Abolition means setting, communicating, and respecting boundaries. Abolition means reinforcing those boundaries when they are not heard. Abolition means transformative justice. Abolition allows one time to heal. Abolition seeks to repair the damage done to a person or a people. Abolition holds space for the person or people who have perpetrated violence, harm, and damage. Abolition makes the impossible possible. (Cullors, 2019, 1694)
1Most theoretical frameworks employed in scholarly work do not make any kinds of demands upon those who use them, about how one should conduct one’s life outside of the intellectual contexts in which those theories are used. While many theoretical frameworks have an implicit value-base, most theories — such as, for instance, labelling theory or desistance theory in criminology — do not call upon one to live in accordance with certain values. In a way that is unlike most other academic theories, abolition — the idea of radically transforming society, eliminating carceral institutions, and replacing them with non-punitive ways of dealing with harm that empower, rather than oppress — is far more than an intellectual exercise. A true commitment to abolitionism in an intellectual sense requires a commitment to practicing abolition in one’s everyday life.
2As calls for defunding and dismantling police and other punishing institutions have become increasingly widespread across the United States in the wake of protests against the murder of George Floyd and other people of color, abolitionism has become increasingly relevant. Even prior to this, however, abolition has been experiencing increasing attention and legitimacy in criminological and legal scholarship (e.g. Cullors, 2019; McDowell, 2019; McLeod, 2019; Rodriguez, 2019a, 2019b). Unlike most other theoretical approaches, however, abolitionism requires something personal of its proponents, particularly if one is engaged in projects of transformative justice, community accountability work, or other forms of justice alternatives outside of state mechanisms. Abolitionism is about radical social and structural change, and this requires a fundamental transformation in the ways that we relate to one another, and to ourselves. It requires a commitment to certain values, not only in academic research and writing, not only in activist or movement work, but in one’s personal life as well. It requires walking the talk. Therefore, when a scholar or activist calls for an abolitionist analysis to guide projects of social change, they must also turn that call to transformation inward onto themselves.
3To this extent, in addition to its sociale and structurale components, an essential component of abolition is a personal project, or project of individual self-development, a commitment to transformation and growth, and willingness to engage in work on oneself and in one’s relationships with others that often requires walking through fear and discomfort, facing and overcoming challenges in order to grow relationally, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. As Spade puts it, “I need a healing path for myself if I want to be a part of healing the world” (Spade, 2020, 118).
4This article aims to answer two questions, namely “Why is it important for a theoretical commitment to abolition to also entail a commitment to practicing abolition on a personal level?” and “What does this actually look like in practice?”. To answer these questions, this article mines recent abolitionist literature — both from academic and non-traditionally academic sources, such as writings from activist organizations and individuals — and draws out the various major articulations of this perspective, distills from them a comprehensive understanding of what it means to live in accordance with abolitionist principles in day-to-day life, demonstrating why it is essential as part of a commitment to abolitionism as a sociological, structural goal in theory and in practice. Finally, it provides some specific guidance as culled from the writings of abolitionists actively engaged in this work, of how to do this, as well as examples of what this looks like.
- 1 Healing justice is “a framework that identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on (...)
- 2 I will sometimes refer to transformative justice and abolition interchangeably. However, there are (...)
- 3 adrienne maree brown’s name is not capitalized because that is how the author herself chooses to pr (...)
5Delisle, Basualdo, Ilea and Hughes write that “[i]t is discordant to support penal abolition, on the one hand, and participate in punishment in other realms of action…” (Delisle et al., 2015, 4). The abolitionist literature, particularly among the writing and testimony of activists and organizers, supports this perspective with resounding clarity, and drives home the point that “[a]bolitionist struggle forces us to examine the practices we espouse in every facet of our lives” (Delisle et al., 2015, 4), that these « other realms of action” and other facets of our lives to which Delisle et al. refer, must include our own personal lives, and the ways in which we interact with others. Rodriguez describes abolitionist movement work as “cultural, ideological, [and] spiritual” (Rodriguez, 2019b, 1602), and as “[a] call for critical reflection at both the individual and movement level” (Rodriguez, 2019a, 1574). Shank, a long-time organizer, explains that in addition to being a project of dismantling oppressive state systems and building alternatives on a societal level, abolitionism “is about realizing that we have a responsibility to align the ways we relate to each other with our values — from the most intimate relationship up to larger systems like the criminal and immigration systems”. Being an abolitionist, she explains, “is a life path” (Shank, 2020, 27).). Shara, a healing justice and generative somatics practitioner,1 describes the work of transformative justice2 as not merely an alternative approach to dealing with harm that aids in dismantling carceral systems, but “a set of guiding principles toward a lifelong personal, moral, political, and spiritual development” (Shara, 2020, 231). Activist, facilitator, and author adrienne maree brown3 describes this work as being “about deep internal shifts in our own ways of being” (Shara, 2020, 253). Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors explains that abolition “is about how we treat each other… about how we show up in relationships… about how we respond to harm caused and how we respond when we cause harm” (Cullors, 2019, 1694). The personal, internal work that allows us to do these things is essential to larger-scale abolitionist movement work, because it aids us in “abolishing the limitations of our own thinking and feeling processes to help us continue doing meaningful resistance work and create more gentle, solidary, community-driven responses to social problems” (Delisle et al., 2015, 3). In other words, collective, social, structural transformation of the kind that abolition seeks to bring about, also requires individual-level transformation, because this sort of personal and interpersonal work and healing, which needs to co-occur with structural-level work, is a building block for transformational work at the collective level (Barnard Center for Research on Women). And in fact, they are necessary parts of the same project: personal and collective liberation are inextricably linked, and there is no one without the other (Lorde, Gay, 2020; Owens, 2020; Spade, 2020) — a point elaborated further below.
6Another reason the personal-transformative component of abolitionism is essential to this work is because, in societies dominated by ideologies and value systems rooted in capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, ableism, settler colonialism, a punitive mindset, and other dominant cultural patterns where these harmful ways of being, and of organizing society are deeply normalized, they are unavoidably internalized, even among those most dedicated to dismantling these structures and ideologies (brown, 2020; Ross, Ghadbian, 2020; Spade, 2020). As Ross and Ghadbian note in their workbook, Turning Towards Each Other:
We live in a world shaped by hundreds of years of collective, structural harms (the legacies of brutal colonization, slavery, patriarchy) that shape the culture we live in. That means these patterns have shaped us too, and we must assume they are present in our relationships. To release the patterns of domination and violence, it’s helpful to acknowledge how we may have internalized them and be unconsciously acting them out… Whether or not we have formal power, we can enact subtle and gross forms of anti-Blackness, white supremacy, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, classism, and other structural oppressions.
(Ross, Ghadbian, 2020, 30)
7As the authors point out, internalizing and re-enacting these harmful forms dominant culture is not restricted to those who benefit directly from that dominant culture as a result of their gender, skin color, class, or sexual orientation, etc. Spade, discussing this problem as it manifests in social movement groups, touches on this notion as well: “We bring our learned practices of hierarchy with us…so even in volunteer groups we often find ourselves in conflicts stemming from learned dominance behaviors” (Spade, 2020, 14-15).
8Similarly, brown describes supremacy as “a collective cancer, an invisible and highly productive disease that quietly roots deep within us” (Brown, 2020, 51). Thus, internal self-work is a necessary part of acknowledging how these harmful ideologies, values, and power dynamics of dominant culture, such as white supremacy and patriarchy, are present in our own thinking, attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors, and in learning how to unlearn them.
9Cullors provides a personal example of how dominant cultural thinking manifested for her, when her closest friend became a drug user and sex worker: “Immediately, I responded with deep criticism…I pathologized her. I judged her…” (Cullors, 2019, 1691), and as a result her friend ceased contact. Reflecting on her experience, she explains, “I had absorbed all the myths about drug users, addicts, and sex workers. I thought they needed to be saved. Despite all my best intentions, I failed my best friend. I did not apply my abolitionist practice” (Cullors, 2019, 1691.). She also reflects on how she would respond differently today, and what a response to this situation grounded in abolitionist principles would actually look like: “Today, I would hold space for her decisions and find resources for her. I would be more graceful, loving, kind, and gentle, and a better listener. I would not let puritanism overcome me and condemn her worth as a person” (Cullors, 2019, 1691-1692).
10Brown’s 2020 book We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice deals with the notion of harmful dominant cultural patterns in personal, interpersonal, and movement spaces doing abolition work — particularly punitive “justice” and supremacy — as its primary concern. She explains how “call out” culture — drawing public attention to a person’s behavior or actions when they’re considered inappropriate - especially when it is employed as a first resort, as she argues it has become, is a re-enactment of punitive approaches to conflict: “we are steeped in a punitive culture, which, right now, is normalizing a methodology of ‘punish first, ask questions later’” (Brown, 2020, 50-51). Brown describes her vision for a solution to this permeation of supremacist culture and its consequences:
We need the people within our movements, all socialized into and by unjust systems, to be on liberation paths. Not already free, but practicing freedom… Not already beyond harm, but accountable for doing our individual and internal work to end harm and engage in generative conflict…where we can end cycles of harm and unprincipled struggle in ourselves and in our communities.
(Brown, 2020, 57)
11In a workshop based on their book (Project Nia, 2021), Ross and Ghadbian explained that these dominant cultural patterns, unless actively being worked against, through the kind of abolitionist, personal self-work discussed here, will dominate individual thinking and group dynamics: “it is the default unless we are actively working against it; it runs things in the background” (Project Nia, 2021). In their workbook, primarily aimed at aiding social movement groups work through conflicts in order to avoid the implosion that can result from such unresolved conflict (brown, 2020; Spade, 2020), they dedicate an entire section to “Self Explorations”. Their main reason for this is that “you can learn tools for social transformation all day and night but if you haven’t transformed your own way of being, they aren’t going to get you very far” (Project Nia, 2021). In her afterword to adrienne marée brown’s We Will Not Cancel Us, Malkia Devish Cyril provides testimony that speaks to the import of this work for the abolitionist movement: “Through personal healing, I have learned to recognize the difference between a situation that is genuinely unsafe and one that is simply uncomfortable. I have learned the difference between intolerable feelings and intolerable conditions » all of which have helped her « to become a better abolitionist” (Brown, 2020, 81).
12The take-home message from abolitionist authors like Ghadbian and Ross, brown, Spade, and Cyril, and the organizations they work with, who are advocating for this kind of self-work is well captured in Toni Cade Bambara’s idea that “revolution begins in the self with the self” (Bambara, 1970, 133).
13How do we, in movements, become responsible for each other, accountable to a vision beyond the carceral system that will only come to pass if we practice it in the present? (Brown, 2020, 44).
14This work can be thought of as taking place on two levels — the internal work that takes place at the level of the self, and the work on one’s relationships with others, which inevitably interfaces with internal self-work, but the consensus among most abolitionists who contribute to this discussion is that it begins with the self. That being said, both kinds of work need to be guided by a commitment to abolitionist principles and values. Here I provide an overview of these values and principles, as culled from various abolitionist writers, followed by a discussion and examples of what this self-work looks like both on an internal, individual level, and on an interpersonal level.
15Abolition as a personal project is largely about aligning our behavior and ways of relating to one another with the abolitionist principles we espouse for larger social and structural systems and relationships. Cullors (2019) lays out a number of such principles. For instance, if one uses an abolitionist lens to indict the current carceral system for the harm and abuse it perpetrates, then one must maintain a personal commitment to not harm or abuse others. If one believes that holding people accountable for harm caused is an important part of the path to resolving harm and violence at its roots, one must hold oneself, and others accountable for harm caused, as well as allow oneself to be held accountable by others. If one believes that it is essential that our ways of dealing with harm not be reactive — in other words, that we treat those who have caused harm with understanding and forgiveness, and a belief that they can take responsibility for what they have done, rather than responding based on knee-jerk emotional reactions that lead us toward a desire for vengeance and retribution—then one must remain committed to thoughtfully responding rather than reacting to harms in one’s personal life.
16Spade, articulating a similar line of thought, explains that this requires “devot[ing] resources to uncovering the roots of my painful reactions and building ways of being in those feelings that don’t involve acting out harm to myself or others” (Spade, 2020, 117).
- 4 The definition of the term “decolonization” is not uncontroversial, especially as it has gained wid (...)
- 5 Note that this is different from the kind of work undertaken by many white suburban neighborhood as (...)
17This also requires being willing to do the hard work of forgiving people who have caused harm, including instances when that person is oneself. If one believes in the importance of uprooting racist, white supremacist, heteronormative, ableist, and sexist ideologies, one must be willing to have courageous conversations to contribute to changing people’s minds on an individual, interpersonal level. One must also be willing to challenge the way these ideologies have manifested in oneself, to actively and constantly do the work of decolonizing4 one’s own body and mind (Brown, 2020; Spade, 2020; Wa Thiong’o, 1992). If one believes in the importance of building strong, self-determined communities in order to actualize an abolitionist vision, one must commit time and energy toward building up one’s own community. This can sometimes involve steps that many of us are not used to taking — truly getting to know our neighbors and local business owners, participating actively in neighborhood associations,5 learning about community needs and working to fulfill them, etc. (Cullors, 2019).
18In 2012, Creative Interventions, an Oakland-based organization that aims to create community-based alternatives for interventions in situations of interpersonal violence, produced a 578-page toolkit, “A Practical Guide to Stop Interpersonal Violence”. The toolkit is an extensive, detailed analysis and practical resource guide to dealing with violence through community-based interventions. Part of their resource guide includes a section on how participants in transformative justice processes — whether as survivors/victims or perpetrators of harm - can set realistic goals for the outcome of these processes. They acknowledge that intense feelings of anger and fantasies of retribution are a normal part of this process for survivors, and they emphasize the importance of expressing these emotions. They note, however, that one of the primary questions that should guide the goal-setting process is “Does the goal fit with my values?”. Values in this case, can act as an anchor for a person who has experienced harm, who is often experiencing a host of intense and negative emotions, a reminder of one’s commitment to the idea that everyone deserves a chance to be heard and understood, that most often people who have caused harm are victims of harm themselves. This case provides an example of the importance, as an abolitionist, of living and conducting this work in accordance with abolitionist values.
- 6 This quote has also been attributed by some to Boggs herself.
- 7 I am thinking of this spiritual component in a similar sense to the American Society of Addiction M (...)
19Another component of this internal work that has been noted by many working in the abolitionist movement, is spiritual self-work. In her book Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown describes a sign she saw hanging on the wall of Grace Lee Boggs’ home6 that read “Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual”. To avoid an entire foray into what exactly “spiritual” means, I will assume a broad definition of spiritual self-work, encompassing the following: 1) the emotional work of healing trauma or emotional baggage,7 attending therapy, cultivating spiritual healing or self-care practices of any kind, such that one can achieve or work toward personal accountability, 2) compassion and empathy for others - even those who have committed heinous acts of harm, 3) connection, trust, and fluid communication with others, 4) peace with oneself in mind and body, 5) working through fears, personal challenges, discomfort, shame, 6) working to reduce binary thinking that tends to categorize people or their actions as good or bad, and accepting that people are complex and full of contradictions, that contradictory emotions and beliefs exists, and 7) making room and holding space for them, in oneself and in others, and understanding that we are all capable of harm, and of good.
20This is part of the hard, internal work of healing past traumas, of asking ourselves difficult questions such as “What mistakes might you need to face in order to trust yourself? What hurts are you carrying that remain unmourned?” (Shara, 2020, 231), allowing ourselves to feel uncomfortable and painful feelings, such as “regret for actions we’ve taken that violate our own values” (Shara, 2020, 227). It requires confronting the fact that under oppressive social structures, we may “have been targeted and denied our full humanity” (Shara, 2020, 230). Even if one has not experienced a particular harmful, or traumatic situation, there is other healing that needs to take place, simply as the result of living “within a capitalist, eco-murdering, settler-colonial, ableist, white-supremacist heteropatriarchy” (Shara, 2020, 230), from which almost no one living in contemporary society is immune. For some of us it is about coming to terms with the fact that we have benefitted from unearned privileged at the expense of others, because we live in a society that does violence to everyone. Staci Haines, co-founder and executive director of Generative Somatics, and co-founder of generationFIVE, explains how even those who are fully committed to social justice causes are shaped by oppression, privilege, and the trauma that results from it: “we can’t not act that out, unless we’ve done the deep, internal and mutual work of transformation… It’s more than cognitively understanding it… it’s a very deep skillset” (Werning, 2018).
21Lama Rod Owens, in his discussion of the dangers of unresolved anger in movement spaces, reminds us of how the internal self-work of healing one’s emotional wounds relates to abolitionist principles, particularly a belief in non-violence: “if you’re…concerned with nonviolence, you also have an ethical responsibility to have a relationship with your hurt” (Owens, 2020, 17). This touches on another one of the principles Cullors (2019) discusses: allowing oneself to feel. Giving oneself permission to feel is a central idea in conversations about spiritual healing, and it is essential to the goal of processing emotions so that they are not channeled destructively.
22Owens details through his own experience, how unresolved anger comes to interface with activist work, and how it can be destructive both to the work itself, and the individual engaged in it. Anyone who has worked in activist spaces knows that individuals sometimes use their activism as a site for channeling anger and other unresolved emotions. Describing his personal experience with this, Owens says:
Activism and community service became the way that I tried to channel my rage…I figured if I could just stay active, I could keep this energy moving, and do something productive with it… Deep down I knew I was hurt, but I just didn’t know what to do with that. I wanted to feel powerful, and I knew that my anger made me feel powerful…
(Owens, 2020, 13-14)
23And this can be particularly pronounced for those hailing from historically oppressed and marginalized groups, employing anger to feel heard, validated, powerful. Owens describes coming to recognize through his own spiritual and self-work practices, that it was a mistake to believe his anger was a necessary element to activism:
I thought I needed anger… I needed anger to keep me connected to the suffering of communities, the suffering of individuals…I needed to suffer, and suffering was how I understood being in solidarity with other marginalized folks and communities…
(Owens, 2020, 24)
24Instead, he asks, “What would it look like if we formed our activist communities around joy, not the suffering or anger, as a basis for our change work?” (Owens, 2020, 24). Much of his book, similar to Ross and Ghadbian’s, is dedicated to providing examples of personal spiritual practices, such as meditation and mindfulness, to support one’s healing, to learn from and respond to one’s difficult emotions rather than reacting to them (which echoes Cullors’s principle of commitment to responding versus reacting), one’s ability to deal with conflict, to show up as an activist from a place of self-understanding, and contribute to the healing of others and the healing of the collective.
25Willingness to hold oneself accountable is another form of self-work that abolitionism requires. As Shank explains:
If we are going to build movements capable of winning, we have to win for all of us. This means fighting white supremacy, racism, transphobia homophobia, sexism and economic oppression in all their forms, even and especially when it means we have to look in the mirror. It means holding ourselves and each other accountable.
(Shank, 2020, 34)
26As her statement highlights, self-accountability takes different forms. There is the self-accountability that asks us to be constantly engaged in the practice of examining our own assumptions, doing the necessary work to decolonize our own minds to be rid of implicit biases, assumptions, and the presence of harmful dominant cultural patterns, to recognize our privilege, to revisit and revise our understandings of what language is oppressive or harmful and why, to constantly work to bring our actions in alignment with our values, and to remain humble and teachable. And there is the kind of self-accountability which requires recognizing that we are capable of causing, and do cause, harm. This form of self-accountability tears down the walls that social conditioning would have us place between those who cause harm and those who are victims of it, not only creating this false binary, but causing us to distance ourselves from “bad people”, “those who deserve to be punished”, and define ourselves in opposition to them. As author and community healer Kai Cheng Thom writes:
When we are able to admit that the capacity to harm lies within ourselves — within us all — we become capable of radically transforming the conversation around abuse and rape culture. We can go from simply reacting to abuse and punishing “abusers” to preventing abuse and healing our communities. Because the revolution starts at home, as they say. The revolution starts in your house, in your own relationships, in your bedroom. The revolution starts in your ire”.
(Thom, 2020, 69)
27Having a relatively well-defined set of values, cultivating awareness of when we act out of alignment with those values, and determining ways of bringing our behavior in line with them, can aid us in holding ourselves accountable in these ways. Shannon Darby of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, advocates for a daily practice of evaluating our choices and looking at how well those choices reflect the values we aim to adhere to. At the same time, she acknowledges that there will always be some discrepancy between our actions and our values, because each individual, just as each community, is a work in progress. Therefore, that daily practice also needs to involve some plan of action for when behavior and choices do not align with values, “which may involve simply apologizing to someone who you were short with yesterday” (Barnard Center for Research on Women). For larger kinds of challenges, such as, for instance, seeking to make amends and repair to a person one has abused, she notes the importance of seeking help and support from trustworthy individuals in one’s life.
28This process of taking daily stock of one’s actions to determine how well they correspond to one’s values are strikingly similar to the practice of 12-step recovery programs, known as a “10th step” in which one takes a nightly inventory of one’s day, to determine where throughout the day one might have acted based on anger, fear, or resentment, where one has been dishonest, how one might have treated others badly as a result, and how to practice spiritual principles of the program to address these very natural mistakes that are a part of being human (Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2001; 2013). Darby’s point that some of these personal projects ought not be taken on alone is also very similar to the 12-step philosophy which maintains that it will serve the recovering individual best to draw on the help and support of their fellows in order to overcome adversity, and help them stay in line with the values according to which they are attempting to live. In fact the entire 12-step program rests on the premise of “we don’t do it alone”.
29A specific example of how some of this can manifest in practice, and some of the effort required to overcome it, is in “pod mapping” work. Pod mapping is “a tool…for accountability and dealing with harm in communities” (Black, n.d.), without involving police or other arms of the state. The exercise involves creating a map of individuals whom one would call upon in an emergency or crisis, a situation of violence, harm, or abuse, upon whom one could depend to show up and provide the necessary aid and support. The pod mapping worksheet used in these exercises looks like this (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective Pod Maping.
30A person using this worksheet would write their own name in the center, and individuals who they would want to call upon first, whom they trust to be “first responders” to the situation, in the surrounding circles in the first tier (Black, n.d.; Mingus, 2016; Youth Justice Coalition, 2020). In the second tier, they would put down the names of individuals they would like to have in their pod, but with whom they must first do some work on these relationships. For instance, perhaps someone would like to put down their neighbor in an emergency situation that would benefit from help the aid of people in close physical proximity, but they have not gotten to know their neighbor enough for it to be appropriate, or for them to feel comfortable, calling upon them in an emergency. The last tier is for community organizations and/or resources to make use of in a crisis, such as domestic violence shelters, foodbanks, hospitals, or sources of legal aid (Youth Justice Coalition, 2020). The idea is to fill out multiple worksheets for different types of crisis situations. One’s pod is likely to be different depending on the particular need: the people or resources one would call upon if one is experiencing domestic violence might be different from those one would call upon in a health emergency. One can create as many pod maps as one expects to have situations in which to need them (Youth Justice Coalition, 2020).
31The reason this practice requires spiritual, or personal self-work, is because the goal of creating these maps is not simply to list people’s names to plan for crisis situations, but to grow or develop one’s relationships with these people (Youth Justice Coalition, 2020). It is important to obtain the consent of the people one plans to include in one’s pod, to communicate expectations, to find out if they have the capacity or willingness to be called upon in such situations. Sometimes certain relationships have to be changed before it is appropriate to include someone, and this can be challenging, difficult work. It requires vulnerability, communication, and trust. This project of relationship-building is long term. For instance, if someone is in recovery from substance abuse, and would like to plan to call upon their mother for help in the event that they relapse, but they have not told their family about their substance abuse problem, this requires them to do that. Communicating one’s needs and expectations, and perhaps broaching topics of conversation that have been avoided among certain long-standing relationships can open up old wounds and create potential conflict. The invitation to address, work through, and heal such conflicts also opens up the possibility for deeper connections. Strengthening relationships is a crisis prevention measure in and of itself.
32Another example is if a person wants to create a pod map to deal with a situation in which they themselves cause harm. Even the idea of planning for such an event is foreign to many people. It requires acknowledging that one is capable of causing harm, and a willingness or a desire to take responsibility for one’s actions, which not everyone is accustomed to doing. It requires that the person ask themselves if they have people in their life who will hold them accountable, who will provide support and understanding even in the event they hurt someone else, or commit some morally atrocious act. If the answer is no, it requires that one build those relationships, which can be a life-long project of self-development in and of itself.
33As some of the excerpts above have stated, acceptance and forgiveness of others, in addition to ourselves, is another essential component of this challenging self-work required to remain in line with abolitionist values. This includes avoiding judgment of others, for, for example, calling the police, or advocating police cooperating in some circumstances. Judgment ostracizes those who are judged, just as much as it isolates those who do the judging, because it contributes to a culture of judgment that makes it difficult for people to admit to doing things they are ashamed of, makes it difficult for people to ask for help (Dixon, 2015), which can create obstacles to individual and collective healing.
34Acceptance and forgiveness of others also must include instances in which someone has committed harm or abuse. Kaba (Rice, Smith, 2019) talks about the urge in us as human beings that wants people who harm us to receive harm themselves, the desire for vengeance, to wish death on someone who violates us or hurts our families. This, she notes, is a primal instinct, and a natural response to harm done to us and those we love. The challenge is to move beyond this initial urge, this knee-jerk response, because resorting “immediately to punishment means that we stay on the surface of what has happened” (Brown, 2020, 251). To transform the conditions in which such harm takes places to begin with, we must ask ourselves why it happened. And this can be a frightening and difficult move, because “‛why?’ is often the game-changing, possibility-opening question. That’s because the answers rehumanize those we feel are perpetrating against us” (251). Usually the answers to questions about why a person has committed harm involve things like grief, abuse, trauma, mental illness, socialization, childhood, scarcity, loneliness. But what’s more, “‛Why?’ makes it impossible to ignore that we might be capable of a similar transgression in similar circumstances” (Brown, 2020, 251). Haines et al. (2020) explain the importance of this for the larger collective project of social and structural transformation that abolition aims for:
For many people, the idea of giving attention to the healing needs of a person who has been sexually abusive is difficult to tolerate, [and yet] recognizing and attending to the humanity of those who harm is a central aspect of transforming our families, communities, and society… By standing for everyone’s needs for healing, we challenge the dehumanizing logic that is central to systems of oppression, domination, and abuse. By standing for everyone’s needs for healing, we maintain our commitment to a vision of true liberation.
(Haines et al., 2020, 118)
35It is essential in this work that we contribute to building a society in which “no one rests outside [the] principles” (Kelly et al., 2020, 96) we would like that society to embody, such as acceptance, compassion, empathy, forgiveness.
36Practicing these principles in all of our affairs requires us “to confront our own contradictions about who deserves connection, compassion, and forgiveness” (Shara, 2020, 231). It requires recognizing our own complexity, and that of others, and accepting that contradictions exist within ourselves, and within others. It requires letting go of the aforementioned binary, black and white ways of thinking, and transcending thinking in dichotomies of good/bad, right/wrong, deserving/undeserving, because “abusers and survivors of abuse do not exist, and have never existed, in a dichotomy: sometimes, hurt people hurt people” (Thom, 2020, 67). Thom explains the complexity involved here, pointing out that “we cannot think of abusers as incomprehensible monsters who must be exterminated — because abusers are also our heroes, lovers, friends, family” (Thom, 2020, 68). Shank (2020) writes about a personal experience of sexual harassment from someone of significant status within the movement, and her process of coming to terms with it, which required, in part, coming to terms with the wholeness of the person who abused her and other women:
On one level, he has harmed and betrayed people who trusted him. Yet on another he has demonstrated that he is willing to work to build a better world. He is a complex person, like all people, full of contradictions.
(Shank, 2020, 38-39)
37Similarly, it is important to hold space for contradictory thoughts and desires that exist within us (Brooks, Kaba, 2020). For instance, Long (2020) points that as survivors, fantasies of revenge against one’s abuser on the one hand, and the desire for them to receive the community and support they need to heal and transform on the other, often co-exist. And in fact, Long notes, it is the act of honoring such contradictions that makes transformative justice and community healing and accountability possible, because finding safe ways to handle such emotions is part of the healing process.
38Finally, another component of this self-work that is essential for abolitionism is, to borrow a term from adrienne maree brown, to “behave science fictional[ly]” (Brown, 2017, 16). This is about “being concerned with the way our actions and beliefs now, today, will shape the future, tomorrow, the next generations” (Brown, 2017, 16). This is a call for us to comport ourselves in the world with a constant sense of how our beliefs and actions today will shape the future, will shape coming generations, the world they live in, and the planet they inherit. It is an exercise in imagining ourselves in terms of the future ancestors that we are, and aligning our beliefs, values, and actions, in accordance with that.
39This encompasses how we behave — acting in ways that contribute to, and do not detract from, the well-being of the planet, and, as most abolitionists do, taking action to work toward building a better world. This hooks into an area of thought and work discussed among many abolitionists regarding articulating and working toward a vision of the future that involves being in right relationship with the environment, with land, and with natural resources, as well as decolonization and rematriation of land (Tuck, Yang, 2012; Counter Power, 2020).
40To maintain the focus on the discussion at hand, I will briefly explain how “behaving science fictionally” also encompasses our attitudes and outlooks. Being able to commit to building a different, more liberated world requires a certain amount of hope and faith. It requires that we not get bogged down in a morass of despair or martyrdom — despair at the state of the world and the magnitude of the fight before us, and the martyrdom that can sometimes afflict those working in movement-building spaces, which have themselves absorbed capitalist values such as workaholism, maximum productivity and efficiency sometimes at the expense of well-being. Moments of frustration, anger, sadness and despair are sometimes unavoidable in this work, and it is important to hold space for them. But to maintain an overall belief that this new and better world we work toward is possible, accompanied by a sense of how we ought to comport ourselves in our daily lives as ancestors of future generations who will inherit that world, are essential. But, like in the above discussion regarding adherence to values, these are aspirational goals, and not something we can do perfectly. We can expect to fall short sometimes, and that is okay too, as long as we are willing to continuously strive to live in accordance with these principles.
41It has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical (Lorde, Gay, 2020, 32).
42The great activism needed today entails bridging our personal grieving with the grieving of our communities (Owens, 2020, 23).
The notion that collective and individual healing are separate projects at all, some argue, is because healing has been de-politicized, treated as if it something even feasible separately from healing the collective (Werning, 2018). Spade talks about “[t]he false separation of politics and injustice from ordinary life” (Spade, 2020, 27). “Oppression is traumatizing” Haines notes, so to de-politicize healing, perpetuates oppression. Those who work at the intersection of social justice/activism/abolition and individual healing, such as Haines and Spade, argue that it is essential for these projects to be seen and understood as one in the same, in order to recognize how their separation perpetuates trauma, but also so that the individual and collective healing required for social transformation can take place.
In addition to creating group approaches to burnout, we can take action in our own lives when we recognize our own symptoms of overwork and burnout. This requires us to work on changing our own behavior and that we be willing to examine the root causes of our impulses to over-commit, to control, to overwork, or to disconnect. This is healing work aimed at helping us be well enough to enjoy our work, make sustained lifelong contributions to the movements we care about, and receive the love and transformation that is possible in communities of resistance. Above all, we must take a gentle approach to ourselves, avoid judgment, recognize the role of social conditioning in producing these responses in us, and patiently and humbly experiment with new ways of being.
(Spade, 2020, 115)
In this passage Spade draws the parallel between the deliberate work that groups undertake at the collective level to ensure that abolitionist organizations function smoothly, and the individual-level work also required in order to actualize an abolitionist vision. It also illustrates how this work encompasses specific abolitionist principles and practices such as transformation, non-judgment, decolonization, sustainability, and humility.
Many of these scholar-activists note that while healing does need to take place on an individual basis, this is not its primary site, or home (Werning, 2018): “I canot see liberation movements without healing, and I can’t see healing without liberation movements” (Werning, 2018). In other words, individual healing and movement building must go hand in hand. As Spade says, “all the aspects of our lives -where and how we live and work, eat, entertain ourselves, get around, get by are sites of injustice and potential resistance” (Spade, 2020, 27).
Brown also comments on this necessarily co-constitutive project of individual and collective healing and transformative work:
The work of cultivating personal resilience, healing from trauma, self-development and transformation is actually a crucial way to expand what any collective body can be. We heal ourselves, and we heal in relationship, and from that place, simultaneously, we create more space for healed communities, healed movements, healed worlds.
(Brown, 2017, 192)
43Part of the reason for this is that there is a sense in which, as noted at the beginning of this paper, personal healing work is a “building block” for collective healing (Barnard Center for Research on Women, 2018). This is exemplified in the work of individuals such as Sonya Renee Taylor (2021), who focuses on body acceptance and radical self-love, but connects these personal, internal projects to projects of collective healing, emphasizing the power of this individual work to bring about larger-scale change:
Our relationships with our bodies helps to create the world we live in. And we get to decide “what is the world I want to create inside of me, so that I can be intentional about the world I want to create outside of me?” And making peace with our body is how we get there… When we don’t do that, we actually replicate the systems that already exist. Because they’re still in us, they’re still the tools we’re building from… We say we want a world that is equitable and just and compassionate, while we have inequitable, unjust, mean relationships with our own selves…It requires of us our work. It requires of us to cultivate inside of us, that which we say we want to bring about in the world.
(Scritchfield, 2018)
44Taylor’s work is in part, about helping people who struggle with their relationships with their bodies, to understand that this is not an individual failing, but the product of the collective oppression performed by capitalism and patriarchy, which delineate certain standards of what a body “should” look like, and profit from people’s self-hatred of their bodies that results from not living up to this arbitrary standard, by selling them products and services such as diet and weight loss pills, wrinkle cream, exercise equipment, plastic surgery, etc. The source of this problem is social-structural, but its manifestation is social-structural and individual, so it takes work on both of these levels, and it requires that individuals engaged in self-healing of this kind recognize that theirs is a common struggle, and that through deepening our relationships with others we can heal our relationships with ourselves, and vice versa.
45Being an abolitionist requires more than applying abolitionist theories to criminal punishment problems. It requires more than movement building and organizing work. We must build within ourselves and in our interpersonal interactions, microcosms of the world we want to see, concurrently with and through, our engagement in system-transformation efforts:
Our vision challenges us to create a collective culture of growth and dynamic support. One that acknowledges and supports each individual’s inherent dignity and worthiness of connection, while simultaneously demanding rigorous self-accountability and mutual accountability.
(Haines et al., 2020, 117)
46This requires a degree of personal integrity, or at least a willingness to grow toward it. Fortunately, engaging in transformative work itself — such as community accountability or transformative justice circles — changes us: “making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics but a process that can and must transform us” (Kelley, 2002 xii). It is simply a matter of letting it, of giving ourselves over to the principles of the work and adopting and practicing those principles for ourselves, in our lives and day-to-day affairs.