almost exclusively drawn from low-income communities. We have become a nation of people who expect to have to pay to be free.


10. Build Community

The concept of community building is really about whom we can trust, whom we can feel emotionally, spiritually and physically safe with, as well as reciprocal accountability. These are the key factors when building the community you want to be evolving inside of. How we practice abolition is critical.

Sounds cool. Don't have. Don't even like the idea of being that vulnerable.

You need every principle we’ve discussed thus far in order to make this one work. This work can’t be done alone. Can you start alone? Yes. Can you read alone and think alone and marinate on teachings alone? Absolutely. No matter what level your work will take you to, it will likely require you to join or build a community—whether it’s a weekly meeting at your kitchen table or a Zoom lecture with hundreds.

Perhaps your community begins with just yourself. You add one more person. This is a community! Don’t think for a moment that if it’s less than a dozen people, it’s not a community. You start where you are, strengthen the bonds as tight as you can and then add on as it makes sense to do so. Community building is fluid and ever changing. Start with how you plan to communicate. Will you try to meet in person? What are your schedules, and how much time per week can you give to building community? Compare work and life schedules and see what makes sense. Offer fine details that help a community grow stronger through future plans, potential job or home changes. What do you want from this work? How often should you take a step back and evaluate your past, present and future?

I don't actually get the idea of 2 people as a community. That doesn't make sense to me at all. That's just me and one friend spinning our wheels, probably doing nothing. I mean, according to this you and me are a community. But I don't think I'm properly a community with anyone else because of the whole I would hate to be held accountable thing. If you want to hold me accountable you can, though, I guess. I mean, I still think at that point you would be better served by someone else entirely but I guess I would be more willing to take it from you because you have memory of a flea when it comes to remembering how you felt about something in the moment. Since you specifically can't access stuff like nostalgia, you probably wouldn't remember how badly I hurt you anyway, in which case I could safely assume that if I made up for it and if you still wanted me around (even though you shouldn't, technically), that it would be case closed as good as it would ever get.

Other people, though. I don't trust other people. I think they secretly hate me sometimes. Because I am capable of thinking that other people are annoying sometimes and wishing they just would be quiet or whatever, which is totally not in service to them. (I would never voice this to them, of course.) And of course, there's the fact that I was capable of hating my mom fiercely at the same time I told her I loved her to make her shut the fuck up. Holding that emotion and being forced to perform the opposite for my survival just means I can't trust anyone else who seems to have a normal emotional memory.

What needs to happen as your community grows? You’ll need to make sure there are clearly defined roles and everyone knows what’s expected of them. Even if it causes slight conflict at the beginning, it’s more important to have that discomfort now than when you have a community of 50 people who are all resentful because no one has clearly defined roles.

Yeah, this is true just based on my work in my lameo translation group. Not spelling things out just makes everything confusing because people are very bad at figuring out what needs to be done on their own and in fact you have to constantly remind people to show up to do what they signed up to do.

The community for this work doesn’t need to mirror everyone’s role in the outside world. If Ellen is an attorney who specializes in immigration law and she wants to work on that in the community—of course, that’s what she should do. If Ellen is an attorney who specializes in immigration law but she actually wants to make the coffee for every meeting, clean up afterward and oversee the children’s area, then that must be okay.

A community’s development must be led from within. People should be able to define themselves not by their labels but by what suits them. Of course, if you have a member who speaks Spanish or French or Haitian Creole, it would be hoped that they would help as needed. But if someone’s full-time job is translating and that part of their brain is simply exhausted, it might make sense to hire a translator as needed. Just because someone can do something doesn’t mean they are the best person for that task. Consent is a critical practice.

Figuring out who does what may be the more challenging part of setting up a growing community. Everyone should have a role to play, so that there’s an equal feeling of belonging. Figuring out what those roles should look like is not always (or ever) simple to do.

Interesting concepts. I think the only thing that suits me is sitting in a mostly empty corner and doing some menial task.

A strong community has plans for relationships that occur within it. Like-minded people, especially when dealing with something as intense as abolition, are likely to grow close to one another, and that can manifest in many ways, from besties to friends with benefits to poly long-term relationships. It can all strengthen the community. Or it can explode it to bits.

Will your community have a hands-off rule in place, with no in-house sexual relationships between members? How will you enforce that? What will happen to those who flout the rule? Or will there be a do-as-you-please-we’re-all-grown mentality? What are the risks there and how will you deal with the consequences?

I'm already feeling the headache and I don't want to engage. oops. I'm just tired of managing my translation group and the one guy virtually no one likes but who we don't kick out because he was a teen and he occasionally does work so that seems cruel. He's grown as a person but is still annoying as hell to me sometimes and so many people stopped talking as much in the group because of him (ironically, I think they're starting to talk more now because he became less active over the years). Though by not kicking him out we basically lost a member who was of marginalized identities that he kept stepping on the toes of (we talked to him at the time and told him that if he said something offensive again we'd have to kick him, but then he didn't). But that member also did 0 work, so what is the logic here? I don't know. I think maybe I am just not good at managing people and I should not have to be put in this situation but other people are actually even worse at managing people and projects (how??).

Leadership is important. Will there be a single leader and co-leaders or deputies? Will people be appointed or elected? Will there be term limits? Can people be suspended? Ejected? On the basis of what? Because you may be building your community from scratch, leadership is something you may need to handle by default. Then, at some point, be ready to reevaluate what works and where your skill set is best used.

Le sigh. It's very important to have guidelines for when you can actually get rid of someone. But maybe that's not what they're talking about because they're talking about leadership, but presumably this person might still be in community. Eh.

Doing movement work doesn’t mean it has to be all doom and gloom and statistics and court cases. How will your community unwind and team build? How will you make sure you are not overwhelmed and overworked? Good community work doesn’t come with exhausted or worn-down community members. Is there a monthly movie night? (Most streaming services offer a way to watch films “together” at a specific time.) Is there a recipe night where people bring their favorite dish or takeout from a favorite restaurant? Food brings people together. So do massages and mani-pedis.

For actual people doing actual movement work Cullors recommends reading a workbook by Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan called Fumbling Towards Repair.
If you look up this book they specifically say not to read it unless you're actually doing the work because it's not introductory material. Hence I am not going to read it, because I am not the audience.

You also know that we have to focus on self in order to build a community. If for any reason you are not in the best space personally, any community you try to build will not have a solid foundation. Before you begin a community, think, what are your own goals, personal and professional? What are you doing to make them happen? Are you stunted in any way? What about your health? Are there any health screenings or doctor/dentist appointments that you’re overdue for?

Don’t let community building become something else to divert you from the important things. There’s no sense in building organizations and communities to talk about bettering our world when you’re overdue for a mammogram or a prostate screening. Get a clean bill of health. Maybe you get your finances together before you start organizing. You can get a free credit report and see where you stand and what you want your next personal goal to be.

Mind, body and soul should be calibrated before you take over the world.

I definitely am not ready mentally but I also don't think I'll ever be. This is also kind of why I hate myself. But anyway. This is all nice, but then I worry about sometimes people don't have the luxury of getting better before they do stuff, right? Then what? Just do it anyway?

In just a few short years, Kendrick [Sampson] has successfully built a powerful and radical community of people at every level of the entertainment industry that is challenging the industry to be an ally in amplifying the voices, stories and vision of a world that is just for everyone.

(...)

He is unabashed in his interviews, candidly stating that “[Hollywood is] actually an oppressive capitalist, white supremacist system” that has been complicit in perpetuating the culture of violence in Black and Brown communities in the United States and in the world. Kendrick calls out this billion-dollar industry for the harmful systems it has created internally within its privileged walls and the oppressive culture it has shaped through narratives that reinforce police violence and anti-Blackness in television and film. Kendrick is relentless and refuses to believe that this creative and imaginative industry cannot do better. Through the organizing efficacy of BLD PWR, he is transforming the way that mainstream media is representing the uprisings that center the defunding of police in defense of Black lives. Taking it a step further, Kendrick co-wrote a letter that was signed by more than 300 Black actors that urges the entertainment industry at large to divest from police and invest in the Black community. The letter bluntly states that “[t]he lack of a true commitment to inclusion and institutional support has only reinforced Hollywood’s legacy of white supremacy. This is not only in storytelling. It is cultural and systemic in Hollywood."

The basis of his key ideas is that donations, while important to fund these movements, are not enough and, for Kendrick, are only superficial and do not translate to the structural transformation that needs to take place if Black lives are to be truly valued.

Think long-term. What happens if you pivot in a different direction, can your built community stand on its own? Can you step away from a community you’ve built? Absolutely! It’s a testament to the strength of what you’ve built when you can move on and know that the ideals you’ve put into place are there. Nimble is good. Audre Lorde’s life, spent building communities, is an example of how it looks when it’s time to move on and set up a new (or just an additional) community. Every group will not fill every person’s needs, creatively or otherwise. You can’t expect every community to be a perfect reflection of yourself. It wouldn’t work well if it was. Our communities can benefit from creating a space for nuance and complexity. This is how we learn and grow together.


11. Value Interpersonal Relationships

Interpersonal relationships are important because they are how we build our communities, and healthy connections to other human beings help build strong societies. The role of an abolitionist is to recognize the inherent value of human life and human connection. It is why we believe everyone has the capacity to transform, heal and be accountable for harm caused.

People are creating their own families more and more. Particularly when our families of origin are not healthy. Or are outright toxic and harmful to us.

It’s a well-worn expression: you can’t choose your family. But we know that we can create families by valuing interpersonal relationships.

Talks about having families that don't fit the norm, like divorcing someone but still being involved in your children's lives, even cross-state and even as you marry someone else and have kids there, too.

There have been many times when movement work was affected—if not decimated—by individual personal problems. Whether it’s drug addiction, financial problems or interpersonal relationships, it can and will come back to your community.

Huey P. Newton was the rock that created the Black Panther Party. Along with his co-leaders, he put actions in place that are still benefiting communities today, decades after the Black Panther Party was dismantled by Newton himself. Later, two women connected with the party were killed, and he was likely involved; he faced murder charges. He was eventually killed by a rival in a drug deal gone bad.

We know that the FBI’s COINTELPRO infiltrated and sowed seeds of discord in organizations like the Black Panthers. But however it happens, it happens and our interpersonal relationships can be scarred, which can lead to our abolition work being affected.

How will you handle something like addiction in your ranks? How will you handle depression or other mental health issues with the people you value in your community? Will there be someone on call qualified to handle these things? Will you have a hands-off approach and encourage people to find help on their own?

Movement work tends to spill over into our personal lives. Colleagues often become family. We share stories of our lives and give examples of why we need to make change, and that makes us vulnerable. In order to have successful interpersonal relationships, you have to go into organizing thoughtfully and with a plan. The same way we plan for marriage or a long-term relationship, the same way we plan for a child: we think about worst-case scenarios, make emergency plans and watch for warning signs.

You know who you are. You know what’s important to you. You know your strengths and the things that challenge you. You know where you are in your journey as an abolitionist, and you know where you want to go.

Self-confidence and self-assurance are key to developing interpersonal relationships. You need them. The people working with you need to have them, as well.

This is all interesting. Still dunno if I'll ever get to put it into practice.

Book mentions Cara Page, a curator and organizer.

One of the many direct things we learn from Cara is the importance of naming that which makes us uncomfortable. That which has caused trauma, both direct and generational. If we want to build valuable relationships, we have to be able to identify that which must be healed or strengthened.

Cara cites such uncomfortable moments in her creative narratives: “Listen You Can Hear the Mothers Crying in the Universe: A Black Feminist Poet’s Requiem for Our Black Warrior Toni.”

In the narrative, she discusses what it was like to grow up during the time of the Atlanta child murders. From 1979 to 1981, 28 young Black males were killed in the Atlanta area. The reporting was in-depth and horrendous, and Black parents nationwide, not just in the South, were absolutely terrified. Even up north and out west, Black parents were keeping their children home from school, especially after one victim was accosted while walking home from school.

(...)

Page also talks about the bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia. In 1985, the city of Philadelphia dropped a bomb from a helicopter on a settlement that housed MOVE, a militant political organization. Eleven people, including five children, died in the fire. It was national news. This was especially distressing for those who were doing movement work, as Cara Page’s family was. There were constant skirmishes and clashes between movement workers and the police state.

If you were a young person growing up in the movement or just growing up Black and Brown in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, these events shaped you. These events molded you. They connected you to others in your generation and in your community. You didn’t forget the details, and you always thought about how you could have been affected—how it could have been you.

Several years ago, when BLM was still in its infancy, I did nothing else but work on this movement. I didn’t see my friends or family, and my life was just head down in this work. I missed weddings I would have been into. I missed the births and birthdays of my godchildren. I was just completely gone. I wasn’t a member of any personal communities, and my interpersonal relationships were trashed.

One spring day, I got a call from a very close friend. As soon as I saw her number, I cursed under my breath. I’d missed her birthday the day before. I answered the phone.

“Patrisse, this hurts.”

“I know, Emmy. I am so sorry. I was at a meeting that ran late. I went home, got ready for your party and then fell asleep.”

“Is that your excuse? You were at a meeting?”

I had to bite my lip from saying something mean. Didn’t she understand what I was trying to create? Didn’t she care?

So, in the real world, your close friends don’t care. They shouldn’t have to. You have a responsibility to show up for your friends and family the very best you can. It keeps you whole, and you’ll need that. The movement is a living, breathing thing. So are your relationships with friends and family.

My friend Emmy forgave me. But our friendship has never quite been the same. We at least talk and see each other when we can. I had some friendships from the early days of BLM that just don’t exist anymore. I’m talking about people I’d known and loved for decades. Don’t let that happen. The real world has room for you and the movement.

This anecdote is interesting. Sometimes your friends don't care. Funny, and true. I guess this about pacing yourself. But then, again, what about people who in the throes of it, who don't have the luxury of doing so? I guess abolitionists in general are confident that there's always something you can do to carve out space for yourself even in the worst of circumstances that could help you live by these principles. Kind of reminds me of Buddhist monks, just because the mindfulness book I'm sort of reading was recommended by Cullors and the intro talks about how the monks persisted in Vietnam even when they were found suspicious by both sides during and after the Vietnam war because they refused to pick a side and wanted to just help who they could. A lot about meditation and the like is about finding ways to be at peace against the odds, I guess. I feel mildly annoyed by this if I think about it too hard because of my mom's nonsense "Tibetan Buddhism" (is it, really?) stuff.


12. Fight the U.S. State Rather Than Make It Stronger

U.S. current systems are in place to maintain the country’s dominance through violence and profit. Part of the work we must do as abolitionists to get free is to create new avenues to undermine the current United States and the ability of its harmful, broken systems to further oppress, suppress and attack communities who are poor.

Let’s dig into what Arundhati Roy suggests in the above quote, that we fight with “our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness—and our ability to tell our own stories.”

Our art has been a part of what has kept us whole for millennia and particularly since we were brought here as enslaved people.

A prime example of this would be the quilts of Gee’s Bend, a semi-isolated Black community along the Alabama River. The women in the area, and their ancestors, are now known for their quilting.

Some of the quilters trace their ancestry to a place called Pettway Plantation, and some can name-check their ancestor, Dinah Miller, brought to the United States in 1859 on a slave ship.

Their work, brightly colored and geometrically patterned, is incredibly intricate, and the quilts are truly something special. One hundred years ago, they were made for warmth, not necessarily art. The quilters were using scraps of fabrics and pieces of clothing to create these vibrant quilts, handing down their methods generation to generation, through slavery, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement.

After many years of being obscure, the quilters are now recognized as masters of the art of quilting and as contributing an immense wealth of art to American culture. Without changing their names or images for branding, selling their wares at white-owned galleries, moving from their hometown for larger cities, they began to sell their quilts, and they now travel the world as part of quilting exhibitions at national museums.

The women of Gee’s Bend are an example of Roy’s ideas. Their art held on, they held on. Because that art meant something to them, to their people, it is now appreciated worldwide. This is not to say that the women of Gee’s Bend needed to have national recognition in order to matter. Quite the opposite: those who now know and experience the quilters’ work, they now matter. That was not there. That was lost to them. It was never lost to the women in Gee’s Bend.

This is how we live with our art and through our art. It is for our survival. If and when others bring it forth to the masses, it still belongs to us. We can still pass it down and hold it close.

Cool story about the Gee's Bend. But does the art really still always belong to you if the masses run off with it? (see: co-optation of Pepe the Frog) This is like the same issue I had with Bitter, though seeing it here makes me understand more why that was used as a plot point in that story, considering that that was an abolitionist work.

John Bush, an eighteenth-century African soldier, carved horns used to store gunpowder. His carvings that survive are often noted for their intricate patterns and the calligraphy used for the text. Two hundred years later, John Bush is known. We can claim him. We can see what his skills were. Thinking about John Bush and the women quilters makes us wonder, what will we leave?

It may be fine arts.

It may also be an entirely new world. Our art may be dreaming up a world our forebears could not have imagined and putting it into place.

Our music holds us up and builds us up and has for centuries. If you truly know who we are and what we’ve been able to do, it’s nothing short of astonishing. Music is absolutely the way we push back against racism, capitalism and patriarchy.

Art explains us. For example, music of the enslaved shows us that those in the Middle Passage were not stripped of all their traditions.

For years, we’ve created our own instruments, from drums and banjos to flutes and string instruments. Our development of music, how we delivered our vocals, was completely inventive; we created our own unique sound. From call and response, which would get passed down all the way through hip-hop, to melisma and vibrato. Our runs, our patterns, our tones, it’s all ours. We’ve lent it out, for sure. But the richness of our art, including music, is how we hold on to our culture and use it in our work as abolitionists.

We can meet to map out our goals while swaying to our sounds, admiring our art and creating a new genre altogether. All while smiling and enjoying our craft. Abolitionist work does not have to be done in the dark while breaking our backs and being miserable.

Yet, we also understand that our music, particularly in the eighteenth century, was more often a wail than a celebration. It is something we note, listen to, absorb, understand and honor. As abolitionists, we go toward the people in power knowing fully who we are and where we come from.

And our literature! We have held so deeply to our stories. We have passed down our words as poems, novels and songs, some published and some kept close. Our words, spoken and unspoken, have always been such a rich part of the fabric of our lives. From Phillis Wheatley in the 1700s, whose true story and true gifts we may never know, to the young people creating 30-second messages of hope and liberation for each other on social media.

For people often pulled apart from one another, Black and Brown people know how to communicate, and we use it as a first line of defense against many ills.

We can fight back against white supremacy. We already do it without even realizing it every day. Our art keeps this heart beating while we move.

She's taking a pretty big frame here to frame this narrative across time. But it's a nice sentiment.

This is where it’s time to identify where you are and what you want to work toward. Is it LGBTQIA+ issues? Is it animal rights? Is it the fight for clean water? Where do you live? What do you see right in front of you? What needs to change? People often ask me, “Where do I begin?” I say the same thing each time. You begin with where you are. For me, one of those early moments was getting bus passes into the hands of Los Angeles students. I knew those students. I knew those buses. I understood what needed to be done.

If you can’t hit the streets or join an organization, amplify those who can.

There’s another step you can take. If you don’t see a movement or organization that’s doing what’s important to you—start one yourself.

I don't really know. I want to just sit inside and work on my project, which does (accidentally?) align with some abolitionist principles.

Let’s keep it real. We know what we need to do to not make the United States stronger in terms of its racial policies and capitalist patriarchy.

But we also get mani-pedis.

We know our schools are not what we need them to be.

Some of us are also not in a place to homeschool and still have to get our kids educated.

We know the medical system has harmed us, continually, for centuries and continues to do so.

We also have to get the occasional filling and take our kids to the pediatrician.

We live here. We have to exist in this space, and we still have to find ways, large and small, to survive and yet push to thrive. We are human with the capacity to hold these contradictions. We can push ourselves to be uncomfortable in the name of not supporting white supremacy and a genocidal government.

And still cop that Ivy Park when it drops.

More of just choose our battles. Had to look up Ivy Park, but it's an athleisure brand.

Book mentions Ida B Wells, who is also someone I should probably read.

Up until then, the official reports of the lynchings of Black men, much like the murders of Black people by police today, were largely accepted—the stories propagated the ideas that Black men were rapists threatening the safety and virginity of white women and that white vigilantes were just meting out justice to these Black criminals. When Moss, a Black grocery store owner, was lynched by a mob of white men after a confrontation at his store, Ida wrote a column in the newspaper about how the town of Memphis had failed to protect the lives and property of Black folks.

Moss was a co-owner of the People’s Grocery, which was outperforming the white grocery store across the street. The white grocery owner went to the city council to complain about how this business was a “nuisance” to the town, and, essentially, the city council deputized men to get guns to go and “correct these business owners.” When the white mob arrived, they were met by Black men who had rifles and were ready to defend themselves. There was a shoot-out in which some of the white men (who happened to be deputies) were injured, and the Black store owners were arrested and jailed. A few days later, the Black store owners were taken out of the courthouse and lynched by a white mob.

Ida wrote that the Black people in Memphis should all leave and head West because there was no justice for them in the city and that lynching was just a form of economic violence and terrorism. Ida became a target of white mob violence and was run out of Memphis. She relocated to Chicago, fleeing the terrors of the Jim Crow South—but not without bringing her supporters with her. Thousands of people left Memphis—about 5 percent of the population—and it crumbled the city’s economy. Ida was not deterred, and became a journalist in exile as she traveled the South for two months, gathering information on other lynching incidents and writing about them in newspapers in graphic detail.

She single-handedly created the field of investigative journalism as she courageously visited the places where people had been tortured, shot, hanged and mutilated. She examined photos of victims, took sworn statements from eyewitnesses and studied local newspaper accounts. In 1895, she published a pamphlet, the “Red Record,” the first statistical record of the history of American lynchings. Backed by data, Ida exposed the reality behind lynchings: they were largely used as economic retaliation. Her work grabbed international attention as she toured Europe and gave hundreds of lectures about the plight of Black people in America.

Ida openly confronted white women in the suffrage movement who did not take an intersectional stance—suffragettes who refused to talk about race and the rights of Black women, in particular, to vote. Because of her stance, Ida was often ridiculed and ostracized by (white) women’s suffrage organizations in the United States, so she founded the National Association of Colored Women’s Club to address issues dealing with Civil Rights and women’s suffrage. She was adamant that race, gender and liberation were not mutually exclusive issues. This woman did not compromise on her ideals—at the age of 68, she ran for a seat in the Illinois State Senate as an Independent just a decade after women won the right to vote in the United States.

Ida lived a self-actualized life—a world-renowned abolitionist, feminist, educator, and the mother of investigative journalism, she courageously challenged unjust systems during the Jim Crow era, when Black women did not have the vote or protection from the law. Her radical anti-lynching reporting changed the narrative of the mainstream media and exposed the corruption of the justice system. She was a strong proponent of self-ownership—she owned her mediums of communication (various newspapers), built institutions where people could educate themselves (the Black settlement houses for men and women) and created spaces where Black people could network (like the National Association of Colored Women’s Club).

Ida understood that ownership gives you freedom to be your true authentic self, and she lived her life creating spaces where other Black people could cultivate their own liberation. She fought this country’s oppressive systems tooth and nail, and her legacy as a fierce force of change and vision is a call to action for all of us to continue that work until we are free.

Okay god I'm done with these notes. As I finish this I am wondering whether any of this is actually worth posting on a public blog. Maybe if they just want to read excerpts of the book because I think my comments are a bit inane given that they're basically like "wehh I'm sooooo bad at this". Ah, well. Can't always have a smart thought.

#books #nonfiction