Transformative Justice in the Era of #DefundPolice: Lessons from the Past, Strategizing for the Future
Live captions are available here: https://otter.ai/s/fPlYPfIfTLCbSak44jdJfQ
First part of live captions available at: https://otter.ai/s/n79pMOmsT1egRElZdFOX7Q
RESOURCES
We’ll be adding a list of the resources mentioned during the event here over the next couple weeks.
Creative Interventions Toolkit
Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators
As the ongoing worldwide protests against police violence so vividly demonstrate, there is an increasing demand to end policing and develop real strategies for keeping each other safe.
On October 21, longtime anti-violence organizers and transformative justice practitioners Shira Hassan and Mimi Kim will join us for a conversation about the history and development of transformative justice, its importance in current movements towards liberation, and everyday practices. This conversation is part of the Building Accountable Communities series developed in collaboration with Project NIA and BCRW Researcher in Residence Mariame Kaba. The three short videos from the series posted below will act as the starting point for the conversation.
Accessibility
Live captioning and and ASL interpretation will be provided.
Please email any additional access needs to ekausch@barnard.edu.
This event is free and all are welcome.
Learn more
“We need the resistance but we also need people building alternatives. Because even if we shut down prisons tomorrow, we’re still going to need a way to deal with harm and violence and abuse and generational trauma and trauma at large. Those things are not going to go away.” – Mia Mingus
Transformative justice offers community-based approaches to intervening in harm, working towards preventing, reducing, and healing.
As the TJ facilitators and practitioners in these videos attest, TJ is a developing practice that needs as many people as possible to be building basic skills in accountability, apology, getting to the root causes of harm, and addressing conflict. They address questions including: How do we choose to stay in community when we know that we will inevitably cause each other harm? How do we deal with conflict? What kinds of skills do we need to build in order to create alternatives to punitive systems?
In the video What is Accountability, Sonya Shah talks about accountability as the radical choice to stay in community, rather than to isolate from shame or to exile others. adrienne marie brown argues that our movements need all our people and that we cannot afford to be throwing people away.
“What I want is for people to have a practice, not a politic. The more we can practice this and the more people can just be brave and try things, the more we’ll be able to have what works and what doesn’t work. I want a million people writing things down all the time about the things that failed so that we can figure out what the intersections are of the things that don’t work and the things that do.” – Shira Hassan
Please watch the three videos below and then join us for a conversation with Mimi Kim and Shira Hassan on learning from the past, building our skills, and practicing transformative justice.
Video #1: Everyday Practices of Transformative Justice
Featuring: Shira Hassan, Martina Kartman, Rachel Herzing, Mia Mingus, Priya Rai, Lea Roth, and Sonya Shah.
Transformative justice is a vision and framework for preventing, intervening in, and transforming harm. There are a number of different practices that fall under that broader framework. In this video, longtime practitioners of restorative and transformative justice discuss the everyday skills that we need to develop to reduce violence and to address harm.
Proactively mediating conflicts among friends and family, learning to give good apologies, negotiating healthy boundaries, and developing active listening skills all contribute to increasing our self-efficacy for preventing and intervening in harm. These skills are building blocks for lessening conflict and harm and provide a foundation for building towards an abolitionist horizon.
Video #2: The Modern Roots of Transformative Justice
Featuring Mimi Kim and Shira Hassan.
In this video, Mimi Kim and Shira Hassan talk about the work they were doing starting around 2000 with INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and the Young Women’s Empowerment Project (YWEP) that came to be defined as community accountability and transformative justice. They discuss how organizers were creating spaces, resources, and practices to respond to the needs of their communities facing violence, navigating work in criminalized economies, being barred from access to food banks, housing, and other basic needs without turning to the state and the non-profit system, which was often a key source of violence and exclusion. These organizers and communities developed practices through building relationships and crafted culturally-appropriate responses to day-to-day needs. Transformative, life affirming, and necessary, this work was dismissed and marginalized by the mainstream anti-violence movement.
In recent years, there has been a significant shift in public interest in transformative justice by the funded anti gender-based violence movement. In part, seeing the devastating consequences of decades of laws criminalizing interpersonal violence, organizations that were once calling for more laws and increased state intervention are now joining calls for decriminalization and non-punitive accountability. Shira and Mimi address what practices of transformative justice look like, as well as both the powerful possibilities of these practices and the threats of cooptation.
Video #3: What is Accountability?
Featuring: Mia Mingus, Priya Rai, RJ Maccani, Esteban Kelly, Sonya Shah, Shira Hassan, Elliott Fukui, adrienne marie brown, Stas Schmiedt, Lea Roth, kai lumumba barrow, Martina Kartman, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, nuri nusrat, and Mimi Kim.
Accountability is self-reflecting, apologizing, making amends, and changing your behavior so the harm you caused doesn’t happen again. It is a process and not a destination. Over the years, accountability has been at the heart of transformative justice work. In this video, transformative and restorative justice practitioners discuss how accountability is enacted and some challenges in the journey.
About the Speakers
Shira Hassan is the former executive director of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, an organizing and grassroots movement building project led by and for young people of color that have current or former experience in the sex trade and street economies. A life long harm reductionist and prison abolitionist, Shira has been working on community accountability for nearly 25 years and has helped young people of color start their own organizing projects across the country. She is the founder and principle consultant for Just Practice, a capacity building project for organizations and community members working at the intersection of transformative justice, harm, reduction, and collective liberation. Shira is the co-author, with Mariame Kaba, of Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators.
Mimi Kim is the founder of Creative Interventions and a co-founder of INCITE! As a second generation Korean American and a long-time activist and advocate, she locates her political work in global solidarity with feminist anti-imperialist struggles, seeking not only the end of oppression but of the creation of liberation here and now. Mimi is also an Associate Professor of social work at California State University, Long Beach.