Deana: [00:00:00]
Welcome to Stories for Power. I’m Deana Lewis, and I’m a member of Just Practice Collaborative Stories For Power is an oral history project produced by Just Practice Collaborative and Creative Interventions. It explores the political lineage and historical experiments that gave way to this wave of transformative justice, community accountability, and prison abolition.
In each episode of Stories For Power, we speak with activists and organizers from different cities who were and continue to be at the forefront of feminist abolitionist praxis.
They talked about the bold experiments and interventions they were a part of in the early 2000’s to 2010, and how their work informed abolitionist transformative justice and community accountability organizing today.
Don’t worry. If any terms or words [00:01:00] have you confused, we will do our best to link to resources in the show notes, and you can always go back to listen to the special introduction episode for more context.
In this episode, you will hear from two inspiring abolitionist feminists, Alisa Bierria and Beth Richie.
Each of them published groundbreaking books that are vital to understanding and remembering the stories of abolition feminist movement organizing.
We will talk about the courageous and radical work they were a part of and how their work informed abolitionist, transformative justice, and community accountability organizing today.
Have you facilitated a process using community accountability tools or strategies? We wanna hear your stories. Creative Interventions and Just Practice Collaborative wanna share new stories from people who are taking action to end interpersonal violence without the use of police or carceral systems. Find the link in our show notes to learn more.[00:02:00]
A note for our listeners, we’ll be discussing violence, including police violence, intimate partner violence, and community violence. We encourage you to take care of yourself and we understand that taking care of yourself can also look like not listening to this podcast until you’re ready.
Now let me introduce our guests. They have amazing and extensive experiences and knowledge. I’ll do my best to summarize. We have linked their full bios in the show notes. You can also learn more on our website StoriesforPower.org.
Beth Richie is the former Department Head of Criminology, Law and Justice, an LAS distinguished Professor of Black Studies and Criminology Law and Justice at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
The emphasis of her scholarly and activist work has been on the ways that race, ethnicity, and social position affect women’s experiences of violence and incarceration, focusing on the experiences of African American [00:03:00] battered women and sexual assault survivors. Dr. Richie is the author of multiple books, including Compelled to Crime: the Gender Entrapment of Black Battered Women, Arrested Justice: Black Women Violence and America’s Prison Nation, and, most recently, a co-authored book with Angela Davis, Gina Dent and Erica Meiners titled Abolition. Feminism. Now.
Beth: My name is Beth Richie, and I am super excited to be in this conversation, both this particular podcast, but also the overall project, to reflect back on the 40 years, 45 years maybe, that I’ve been doing anti-violence work as an abolition feminist.
I started this work in the ’90s. I was working as a social worker at a community-based organization that sort of had a very strong, lively political [00:04:00] commitment as an anti-Black racism activist group. We had campaigns, we ran the health clinic, we had educational programs, food justice work. It really was one of those moments in that particular historical moment where being part of a radical movement for racial justice surrounded me. And as I was doing that work with sort of full enthusiasm and commitment, that kind of young energy that like keeps you up all night and ready to do more despite, you know, some obvious limits, I looked around and the questions of gender equity, gender justice, let alone the kind of recognition of women’s leadership, and women’s position/ positionality in the work was just absent. We were there, and we were doing a lot of work, but people who identified as women were not recognized for doing that work.
In particular, it seemed that the ways that racial justice was framed at that place, or racialized violence, [00:05:00] or racial discrimination, it didn’t include attention to people who identified as women or people who identified as queer, people who identified as gender fluid. We didn’t use those terms then. We were invisible.
So I convened a group of people and said, “what’s happening here?” And we talked and talked and realized that it was both the patriarchy of the actual activist work, but it was also that women, people identified as women, were afraid, were in hostile relationships, were not free to sort of travel the activist space that the organization had created. And so we started an anti-violence program. And it seemed to me that it was like a natural thing to do. Again, coming from an organizing background, when you need to make change, you get together with other activists and try to make change. So we started an anti-violence program.
At the time it was one of the first ones that specifically dealt with Black women and other women of color in New York City. [00:06:00] And you know, since then, feels like the work has been my world. I’ve always done it, always cared about it, always felt like it was the place I could make the best change, and it was the place that would change me the most. So there I was.
The abolition part came a little bit later. Maybe I’ll let Alisa talk a little bit, and then I’ll get back to how I found myself working with women inside jails and prisons.
Deana: Alisa Bierria is a Black feminist philosopher and an assistant professor in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA. Her forthcoming book, Inconceivable Agency: Race, Gender Violence, and the Carceral Imagination explores how Black women’s survival actions within the structures of criminalization and anti-Black gendered violence challenge philosophical understandings of agency.
She’s a co-editor of the two volume collection, Abolitionist Feminisms, and a special issue of Social Justice titled Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence. [00:07:00] An advocate and organizer within the feminist anti-violence movement for over 25 years, Alisa has co-founded and co-led several national organizations, including Survived and Punished, which advocates for the freedom of criminalized survivors of domestic and sexual violence.
Alisa: I started officially maybe back in 1996 when I volunteered at a battered women’s program. That’s what it was called back then. Tompkins County Battered Women’s Program. I am a survivor of domestic violence and sexual violence, and I knew that I wanted my work to be in that area. I also was really interested in thinking about questions of survivor life and survivor integrity and the ways in which survivors make decisions about their own safety and connections and so on.
[00:08:00] So I think I was just connected or attracted to the work, like a moth to a flame. And then I, after I graduated from undergrad, I moved to Seattle and just started doing everything I could to connect to the anti-violence work that was happening. So I became a, a volunteer at Seattle Rape Relief on the crisis line. Seattle Rape Relief was one of the first anti-rape organizations in the US. I think it started in 1972.
I was on the board of the Northwest Network of Bisexual, Trans, Lesbian, and Gay Survivors of Abuse. I worked as a advocate, a community advocate at the East Cherry YWCA, which focused on Black survivors of domestic violence. And then there were several other organizations. I just kind of filled up my life with anti-violence work because I wanted to learn as much as possible and let it inspire me and drive me, [00:09:00] basically taking the wheel of my life for the next 25 years.
And then Seattle Rape Relief sadly closed in 1999, I think. And the volunteers from the crisis line organized to establish another organization called Communities Against Rape and Abuse, or CARA in Seattle. We had a vision for CARA. Our vision was that we didn’t want it to be only a direct services organization. We did support groups occasionally, but mostly we wanted to focus on community organizing as an anti-violence practice, as an anti-violence praxis.
And I think that that shift from direct services to community organizing, it’s not that the work wasn’t politicized, like I was going to all the coalition conferences, all the things, right? I met advocates who were deeply politicized. But there was something about the shift to community organizing in a more intentional way that [00:10:00] made that politicization more explicit and then opened a pathway for us to do some really interesting experiments.
So I can talk more about how I became an abolitionist through CARA’s trajectory. I’ll say this, that Seattle Rape Relief closed in ’99. Critical Resistance had its opening conference in ‘98. Incite! had its opening conference in 2000, so it was like right at the millennium, right at that juncture that everything started to come together.
I let the work bring me to abolition, right? And so the people at CARA, there were several folks, we did not have consensus about abolition, and I was one of the people who just wasn’t really sure. What happened is that CARA, one of our members connected with Critical Resistance. CR was having film festivals at that time, and we decided to host a film festival.
And I think, at [00:11:00] least at that time, we were the first non CR chapter to host a film festival. So it was an anti-rape organization that was the first one to do that. And through that work, that process of organizing that festival, that development, trying to figure out which films made the most sense given the needs of our communities, figuring out the workshops, ’cause it was more like a mini conference that we did. Trying to translate community organizing into pedagogical approaches and workshops. Bringing speakers in to talk about areas that we were less familiar with.
It was through that practice of collective event planning and community organizing that we all collectively came together to articulate, like it compelled us to articulate an abolitionist politics. Because I think that what happened before the festival is… couldn’t come to consensus, not a crisis, let’s see what happens, right? Let’s just see what happens. [00:12:00] Let’s see what happens if we all learn together. Not CARA teaching the community. That’s not what happened, but CARA learning with and alongside the community and through that practice of collective learning, we came to a politics and articulated a politics of abolition, really from a very particular survivor perspective, right?
So we were grounded in the positionality of survivors. So it wasn’t just abolition because prisons are evil institutions, policing is an evil institution. It was that prisons and policing are destructive to the lives of survivors. So it was that logic, right? That reasoning that brought us to a consensus around the politics of abolition.
I think we had the film festival in 2002, and, of course, my colleague, Theryn Kigvamasud’vashti [00:13:00] from CARA, Ebony Colbert, I think Xandra Ibarra maybe, we all went to the Incite! Conference in Santa Cruz, the first one in 2000. And that also just helped pave the way for us to create a vocabulary around feminist abolition. Try to bring the critiques around structural gender violence and structural state violence together that also just helped position us to have that film festival in 2002, and then the rest was history. .
Beth: I love hearing this history of CARA, which to me stands out as one of the organizations, at least in my thinking, that was so clearly articulating abolition feminism before people were putting those two words together.
I really appreciate your story of being pulled to that through the work, as opposed to sort of [00:14:00] co-signing a label, right? That gets sort of put out there as the way we’re supposed to be or the work we’re supposed to do, how we’re supposed to act.
I also appreciate that the history that you provide gives some lens into what was happening around the tension between direct service and organizing, because in my experience when I realized in the early ’90s that the struggle against anti-Black racial violence was happening alongside of, but not at all, incorporating the white, mainstream analysis of gender violence. And vice versa, the white mainstream analysis of gender violence was articulating a kind of false notion of sisterhood and gender essentialism.
It was clear to me that those two worlds couldn’t come together in part [00:15:00] because the white feminist mainstream anti-violence movement was interested in direct services. And the anti-Black racism, radical organizations were looking for campaigns around justice. And so it was not only the lack of analysis around gendered racism or racialized gender violence, but it was also that the strategies were so different.
And for me this discussion is reminding me that my instinct around abolition came because I came up working around anti-Black racism, which, at the time, even when it didn’t include gender violence, was articulating stories of police violence as part of state violence that were controlling and dominating. That was always part of the narrative in the community-based organizing work that I was doing around racial justice.
And so to think about a justice movement without thinking about policing and the violence of prisons, [00:16:00] which is, I mean, I thought the anti-gender violence movement was a justice movement, right? So how could they be articulating a strategy for change that involved using the carceral state? It just was incompatible to what I thought radical work was. Little did we know, right, Alisa? That’s, that’s exactly what the analysis was and that, therefore, it did compromise the white mainstream early sort of 1990s work around gender-based violence.
It was clearly co-opting work that was radical work, and I think it’s why so many of us who were doing organizing and campaign work at the time have gotten erased from that history because our work was so incompatible with the dominant strategies that, of course, became more and more powerful and controlling through things like the passing of the Violence Against Women Act, et cetera.
The formulation of really rigid state coalitions, not the radical ones, [00:17:00] but the really rigid state coalitions that were interested, you know, in foundation grants and evaluating programs and best practices, all of those kinds of things.
Alisa: Yeah, I should think more about where the anti-violence work was in the ’90s. I think I’ve thought a little bit about it. Certainly in the ’70s and ’60s there’ve been brilliant books out. Emily Thuma’s book, All of Our Trials and so on, but less so about the ’90s, right? And I know that intersectionality, right? Crenshaw writes the two articles, but the second article is really intentionally about anti-violence work, the “mapping the margins.”
In ’92, there’s… the Rodney King verdict happens, and the rebellions, and then ’96 your book. I’m skipping things. I’m just identifying the different points on the timeline map that I know had an impact on the rest of my sort of development of politics and political world making, right. And [00:18:00] then, of course, I think that 9/11 and the wars, that particular pivot around state violence was just…I guess my point is is that I feel like Black feminists, other feminists were seeding things.
I think as you’re saying, Beth, that those things were not, these points of knowledge production were not taken up by the anti-violence organizations field at all… at all. In fact, it was actively hostile against these points of knowledge production. I think you were more deeply sort of in the struggle within the field, right? Because weren’t you part of the National Coalition against Domestic Violence? Yeah, and I feel like in my work, I have always been walking around it, talking to it, critiquing, being critiqued by it, right? And so and so I think that I haven’t identified myself as part of the field, but in actuality I’ve always been on the margins of that [00:19:00] field.
And so I had less experience having arguments with feminists around cops. My whole political world was about Black liberation, racial justice, fuck the police, and then it was just a matter of time of trying to figure out how to bring these things together from the perspective of survivors in particular, right? So, you planted the seeds so that when shit hit the fan again and again and again, right, but particularly in the new millennium, we were able to pick up those flowers and run with it. Yeah.
Beth: You know, I hadn’t thought of it like that. It’s sort of a beautiful metaphor and feels, like emotionally, so accurate to me that the really serious political arguments that in many ways became personal arguments about the use of the carceral state in response to the [00:20:00] horrific gender violence that was revealed in the ’90s.
I mean, certainly before, but in the mainstream, in the ’90s, right. It was so exhausting. You know, we were so angry, we felt sort of like all of our hope had been stolen by a really rigid carceral feminism. I think we felt like we were losing. It is almost like we woke up, and there was a generation of people like you who were just carrying it on.
I remember that feeling after the first Incite! conference that the small group of us, really because of, you know, the age that we came into this work, were sort of ready to like, give it up, except of course we felt accountable to our communities and to survivors. We were out of strategies. We were out of energy, and when we looked around that room at the thousands of people who [00:21:00] came to Incite!, it felt like we could just not rest.It didn’t feel like we could rest. It felt like we could be in community with so many other people who brought such rich, diverse experiences to the work.
And I remember that like it was a bodily feeling for me. It was in my heart, it was in my mind. I felt like I was in tears the whole time because I felt such a relief that there was a movement that became the movement of abolition feminists.
And I think it reminds me to sort of name the writing of the Critical Resistance-Incite! Statement. It wasn’t just a document. It’s a document and a process that was trying to articulate abolition feminism. We didn’t call that, it’s not in the text anywhere, but that’s really what we were trying to do when we wrote that. And all of the people who have rewritten it and elaborated on it and used it and modified it, I think that felt like a material representation of what was about to happen [00:22:00] in the building of an abolition feminist movement.
Deana: This conversation is incredible and I feel so lucky to be here. And I wanna talk a little bit about how your books frame so much of the work we are and have been doing. So Compelled to Crime in 2003, Arrested Justice in 2012, Abolition. Feminism. Now, and Abolition Feminisms in 2022.
So more and more people are talking about abolition and more and more books are being published on abolition, and the two of you have really made sure to insert feminism into abolition, in general. Can you talk about why you believe this political moment seems more open to abolition and abolition feminism specifically? Also, how are your books playing a role in the moment that we are in now?
Alisa: To Beth’s point about the Critical Resistance-Incite! Statement from 2002, I think it was published? The brilliance of that statement is that you called it a statement that was material. [00:23:00] I think that was the word that you used, right? It’s such a statement that’s grounded in a practice, and the way that I think about it is that it’s practice to theory.
CARA taught me so much about an approach to political analysis that’s practice to theory. So the way in which the five points critiquing anti-violence practices, the five points critiquing anti-policing organizing practice that doesn’t take into account gender, and then articulating some really concrete recommendations, that methodology of analysis, it’s so critical for us to remember as organizers that are organizing in the 2020s, right?
And so with books, I was very fortunate to co-edit a two volume book, Abolition Feminisms with Jakeya Caruthers, and Brooke Lober, two really wonderful [00:24:00] feminists, activists, academics. And the thing about the books is that it’s not just that they articulate an analysis of abolition feminism, they set the stage for abolition feminist practice all around the world, right? And so… and all across time. That’s the other thing.
So inside prisons, what abolition feminist practice is looking like through transformative justice collectives, the anti-war movement, all of this, is, it’s not just the theorizing. It’s the practice that is supposed to get you to articulating a theory of abolition feminism, which is why we made it plural, Abolition Feminisms, because the politics, it’s beyond the phrase, it’s beyond the hashtag, it crosses geography, it crosses temporality. We’re planting seeds, we’re leaving ghosts. We’re trying to talk to the people that are coming after us, and the people that [00:25:00] came before us, right? And so there’s a way in which abolition feminism, it’s a time traveler. It’s a long-term movement. It’s a long arc of politics making.
Abolition feminism can be a really great intervention in masculinist, anti carceral organizing, and a great intervention in carceral feminist work. It is, but it is more than that. It has its own life and history and set of legacies and knowledge producers and activist makers, right.
Beth: That’s so beautiful. I love the way that you talk about going from practice to theory as an abolition feminist, which is kind of counter to how a lot of academics think about how you go from theory to practice, and it’s one of the things that really distinguishes the transformative potential of abolition feminism, is that it is practice that [00:26:00] teaches us what we call theory, or strategy, or intervention, not the opposite. So important, and I think that’s in part why, as you say, Alisa, it lasts over time. It invites lots of people in. It allows for, I say “it,” I mean abolition feminism allows for responding to immediate crisis. You know, the kind of amazing campaign work for freedom that Survived and Punished does, for example. It allows for that.
And it also allows for the really slow world building work that it promises it will deliver. And so I think the both and part of abolition feminism really comes from the way that it’s alive and it’s living and it’s experimental and it changes over time, but it gives us something to kind of wrap ourselves in or hold onto as something that’s moving in a direction toward freedom. I think if you [00:27:00] try to do abolition without feminism, or if you are a feminist and don’t understand what abolition is required of you, then I think you miss that long arc that you described.
You know, in terms of the arc of the books that I’ve been involved in writing, you know, I think Compelled to Crime was written really just to tell the story. To not tell the story, to reveal the story, to share the story of criminalized survivors. I didn’t have that language. All of you came up with that brilliant language, but it to me was a way to sort of put a reality on the consequences of doing abolition work without feminism and feminism, anti-violence work without abolition. The result is people are “compelled to crime.” It was really written kind of as a invitation for people to wake the fuck up and look at what your work has done, right.
And Arrested Justice [00:28:00] really was a more poignant critique. I mean, that was like, “okay, you really, really need to wake up now” in some ways, you know, it wasn’t sort of the… the stories, it was, the more analysis of how we won the mainstream and lost the movement. And how carceral feminism has been so dangerous and so almost hateful to some people who are survivors. And how our, and I say “our” ’cause I do feel like I was involved in the building of local and national anti-violence organization movements, how our hands were dirty in that and that we had to do something different.
I didn’t end Arrested Justice with exactly what we had to do, but it’s part of why Angela, Gina, and Erica and I came together to write Abolition. Feminism. Now. And so that to me is sort of the hope. You know, sort of alongside Alisa, your books and so many other books that are really like, here’s what we can do different.
There is a possibility. There’s strategies. It’s not tomorrow, but it’s some day. [00:29:00] You know, I think about what Derecka says, you know, when we think about abolition, you don’t just think, okay, so we’re gonna wake up and be free. It’s like, no, we’re gonna wake up and make our way the best way we can, towards some world other than the one that we live in. And every step along the way builds something different.
So I don’t know exactly how Compelled to Crime links to abolition feminism, except it was a way to really say we have to do something different on behalf of the survivors. And I was mad when I wrote Arrested Justice.
Alisa: It showed!
Beth: And I feel more hopeful. It showed, yeah?
Alisa: I loved it.
Beth: And Abolition. Feminism. has me a little more hopeful, especially the Now. part.
Alisa: I love those books so much. I mean, I think that Compelled to Crime, like what it said in bright, bold red letters is that prisons are killing Black women. That’s what it said to me. You know, survivors trying to [00:30:00] do their best to make decision under completely impossible circumstances, conditions, right? in the context of gender-based violence, poverty, all these different kinds of things that survivors are doing in order to manage the trauma that they’ve experienced.
And then, of course, police violence, and you’re in prison. So I think that Compelled to Crime clarified the politics for, you know, “criminalized survivor.” Because “criminalized survivor,” we didn’t like say, “we are now going to start using criminalized…” it wasn’t like that. It was just that, I don’t know who started, but we just used that language because it was thoughtful about making explicit that some institution is making the choice to criminalize survivors, right?
Survivors aren’t choosing to be criminalized, right? They don’t just happen to be in court. They are getting there through those pathways to crime that you described [00:31:00] in Compelled to Crime. And so, yeah, I think that making those pathways just more explicit helps Survived and Punished articulate the explicitness of the criminalization of survivors and survival, which I also think is in your book, just more clearly. So I’m so thankful.
And like I said, I think that the politics and the life building, and the political vision, it’s more than these…You know, we have to speak, so we have to use language. We have to have some sort of shared vocabulary. But I think it’s important, especially in this age of social media, to acknowledge that the phrases can only do so much work, right? And so there has to be more. That’s why I think that the writing is so essential to getting that more across.
Beth: I appreciate you saying that. I never imagined that Compelled to Crime would ever sort of land [00:32:00] in the world of influence for the amazing work that you and so many others have done. So I, I feel very humbled by that. And in honor of the stories that are in the book, of course.
And I think when we sort of think about the current, almost rush to abolition. I dunno what else to call it. I remember in the summer of 2020, it felt so uplifting, like finally, oh, they must have read your work and been on the website and listened to Shira talk, and all the other people from Love and Protect. I just feel like there’s a way that, for a minute, it felt like everyone has read the Critical Resistance-Incite! Statement, and that’s why we are where we are, in the streets.
And it wasn’t long when it was clear, at least to me, where I sit in Chicago, that people hadn’t read. It doesn’t matter that they didn’t read it, but they didn’t bring to the abolition work an analysis that was [00:33:00] too far beyond the hashtag. And I appreciate what you said about how we need the long version of the story in order to really fill out the promise of what abolition feminism can bring. Because if we don’t sort of think deeply and for a long time and have it emerge from a practice, then I think it can easily be not only misunderstood, but erased.
There was a time in my classes on campus, students would say, when you introduce yourself, I’m an abolitionist and so at the end when I would say, well, what does that mean? “I went to a protest when George Floyd was killed.” Not, “I think about the world that I wanna build, and it has to include the following. There’s enough for everyone”. You know? The things that we know, that we know that we care about. So…
Deana: I really appreciate the reminder of abolition as a practice and also that there’s room for everyone to come [00:34:00] into abolition.
This is also a good segue into thinking about successes. Can you share what success stories stick out to you? Like what made those stories happen?
Beth: I think of two things about success. I…I first wanna say that success to me is different than winning campaigns. That success to me is about building movements. And at the same time, I want people free.
So I think that one success is the cumulative successful campaigns that have freed criminalized survivors. And I wanna sort of lift that up and really say that to me, every time someone walks outside of those gates and lives free, that’s part of both an individual freedom and a movement success.
And I wanna [00:35:00] hold, count, name, all of that work, ’cause it’s not just the moment coming out of the gate, but it’s the work that went into the letters written, the showing up at hearings, the engagement with families, the changing understandings of community members. So I think that’s huge. And I don’t mean that, like, to avoid the question is like, well, it’s everything. I really do mean that we have to count the individual freedom and the story of success that leads to that freedom as one of the biggest ones.
And in some ways a smaller one, we’ve already talked about the CR-Incite! Statement, that every time I see someone using it, changing it, doing a study guide around it, I feel like that was a success, not, again, the document, but the process that laid open a chance for people to think about [00:36:00] the ways that abolition feminism can be made real. Sort of as a tool, but really more as a invitation to be part of a process of thinking about what abolition feminism is, I would name the CR-Incite! Statement. .
Alisa: I would co-sign both of those passionately. You can’t see me ’cause it’s a podcast, but I held up a praise hand around the, you know, freedom as of a point that needs to be lifted up at all the time.
I guess I have two very similar points, which is when CARA did the Critical Resistance film festivals and we came to that abolitionist politics. Let me just speak from my perspective. The reason I had hesitation around abolition for a while was that I did not know how to answer the question, “what else is there for survivors?” I understood that police and prisons were terrible for survivors. [00:37:00] What I was scared about was that survivors, by and large, relied on the idea of prisons and police.
I took that reliance, that kind of existential kind of pull towards this idea of like a magic 911 that would come and save you, I took that seriously, I did not negate it. And so I think that the work that we did was that we figured out a way to be comfortable with not being able to answer the question, “What else is there?” We held that as just a question that was just there. Maybe we could figure it out. But in any case, we, the broad “we” as a movement, as a community, had to figure it out. It was our moral obligation to figure it out. I wanna pause there and just say that this is what I mean by practice to theory, right?
Sometimes there’s this moment of just not knowing, and I think that [00:38:00] that’s okay. Like be cool about it. You know what I mean? And occupy that moment of not knowing, continuing to do the practice, and then seeing what the practice brings back to you and what the practice brought back to us was an opportunity to begin to do some experiments around community-based approaches to safety and accountability. And so we were experimenting with different communities that had different contexts of gender violence.
And then Incite! was at the same time beginning to write its first anthology Color of Violence, and the editors asked us to, they said, “submit your model.” And I was like, there is no model. I can describe what we’ve been doing. But then what happened is when that invitation occurred, then it compelled us again, to articulate what it was we were doing in a more systematic way, [00:39:00] which is what became the “Taking Risks” article in the Color of Violence anthology. And so my point is you don’t have to know everything in order to do the work.
There is a lot of faith that comes into play for community organizing. It may not always work out. Certainly, transformative justice and community accountability has had a really amazing road and a rocky road, right? We are all learning together, but unless you push yourself to the point of not knowing, then it’s hard to bring yourself to do the experiments because then you’re just like, doing the thing that everybody has always done forever. Just like an automaton, just repeating the same thing, right? So that’s the first thing.
And then the second thing, very similar, is Free Marissa Now. Marissa Alexander, Black woman, domestic violence survivor in Florida, tried to defend herself from her abusive husband and did [00:40:00] successfully, I should say, defend her life, which is why she is still here with us today, right? But then the Florida prosecutor tried to punish her for that survival and she went to trial and got 20 years. And so I did not have the language for “defense campaign” at the time. I had called a number on a flyer. I don’t really remember how I connected with people who were beginning to do the work. I connected with Sumayya Coleman and some other organizers, and then we began to build an idea of a defense campaign.
I sort of knew about Joan Little, like I knew that name. I knew what roughly happened, right? I knew there was a movement that freed Joan Little in 1974, a Black woman in North Carolina who had been raped by a jail guard while she was in jail. She killed him, and North Carolina wanted to put her to death for that. But a, a movement, a broad based movement, mobilized to free her from that charge. So [00:41:00] I knew something about that, but there wasn’t a lot written at that time in 2012, I think. So we had to move forward by faith, and let me tell you, that was hard. That was really hard.
I remember a comment on our little campaign blog that somebody left that said, “they’re never gonna free her. I don’t know what y’all are doing anyways.” And I was just like, you know what? I’m gonna free her if it takes me the rest of my life. Like, I understood where that was coming from, but I refused to give in to the nihilism of all of that.
Like there had to be a way to figure it out. And I don’t mean to suggest that if you only work hard enough and you can win a campaign, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is – I’m not going out like that. I want to do the experiment, see it all the way through, learn all that [00:42:00] we can learn together, and then adapt our strategies and work together and try to figure it out.
Eventually Marissa was released. She won an appeal and then she ended up being forced to take a plea deal and then she was released, and now she’s doing great. She’s an activist and on social media. And then that helped us connect with Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander, which became Love and Protect. It helped us connect to Stand with Nan-Hui, which is a campaign in California. It helped us connect to California Coalition for Women Prisoners. And those organizations and formations ended up founding Survived and Punished. So I would have never guessed that calling a phone number on a flyer would lead to that trajectory.
And so I can’t give into a comment that says, “I don’t know what you’re doing. They’re never gonna free her anyway.” I mean, maybe, but I need to [00:43:00] pursue it. There has to be a level of faith around it, and I don’t know what will happen, but I wanna see what would happen if we work together and continue to imagine strategies together, even if we don’t really know what we’re doing. You know what I mean?
Like we learn what we are doing, we write it down, and now there’s discussions about defense campaigns for survivors and people doing it, doing it on their own. You know, like just very organically, like it’s a different consciousness around that kind of organizing that came about through work, you know, not through a theory. We didn’t first write an article about defense campaigns, right? It just came about through work and through love.
Beth: That’s such a beautiful story. I am moved to sort of reflect on, that we have to have faith in order to get free is [00:44:00] so profound both on the level of the defense campaign, but also that’s what survivors do.
That there’s no, like when you leave, there’ll be this, or once you’re free from the tyranny of the abuse, life is gonna… I mean, it really is believing. And in abolition, when slaves were walking north, it wasn’t ’cause they knew what the north looked like, right? It was because there’s something about abolition and feminism that allows people to have some kind of belief or faith that freedom will deliver something, and a community of support that you’re not walking alone. That there are other people who maybe also don’t know where they’re going or don’t know what it’s gonna look like or don’t know how or when it’s gonna happen. But there are people who are working in coalition, in collaboration, community, and in love to sort of set you [00:45:00] free, ’cause that sets me free. So the notion of the faith is so important in doing this work.
Deana: I think it’s beautiful to think about love and faith in these different ways because we often have to rely on them to lean into uncertainty.
Can you share some challenges that you’ve come across in this work and how did those challenges grow your work? Also, as you think back, I would love to hear what other lessons or learnings you’d like to share with new organizers.
Alisa: So CARA was a nonprofit and oh, boy, did that bring a can of worms, right? I didn’t have the title of executive director, but I had all the responsibilities of an executive director. By which I mean find the funds, find the money in order to make sure that people get paid. The money is very strange now. The money is here like for, for different kinds of feminist abolition work. [00:46:00] I don’t know how that happened. I will tell you that in early 2000’s, that stone was dry as mud.
Like it was just… I could not find a grant at some point in the mid -2000’s to save my life. It was so stressful. Eventually I went to school, and the folks who took over CARA, they also had the same struggle, and eventually it had to close. Sadly, sadly. But the thing that I learned is that sometimes organizations should close.
It got a lot of support when it first began in 1999 from the city of Seattle, which was pretty progressive. And then the administrations changed because that’s what happens in politics. And the new administration was like neoliberal on, you know, exponential and they wanted to call survivors customers and that were, you know, getting services or purchasing… they just tried to put a neoliberal [00:47:00] framework, a market logic framework on a, certainly a non-market project, right? And so at first we bent, we translated, we coded, we did all the things, right? You know, get the money. Get the money, and run. Like that, we tried all of that, but that I feel shortened my lifespan.
I just don’t, I don’t think that that was a sustainable thing. I feel like it just wasn’t gonna work. And anyways, they weren’t ever gonna let it work for too long at the end of the day. So I felt very frustrated about that, about my leadership at CARA at the end, because I couldn’t figure out how to keep it afloat. I didn’t know what language I could use. I just couldn’t figure it out. But here’s what happened. After CARA closed, the “Taking Risks” article continued to live. And also like all the other brilliant [00:48:00] work that the people at CARA did, like Joelle Brouner, who did really brilliant disability liberation theory, the reproductive justice work that folks did, like a lot of our work continues to live on in different spaces.
The “Taking Risks” article in particular got translated into Spanish and German and just got circulated all over, and still there’s shout outs right to the article. And so never would I have anticipated that. And when we all got together in Theryn’s apartment and tried to figure out how to write this article, that it would continue on 15, 20 years and counting.
So just because something has to stop or something has to close, or there is heartbreak, it doesn’t mean that the work is negated. Sometimes the work transforms its being. It takes another form and that’s, that’s another point about faith.You know, you did your best [00:49:00] work, you put it out there. Let’s see what happens. It’s a seed. Let’s see what kind of flower, what kind of tree grows in the future.
I believe in relationships, I believe in the liberation, the relationality that’s cultivated in the context of community organizing. I mean, I just had a medical crisis in December, and people just really, they had my back. And it’s, it’s funny because I am pretty introverted, and pretty independent. I just didn’t anticipate, I don’t know why. I just didn’t anticipate. But people were like, here’s some DoorDash, here’s some, here’s, here are flowers. I got so many flowers, so much chocolate. Like it was just really, it was really lovely. I’m used to being in a position of helping and assisting others. I just did not anticipate so much love coming my way after I had this thing happen.
And this goes to the point I wanna answer with, which is that I’m pretty analytical, but [00:50:00] what I have learned is trying to figure out ways to be creative. Ways to use the other part of my…my mind, sometimes out of necessity. I’m a fan of art, but I don’t think of myself as an artist. But lately I’ve been trying to write a short story just to challenge myself and to see what happens. And what I have found in that practice is that it is touching parts of me that I hadn’t, didn’t even know existed. So I think that trying to find a creative outlet, however that works for you, can be extremely liberatory. Especially in the context, you know, if you’re a full-time organizer, or even just a part-time organizer, that can be kind of stressful. It’s stressful to deal with violence, state violence, right? It’s stressful to deal with gender-based violence, [00:51:00] have conflict in different political spaces. That sucks, right? It can be hard. But in order to continue to sustain yourself. I think that in addition to taking breaks and talking it out, what I have discovered in the past three months is that… is that finding creative outlet… it opens a new pathway to freedom.
Beth: I’ll talk about what challenges me and kind of worries me, and it always has, and that is how to make sure that our work and whether it’s early work that I did to talk about how dangerous gender-based violence is and patriarchy is to Black communities, or current work about the hope and possibility of abolition feminism, or the work in both spaces around [00:52:00] how mass criminalization and arrest and surveillance and incarceration is deadly violence to Black people. How to make sure that I keep my ear and heart open to people in my community, my neighborhood who disagree with me? Who feel like I’m not taking their experience into account. I don’t live in the same nexus of danger that they live in, that I can’t respond to some of the things, Alisa that you were saying earlier about, you know, what do we say to people who right now are terrified? And can’t think of anything else to do other than call 911, even though they don’t wanna do that, they can’t do… but how do I make sure that my message and my experience and the stories I listened to and where I’ve come to is [00:53:00] at least heard and that I’m hearing from people who disagree with me.
You know, I’ve learned that there’s some people who I don’t care if they disagree with me. I don’t mean it like that. I don’t care about them as people, but I’m not trying to influence them. But there are people who I wanna be in conversation and community with, like my people, you know, my family, my people. And I wanna do that thoughtfully and generously and with some grace, but also with a firm commitment to what I think is true.
It’s not always easy to find that balance. It sometimes…it’s…I guess easier than others, but that’s a challenge for me. And I’m thinking about now how to talk in particular to some of the, for example, the Black women who are advocates at sort of the national policy level, who finally feel like they have a voice, and people are respecting them and they are getting money, Alisa, ’cause they are arguing certain kinds of policies, and who feel like I [00:54:00] have, I mean, and they’re people who I care about. So I don’t think they say, like, terrible things about me, personally, but we have really strong political disagreements. Sometimes looking at the same thing, we have strong political disagreements and I’m trying to figure out how to manage that a little bit.
And the thing I would say to new organizers is that what has sustained me in this work is the intentional building of community, friendships, family, the joy, the fun that we have. I mean, people often ask, how is it that you’ve done this for so long? And, you know, of course part of it, my initial reaction is, ’cause I have a political commitment to it. But that’s like, not all I have. I also have the best friends that I’ve ever made in my life. People who I trust with my life, who I have been alongside me in this work all across the country, in some cases all around the world.
Different generations doing different kind of work, [00:55:00] but it’s my people. And I have been able to sustain the “my people” part, you know, even though we’re losing the campaigns, or even when we can’t figure out and we have to close the organization, that we still have each other and that “each other” part is really important.
In some ways, I think it would be easier to have the “each other” part in a world when we can have kind of virtual relationships. But I actually think that having “each other” part was built on those long days at conference centers or sitting around a table and in a coffee shop, or just building care for each other. Care that’s deep and that’s for me, everlasting. I hope young organizers can find that.
Deana: Thanks to the amazing authors and organizers that kicked off this work and who are making this world a better place for all of us every single day. As always, I encourage you to take the lessons you [00:56:00] learned today and keep practicing.
Have you facilitated a process using community accountability tools or strategies? We wanna hear your stories. Creative Interventions and Just Practice Collaborative wanna share new stories from people who are taking action to end interpersonal violence without the use of police or carceral systems. Find the link in our show notes to learn more.
Stories for Power is presented by Creative Interventions and Just Practice Collaborative. Executive produced by Mimi Kim, Shira Hassan, and Rachel Caidor. Produced by Emergence Media. Audio editing and mixing by Joe Namy and iLL Weaver. Music composed by Scale Hands and L05 of Complex Movements in collaboration with Ahya Simone.
Stay tuned for more episodes of the Stories For Power Podcast. Check out our show notes and go to StoriesforPower.org to learn [00:57:00] more.
