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 2000s through 2010, and how their work informed abolitionist transformative justice and community accountability organizing today.
Don’t worry, if any terms or words have you [00:01:00] confused. We’ll 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.
We have a special episode today. We go back to the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s to talk with some of the OGs of this work – Kalei Kanuha, Andrea Ritchie, and Mimi Kim. They are three inspiring abolitionist feminists who talked about the bold experiments and interventions 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 want to hear your stories. Creative Interventions and Just Practice Collaborative want to 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.
A note for our listeners, we will be discussing [00:02:00] 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.
Valli Kalei Kanuha was born and raised in Hilo, Hawaii in the 1950s. She’s the daughter of a Native Hawaiian father and Nisei mother. Dr. Kanuha considers herself an Indigenous critical feminist activist, practitioner, scholar. For the past 46 years, her research and consulting have examined the impact of colonization, racism, heteronormativity and white supremacy on gender violence in Hawaiian Pacific Islander, [00:03:00] LGBTQ, and BIPOC communities.
Her current interests are focused on alternative justice interventions from an abolitionist standpoint. Kalei is a founding member of Incite! a network of radical feminists of color organizing to end state violence and violence in our homes and communities. She currently serves on the board of directors for the Joyful Heart Foundation and API Chaya.
She’s also on the Advisory Committee for the Spirit Aligned Leadership Program, honoring Native and Indigenous women elders in the US and Canada. Dr. Kanuha is a teaching professor and director of the MSW Program at the University of Washington School of Social Work.
Kalei: I am Kalei Kanuha, and I’m old, and so I think I represent the long view. That’s how I talk about my work now, is that in 2025, it’ll be 50 years since I began this work in the movement, which was in [00:04:00] 1975. And so I spent my time now just going back and forth between those early years and they were early. And for those who don’t really remember the roots, particularly about domestic violence organizing, I situate myself in my history and that history and the ways that I’ve learned and changed and grown to being so embedded, uh, immersed in the notion of abolition feminism.
And I also consider myself an Indigenous critical feminist in terms of my work and my commitments is really to my Indigenous community, which is Kānaka ʻŌiwi or Native Hawaiians.
I do wanna say that there’s a lot of, I would say, historical context that really informed my trajectory in terms of my own activism, because I started in the early 1970s. One of the things that’s really important to me is I began this work in Minnesota. For those folks who [00:05:00] don’t know about Minnesota, it really was the roots of the early battered women’s movement, the domestic violence movement was there in Minnesota. So many great, great activists. So the story that I tell is in 1975, I had literally just finished my MSW two weeks before I got a job at a community health center in South Minneapolis. Actually, now the clinic is still there.
I was assigned to go to a meeting on “the battered wife problem,” and I literally didn’t even understand what that could be. So I went to this meeting, I remember so vividly, even though it was so long ago, I, I remember so vividly the various constituents, all of us community people who were getting together – childcare workers, housing advocates, legal aid, counselors. So we were like social work counselors. I mean, it was just kinda a ragtag group of people.
I didn’t know anybody there. And I’ve come of course to know almost everyone, quite closely. And we kind of were talking about [00:06:00] this problem of women, mainly wives, being abused by their husbands. And everybody was talking about the ways in which they were seeing this as more than just a case here and a case there.
I really feel like my head and my heart were just exploding. You know I grew up in the ’50s, in kind of an idyllic time in Hawaii. I am Native Hawaiian. So this was the beginning, and I would say it was a very nacent… but it was really the beginning of a more organized, battered women’s movement in Minnesota.
I’ll just say that I was part of this early group, again, Ellen Pence, who actually got a free house so we could actually set up the Harriet Tubman Shelter in South Minneapolis. We helped literally put up sheet rock for Women’s Advocates, which is considered the first dedicated battered women’s shelter in the United States.
And then as I started to work much more with survivors, none of them wanted their partners really to be arrested. [00:07:00] What was our mantra? We just want the violence to stop. We don’t necessarily want to throw people in prison or jail or have them taken away, or have our children taken away.
So I just never felt very good about this movement. But I think this was the beginning in the 1970s of the carceral standpoint, the roots were then. And so it was driven by white middle class women, a lot of whom were trained in the law. I had a community, you know, of friends and colleagues and sisters and advocates. I felt so alive, and I felt like I had come to a place that really spoke to the values, but I didn’t exactly feel good about our interventions.
So I think over the years, you know, I’ve just come to understand that those things that we set in motion back in the ’70s were driven really by a carceral notion, a carceral standpoint by white racism and white privilege, and the white influence of, uh, feminism at the time. [00:08:00]
And then the other thing I wanna say is that I have now come to know that as a Native Hawaiian growing up in the colonial location of Hawaii, I never felt good about how we were treated in my homeland either, and I never made the connection between a carceral response and colonialism. But as I kind of grew into myself and grew into my understanding what my feminism would mean for me, I understood that really, I came to this very early on as a child, and I think it was rooted in an anti-colonial response. I know that now.
That I never thought that how Hawaiians were treated was right, and that we were always arrested, and we were always surveilled. And that was our homeland. That’s the only place we had. And so I know now that that was something that I think was in me. That’s why I was really interested in the battered women’s movement.
But now I’ve come back to my whole self, which is a more abolitionist stance.[00:09:00]
Deana: Mimi Kim is a second generation Korean American, a daughter of immigrants from a country still divided. She’s a co-founder of Incite! And a co-founder of Creative Interventions, one of the partner organizations of this relaunch of STOP, Stories For Power. She has lived in many of the cities featured in this podcast series, born in Seattle, politically raised in Chicago, a longtime Oakland person, and now living in Los Angeles.
Mimi: Hi, this is Mimi. I take myself back to the late 1980s when I think about my entry into this work, this movement, or these movements. And that’s when I started being more conscious as a woman of color, as a woman of color feminist, and really starting my work collectively and in solidarity with other women of color.
I would say that that started when I was in Madison in a… in a more organized way. When [00:10:00] we formed a women of color group that took over Take Back the Night, that year. Take Back the Night had been very much run by white women previous to that. Many of us had been part of different Take Back the Night marches.
For me, it was in the Midwest to Minneapolis. I still have my t-shirt from that time, and then later when I moved to Madison. But I had not ever been or dreamed of being part of that organizing until I went there and really linked together with people, some of whom I’m actually still in connection with today.
We decided to really occupy that space, claim it as our own, had all those experiences of resistance by white women, feelings of exclusion, tears, and so on. But we held strong. And it was really a formative experience for me. I mean, one, I think to think really, really more in a centered way about my own experiences, the experiences [00:11:00] of Korean women, the experiences of women of color, the experiences of violence, and not making that a side issue, but really a central issue and seeing how much it had impacted my own life and the lives of the women that I was connecting to then. The lives of women in my past and obviously in my future. So that was a really crystallizing moment I think for me.
Later on I went and… I really, really did actually wanna work in the anti-violence movement. After that, I moved to Chicago. This was the late 1980s, and there wasn’t a space for me. I applied for a lot of different jobs, and there were actually no Asian American women in the whole state of Illinois that were working domestic violence or sexual assault. So I think that we weren’t seen as part of the movement. It was every organization at that time was run by white women. And the reason I did get a job was because that was a time which a lot of Southeast Asians were coming into the United States as [00:12:00] refugees. And it was understood very much in the public media that so many women and girls had the experience of sexual assault.
And because of that, one of the programs in Chicago decided to start a special initiative around addressing violence among refugee communities. And that’s how I ended up getting a job as the coordinator of that program. And that started really my work and my passion as somebody that was an anti-violence activist, a feminist activist, an advocate, and somebody who really was fighting to bring women of color and communities of color into a movement that was very, very strongly run by white women still at that time.
During that time, I think I started an organization that’s still around today – KANWIN, Korean American Women in Need. We joined together with other sort of emerging organizations that were run specifically by women of color [00:13:00] within communities of color.
And I think that that started my connection to other people that were part of Incite!, Beth Richie being one of them, who came by as kind of a leader among women of color and somebody that we were very, very excited to see. I think everybody fell in love with her in all the different ways that people fall in love with Beth Richie. So I have to credit her as being an early mentor and a leader for me.
Creative Interventions of course, is sometime after, that’s 2004, and I have a lot of other experiences in between and after, but that marked the beginning for me.
Deana: Andrea Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people for the past three decades.
She has been actively engaged in anti-violence, labor and LGBTQ [00:14:00] organizing and in movements against state violence and for racial, reproductive, economic, environmental, and gender justice in the US, Canada, and internationally since the 1980s.
Andrea is the author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, and co-author of No More Police: A Case For Abolition. She co-founded Interrupting Criminalization and the In Our Names Network. She also led Incite!’s work on law enforcement violence.
Andrea: Hi Deana. I’m Andrea Ritchie.
I came into this work in some ways in the ground that Kalei and Mimi prepared, but particularly thinking about Take Back the Night as something that by the time I came to it, there had already been some sort of confrontation around white leadership and there was, you know, women of color contingents, or I think we were called the Third World Women’s contingent, but so grateful just even for some of the fights I didn’t have to fight [00:15:00] myself because people like Mimi and Kalei fought them ahead of time.
I would say I came into this work with a clear understanding that the cops were not producing safety for, they never had for me or for anyone in my family. At all phases of my life, I was learning and hearing and practicing, creating safety with other people. And so Take Back the Night felt like a collective expression of that, of literally saying, we are taking our community back from the threat of violence and stories that tell us we can’t walk alone late at night. We can’t dress a particular way. We can’t have sex with too many people, or be too obvious about it, or enjoy it, or the sort of basic principles there.
But very much from a place of, you know, in college, thinking about how conversations about sexual assault and violence played out. You know, the cops were the enemies. We were in a battle against them around an anti-apartheid struggle on campus, and they were regularly violent to us, including stories we would [00:16:00] hear about them having pictures of protesters up on their lockers, you know, with some kind of sexual thing. And so it would never occur to us to go to them as a solution or to address violence.
We would keep each other safe at parties and on campus. And the folks who did go to the cops were white women who would claim to be sexually assaulted by some generic Black man that would then lead to, you know, harassment of all young Black men on campus in the town. So I really feel like all of this was very experiential for me.
And when I started working for the National Women’s Movement in Toronto, it was a time when carceral feminism was really on the rise in the early ’90s, and people were, you know, wanting to push for legislation that would make stalking a crime. And I just remember being very uncomfortable with that.
It was around the time that the Rodney King beating and aftermath was in play, and I couldn’t put a name to it or figure out how to get around it. Like, yes, I wanted violence to stop, but turning to the state to do it felt very counterintuitive as we were organizing against state violence. [00:17:00] And then at some point I became part of an advisory committee to the city of Toronto on police responses to sexual assault. And of course as we were doing community listening sessions and interviews, we were hearing about police perpetrating sexual assault, which certainly had been my experience, but I thought that was maybe just an isolated thing that was just about me or that particular moment in time. And figuring out that absolutely not, that was a common practice of policing, really was eye opening.
So for me, at that point, it became about documenting the reasons why we couldn’t rely on the state to address violence and why carceral feminism was not the answer and why we needed something else. But it wasn’t until, well, one, Angela Davis came to Toronto on March 21st, 1999 and laid out the case for abolition.
I just remember being like, oh, we can do that? We can actually kind of have a politic that’s organized around us creating safety for ourselves and not turning to a violent state? Oh, okay. Great! Sign me up. You know, that was kind of the beginning. And then I came to New York and [00:18:00] fortunately stumbled in and was invited into conversations that Incite! was hosting and facilitating. And so I remember my first meeting at Sista II Sista, I think that’s the day we met Mimi, in 2002, where there was a bunch of people talking about all the ways that people responded to violence in community without policing, and it was just a brainstorm of that. That was kind of the beginning of being part of documenting and kind of connecting folks, engaged in non-police responses to violence.
Deana: I appreciate all of the connections you’re making here. What were some of the other contexts in your cities or communities that helped kick off your different projects? . .
Mimi: I’ve lived in different cities over the past decades. My early beginning was in Chicago. Chicago is a really important place, I think, for the development of abolition and abolitionist feminism.
So I think it’s no surprise that I would’ve learned so much during that time. [00:19:00] Some of what was also happening in Chicago was, I was just sort of entering the anti-rape, rape victim services, as they called it program, was that I was also in solidarity with anti-imperialist Korean solidarity networks and really was also rooted in an anti-imperialist feminism that was, in many ways, separated from, and at odds with some of the work that I was doing.
I think I held it together, but it became, I think, increasingly clear that some of the ways in which we relied on the police, that was already happening in the anti-rape movement as I had entered in the late 1980s. I would say that the organization I was part of and the ways in which we addressed violence, which was much more probably rooted in a kind of a feminist therapeutic kind of background, we did work with the police. A lot of people did go to the police. We [00:20:00] weren’t explicitly anti-police at that time, but we certainly did not formulate strong ties with policing and knew that so many people that were survivors of sexual violence did not go to the police, nor would we in any way urge them to do so.
We did not see it as a strategy that was helpful in so many cases and was harmful in so many more. But we are also in a position where if somebody chose to do that, we were also not going to tell them not to. I think this is not unlike positions a lot of us hold today.
But I also was very anti-military in my understanding and experience of how I and my family were in the United States because of Western imperialism, because of US imperialism. That was very clear to me. That was very clear in my solidarity networks, in my learning about the history of US military occupation of South Korea and continued aggression against [00:21:00] North Korea. I’m somebody who’s from both North Korea and South Korea. I don’t have relationship with many of my relatives in North Korea for obvious reasons.
And it was always at odds with the work that I was doing in the anti-violence movement that was more rooted in the United States, that I think what my trajectory towards Incite! and abolitionist feminism was based upon my yearning for alignment, my discomfort and my need to always do kind of a disassociation between my life as a US-based anti-violence feminist, but also my experience and my life as somebody who was so profoundly impacted and so negatively impacted by US imperialism and military presence in Korea. And that I think that all of those alignments and understandings and comings together led me towards this yearning for what would become Incite!.[00:22:00]
I was around and I was doing the work in 1994 when the Violence Against Women Act was passed. That had really profound impact on me as well. It became so clear that we had passed that bill on the tails of the Crime Bill of 1994, something that actually wasn’t aware of as people were organizing to pass that bill. And when I discovered the kind of collaboration we had done with, we, I didn’t call it carceral at the time, but with the prison system, with policing, it was untenable. I was appalled. And what I was really, really surprised by was the lack of concern among anti-violence feminists that we had done that. There was such a silence around that.
And this is when I was living in San Francisco. There was… I only had a couple people in my world as an anti-violence worker and advocate activist, who I got together with. And we were [00:23:00] really wondering what we could do about it. And we were all very, very disturbed by the lack of activism and outrage by other people that were part of our movement.
So I would say that that was a kind of a shock to the system, but one that was aligned with my discomfort that had been leading up to that time. I think if we look back at it, I do wonder how much that prompted and provoked what would become Incite!, but also Critical Resistance was very much tapping into, and that conference happened in 1998, 2 years before our Incite! Conference of 2000.
Andrea: The sort of common element to the projects or things that I’ve been a supporter of more than sort of leading, or a connector between, has always been the violence of policing. And not just the violence of policing in response to anti-apartheid organizers, it was the violence [00:24:00] of policing that upheld the apartheid state that was very much… kind of shaped my politics, and therefore couldn’t imagine turning to that for safety in any country, right.
So for me, like Mimi’s saying, like arriving in a place like Incite! allowed me to align that. Hearing Angela Davis articulate the analysis that formed the basis for Critical Resistance, and then was that moment where I was like, oh, finally! I can stop wondering why we’re doing this when I know that, or why we’re trying to fix the Toronto police when they’re raping people, including when they’re calling for help about being raped, and also setting people up to be raped by serial rapists, which is exactly the situation that we say we need cops for.
You know, like it literally was too much cognitive dissonance. And I think hearing that something that aligned those two things and helped me understand, you know, the role of the state in the spectrum of gender-based violence and then coming to an Incite! meeting and yeah, literally I think bursting into tears because I had felt this was the first time I could be my whole self in a room and not be [00:25:00] struggling with the things that Mimi was saying.
But also the projects, you know, that I had the chance to support or be involved in in New York City – Sista II Sista, SOS I was part of on an ongoing basis, The Safe Outside the System collective that you heard from Ejeris Dixon about and connecting folks to Kai around Harm-Free Zones as part of the Incite! campaign to end law enforcement violence against women and trans people of color.
In each of those instances, the thing that kind of kicked off those projects was an instance of police violence, and an instance of police failure to protect people from violence. So the campaign that Sista II Sista had started around sexual violence by cops and to build Sistas Liberated Ground, a community-based response to violence in part, was sparked by two things. One, one of their member’s sister was killed by an off-duty cop and that they were experiencing sexual harassment by cops. So they were like, we need to build something else. Safe [00:26:00] Outside the System, same, you know, two people I know were being attacked by people in the neighborhood, and when they went into a Crown Fried Chicken seeking safety, they didn’t find it there.
So they decided they needed to figure out a way to create safe spaces in the community that people could go to when they were experiencing homophobic and transphobic violence. And at the same time, the cops were perpetrating homophobic and transphobic violence. So that’s why Safe Outside the System started to address both of those things.
The same for Harm-Free Zone. That started because the cops raided a fundraiser that Critical Resistance East was doing. And people responded by thinking, how do we shut down that precinct and then do the things the precinct is supposed to be doing in that neighborhood, which is allegedly creating safety.
So for me, the starting point has always been a recognition of the violence of the state and its failure to produce safety for women and trans people of color. And so that’s part of why I focus so much on [00:27:00] documenting particularly police and state violence against women and trans people of color to help make that case, ’cause it starts people thinking about, well then what else?
Kalei: The other thing that was important in the early years of our organizing were women of color caucuses. You know, we had all these caucuses that would happen at these national gatherings. These were the places in the early ’70s where all of us from around the country would gather.
But it was very clear early on that it was really driven by, planned by, presenters were all primarily white women, across actually, social classes. But we decided that we really needed to have a place for, well, we said, you know, it was a lesbian caucus then, or we would have, always a women of color caucus.
And what we talked about in those early years was racism. So racism in the movement and the lack of inclusivity, we didn’t use that word either, but a lack of a place at the table for all of us who were women of color doing on the ground work. I think that was [00:28:00] also a movement towards a more activist agenda that was intersectional, that has been maintained over time.
When I think Mimi, about the early roots of Incite!, it probably was in those caucuses, you know, and subgroups and these ways that, especially women of color, lesbians, survivors. I mean, think that survivors had to have their own caucus because there was no voice actually. At a point in time, the movement became so professionalized that there wasn’t even a voice and a care for the safety and the integrity and the lived experience of survivors.
And so I think those were the early roots. And then the other thing I just really wanna credit for my own development was the HIV AIDS movement. Because for me it was being with gay men of color, and, you know, every week having my brothers and sisters, every week, sometimes every day, at a point in time, someone was dying [00:29:00] that I was working with. And these were coworkers. And we were doing AIDS work in the community, but every week we would go to a funeral of one of our staff people.
And it was the tremendous courage, radical craziness, the integrity, the creativity, the artistry of these beautiful and powerful gay men of color, and I was in New York at the time working at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, that really, really inspired me. You know, I remember one big confrontation that all of the people of color, primarily led by gay men of color, most of them, people living with AIDS, this big confrontation we had at some restaurant in Manhattan, basically confronting Roger McFarlane and Larry Kramer. I marked them as really some of the early founders of ACT UP, and we were yelling up on tables and screaming at each other about how the movement [00:30:00] was being co-opted by white, gay, middle class men.
And it was that depth and dynamism of advocacy and activism and mobilization that kind of inspired me to think like all the things I kind of didn’t like about the anti-violence movement, I thought, how come we aren’t doing things like that? Like jumping up on tables and saying, what about us? And that is part of the reason I think that I also made a big turn is the inspiration of these just beautiful, powerful friends that I made in the movement, and knowing that we just couldn’t wait anymore, right? So it was the immediacy and the crisis nature of AIDS and the deaths every single day that made me feel that we don’t have time to wait and be nice and to talk nice.
I feel like that kind of set me on a big trajectory towards confronting the structural [00:31:00] kinds of things that were standing in the way of us ending gender-based violence and all form of oppression from an intersectional perspective. And I know that that’s what made me feel so excited about the notion of Critical Resistance and Incite!.
Deana: Each of you has made a point to talk about a number of different connections across the country, different projects, organizations, so on and so forth. One of the main connectors, of course, is in Incite!.
I’d love to hear more. What was the work of Incite!?
Mimi: I think a lot of the beginnings of Incite! Started from some of the people that were in Chicago. ‘Cause if you think about it, Beth Richie at that time was in Chicago. Some of us had really developed networks of solidarity through our women of color organizing that had been going on for quite a while, at least since the late 1980s. And [00:32:00] Incite! didn’t start until 2000. I think what the sort of legacy, and going back to historical roots is really important in that we see that relationships were built at early years. Sometimes they don’t create formations until a decade later, two decades later. And these kinds of political connections are really important.
Everybody’s gonna remember it in a slightly different way. Everybody’s entry point is different. But when I think about some of the people that I think were pretty instrumental in keeping those ties together, but actually mobilizing them in such a way that we did start an organization called Incite!, where we did have a gathering that was more than Incite!.
That gathering brought in energies from, I think almost a thousand primarily people who identified as women of color from all over the country, from across national borders. And [00:33:00] I think tapped into a yearning that people had for a kind of framework around oppression and inclusion of state violence as a central form of violence that was oppressing our communities. I mean, oppression is a word that… I mean literally killing our communities and still killing our communities.
And that was so not a part of our anti-violence organizing when we were in white dominated formations or formations, even among women of color that were so influenced by the kind of depoliticization that was happening within the US movements. You know, “you don’t talk about that.” “We can’t afford to lose our ties with the police. We rely on them.” “This is a profession.” All of those kinds of tendencies that we even still have today. It was a direct counter against those tendencies. It was a direct appeal to the really vari… variation of histories that we had.
And I think what happened in that conference [00:34:00] beyond the beginning of a formation that so many of us are part of is a coming together of those energies and acknowledgement and centering of these frameworks sometimes that were in tension with each other, but had so much alignment and so much alignment with the Critical Resistance movement that many of us were actually had been part of or had attended.
I was very influenced by that gathering that had happened two years prior. And what I really also remember so much about it is that it was not this, “well, we’re gonna have a panel that has a Black person, an Asian person, a Native American person, and a Latina.” That was so much the kind of ways in which, you know, the sort of multicultural inclusion, diversity model of the United States has produced.
We had people that were representing across Palestine… you just couldn’t define sort of the racial categories in the same way we had been used to. It was incredibly [00:35:00] powerful. I think the bringing together of different experiences and issues across the different ways in which people had experienced colonization, imperial violence, occupation, and so on, was so palpable across all of the different sessions and in the keynotes that I think so many of us knew something was different. And not only something was different, but something would always be different because of that.
It wasn’t something that was just among 15 people in a room, or you getting together after another conference that you were so disappointed with that, and you were gonna have something on the side. This was something that was front and centered that involved hundreds of people, the ones that could even make it. We had to turn people away, that reached a thousand people. That turned into the next conference that was in Chicago and the next one that was in New Orleans and continued, and there was still a hunger for that.
I think that the impact of that, yes, we call it Incite!, The [00:36:00] organization of Incite! Has been important, but I think it’s the influence of what Incite! represented that is really profound and goes beyond. I think what I like about Incite! Is that we did not wanna be a centered nonprofit organization. That we didn’t take that route. We purposely did not take that route. Did we have contention over that? Yes. That was some of what we argued about in early meetings. But we wanted something different, and we wanted something that wasn’t going to get entrapped into the kind of industrial complex that so many of us had been part of.
We knew that we couldn’t do that. That this called for something that would go beyond any kind of formation, and that we also didn’t wanna control and police the way that was gonna happen. And I think that’s part of what has allowed this to be a force that has mobilized so many people whether they came to a conference or not. They might have heard about Incite! through a poster. At that time, [00:37:00] we didn’t have webinars, you know? Through a… a meeting, through a conference, through a gathering, through a chapter. I think there were so many ways in which people felt moved by, touched by, and really a part of what Incite! was and had become.
Kalei: The beginning for me of my involvement and Incite! was going to that conference and doing a couple of presentations, and then a group of us were invited to stay after the conference and meet and we did for two days.
I would say Incite! changed my life forever. I had many different change moments, but Incite! and that first conference and that first meeting changed every way that I think/ It was just inspiring and loving and really wonderful. And you know what? There was a lot of tension. We had a lot of fights and a lot of arguments, but all towards a cause that I believed in.
I don’t consider Incite! an organization. I always thought of it as a promise – [00:38:00] an organizing force, an organizing set of potentials. It had to me more to do with the values and principles and the practices that we could envision for ourselves in terms of activism. Not only, I think, was there a lot of pushback about there being kind of an organizational structure. I think we actively avoided it because we really wanted this to be a structure, an idea, a notion, a set of promises, a world that we could envision that was local and global.
The thing that I loved about Incite! was that anybody could do Incite!, anybody could be Incite! That was excitement about a world that we could envision to be different than the kinds of carceral responses that most of us had gotten tired of and angry about.
Andrea: I really appreciate the piece that Kalei [00:39:00] just said about it being a promise or a politic, and a network and a practice. All of those things. And that all of those things were incredibly inspiring to me who, at that point, by the time Incite!’s conference had happened, I had been documenting police violence against Black women and queer people for two or three years and didn’t know of anybody else who was doing it, and thought that was very odd that some random chick from Toronto would be doing that.
And so when I saw the call for the conference in 2000 where the violence of policing against women of color was on the agenda, it was a promise. It was a promise that we could talk about both of those things. That there could be a politic that could hold all of the things I cared about and think about how to address them all simultaneously and their interrelationships, and do that in a trans-local way, on a networked way, and a transnational way.
And also as someone who was coming from Canada with connections to the global South [00:40:00] and had been involved in the anti-apartheid movement, I was like, oh, thank god. It’s not like every other American organization. I just moved to the US and was like, these people don’t look beyond their borders, ever. Like they don’t watch the news. And obviously I’m throwing a very broad stroke over a very home.. heterogeneous population that many of whom do pay attention to global struggle and solidarity. But I didn’t make it to that first conference, and so I made it my business to get to the second one to present a workshop on police violence against Black women and women of color with my sistren from Toronto.
And I remember Beth and others being in the room and being like, this is the work that we’re doing. Come on in. And you know, that’s also not a common thing. Like how am I all of a sudden still the same random chick from Toronto on a phone with Beth Richie talking about what a project could look like that would flesh out what police violence looks like when it’s experienced by women and queer people [00:41:00] of color, and how do we integrate that as part of this larger struggle against gender-based violence?
It was amazing. Incite! was, to my knowledge, the first formation since the Civil Rights Movement to create a national conversation about law enforcement violence against women and trans people of color. And to create a toolkit around it that brought together and networked all the work that was happening invisibly around the country that wasn’t even visible to each other. And to be able to have people be in a conversation together, trans locally about what that looked like in different communities and why that also required us to build community-based responses to violence that didn’t involve the police.
And I feel like that was one of those things that you do that you just don’t know what you’re tilling the soil for. You don’t know what you’re sowing seeds for. You don’t know how 10 years later there’s gonna be, Say Her Name, 15 years later, there’s gonna be a movement that really is picking up what was laid down at that moment. [00:42:00]
Deana: I think the metaphor about sowing seeds and letting them grow is so beautiful. So now along the same lines, what are some success stories that stick out to you?
Kalei: Well, I would say Mimi and I have just recently been talking about this, that we can’t exactly remember the actual dates that we started this, but it was growing out of the notion of community accountability. Wherever I went, if I was at a meeting or a conference, I would basically say, “does anybody have a story to tell about a time that you intervened in a situation of sexual assault or domestic violence where you didn’t actually go to a shelter or you didn’t call the police?”
I just wanted to know what people did. So it was actually genuine curiosity about all the different strategies. And the kinds of stories that people told were not only moving and inspiring, they were a little scary. And then I also got a fellowship, so I went to Alaska [00:43:00] and then also met with Aboriginal groups in Australia.
And I did the same thing I just said, “can you tell us stories about what you all did when you’re in the Yukon? And you can’t exactly call the police. What do people do?” So I heard so many, again, inspiring stories about what families and communities and groups of elders would do to address gender violence in their communities.
And again, some of them were a little scary. But it was really like, “this is what we would do in our community. This is what we believe is the right solution.” And some of them were right solutions for them, and those families and those communities and the context and the historical context in which they were living and surviving.
But all of it was, can we just document that people do a lot of things. Because part of, I think the assumption in the industrialization of our work is that nobody does anything. They don’t even call the police. They don’t even go to [00:44:00] shelters. Instead of saying, everybody does something before or instead of, and so it was this kind of disempowering notion of how everyday people try to address this problem.
And so I was very inspired by that. I went back home to Hawaii after living in America for almost 25 years, I went back home. And what I was inspired to do is to think about what we could do in Hawaiian communities, that used Hawaiian culture and used Hawaiian traditions and used our own ways. Again, thinking back pre-colonial, we had these problems.
Actually, that’s one of the things I did, and I commissioned a study of Native Hawaiian stories pre-contact to find out that the idea like, oh, Hawaiians didn’t have domestic violence or, or family violence until white people came. And I kind of thought like, is that really possible that we never happened at all?
Of course it did happen, but it was what was done to resolve [00:45:00] those problems, ’cause there wasn’t a police state. You don’t call the police or sheriff or anything like that. So it was in the context of that, that I started to understand that maybe there are some things that people are already doing in Hawaiian communities instead of calling the police because we know that the police are not our friends.
But the other thing is, were there things that people were doing that reflected old Hawaiian traditions, cultural traditions? That was very hard to uncover. So I worked with a local domestic violence program for about two years to kind of just see, could we do something that incorporated Hawaiian values and traditions and practices.
So basically the short story is we took two years, we had Hawaiian elders who worked with us. So we ended up doing a Hawaiian cultural intervention that was in the carceral model. So, uh, Hawaiian men who are court mandated to a batterer intervention program. To me, I consider this mainly a success of the heart and the spirit because there were many, [00:46:00] many problems designing and actually carrying out this intervention.
But what I saw in the stories, we did probably over 200 interviews with the participants in this intervention. Everybody was changed by dealing with their behavior in the context of culture. And understanding that there are ways that you make amends for hurting and harming your family and your community.
The way the approach was grounded was that Hawaiians don’t throw people away. We care for each other. We express different ways of going back to culture. Learning about the ways we used to be that we could be that way again. I would call it an island of joy and hope and accountability of care, a sense of a future of being back to our Hawaiian ways.
I wouldn’t say exactly a success story because it was very difficult to maintain. It’s not actually being done anymore right now, but the potential, so this is where we [00:47:00] come back to, you know, what Incite!, uh, gave me, which is the notion that no matter what, we keep on a path and the path is towards liberation and justice that’s grounded not in punishment, but in hope and in love and in caring for the best of what we want our people to be.
But I think maybe I believe that from when I was a child. And this is where I say again, coming full circle back to my whole self, is I believe that this is what we all want for our people. And when you’re more of your whole self and grounded in a place that touches you very deeply spiritually, I think it’s very hard to be abusive when you are in those places and spaces.
So I still hold out an ideal that that is possible for all of us. And so I consider it a success because it was a possibility and a practice. But we never did it for anybody else but our own communities. It was never meant to be disseminated. We didn’t care about what anybody else was doing. This was for us, you know, to heal us and to help us find [00:48:00] a different way of life and being for ourselves.
You know, one of the things that we kind of devised in the first session, we would say, “you have to be here not for the judge, and not for the probation officer, and not because you were arrested. But you must do this for your ancestors.” And then we said, “your ancestors saw what you did. and your ancestors watched what happened. What do you think they felt?” And we began our groups this way and it just kind of blew up all these kind of notions that you’re forced to be here and you know, you wanna make sure you don’t get arrested again. And the judge is gonna throw you in jail if you don’t graduate. And you know, this was the beginning of this transformation of a community of care and accountability to yourself in relationship to your history and your culture.
And when we would start that way, instead of, you know, I mean, anybody who’s done groups with those who harm know that it’s [00:49:00] very difficult to start because there’s just so much defensiveness. But that defensiveness is built in by the system, and the carceral coercive system that is intended to punish you. And everybody’s surprised that there’s defensiveness. But what else is there gonna be? And so one of the things when we started that way, all the participants, the first thing they would do is they’d put their head down. Half of them would start crying, and they would say, “my ancestors were ashamed. They expected more of me. They’re sad. They cried for my partner that I hurt. They cried for me. They thought about my family and what my family would’ve thought and think now about me that I did this.” It was totally like they kind of forgot that they were there because the judge told ’em to be there. And that became the guiding force for their participation is that they’re here for their relatives and they’re here for their future, all the children who will come after them. [00:50:00]
And that was this whole notion that nobody cared anymore about the probation officers or the judge or anybody else. What they cared about is what was gonna happen with their families every day that they left those groups and their communities after they were all done. And you know, it wasn’t that idealistic, you know. Some actually re-offended during the groups, but it was the way they engaged about relationship.
So not only for those who are in situations of harm, but all of us. We sustained this work and people say, “50 years, how could you do that terrible work?” And I said, “because of my relationships, because of Andrea and Mimi and Beth, and so many hundreds of us who have been here for the long haul.” And that’s because we all, I think, have this notion of hope and belief. And we actually have a little rage in us too. You gotta have a little bit of that too, right?
And that is what I hope that people will take away, is that this work is about both hope [00:51:00] and rage in some ways. It’s about activism and activation, but it’s also in the hope and towards liberation and justice. If you always remember, it’s not about punishment. It’s about liberation and justice. Then we’re gonna be on the right path, and I think that’s how we can also sustain ourselves.
Mimi: One of the things that I know that I was really concerned about and I think drew me to what we now call community accountability or transformative justice work was the amount of violence that was happening within progressive radical formations of color. And sadly that are still happening today. And the poor way in which we are addressing it either by doing the same things everybody does, like ignoring it, pretending it’s not happening, victim blaming, saying that that’s not important ’cause we have more important political work to do, covering for people who were abusive because they are powerful or are seen as [00:52:00] important in our movements. All the things that sadly, again, that we see today.
But some of us got together a little bit undercover because I think a lot of us were dealing with situations of violence that were happening in organizations. It wasn’t something we wanted to put out publicly. And we didn’t have the kind of social media ways in which we could disseminate information the same way we do now. And people were really concerned. People were really struggling to think about how to address things that were interpersonal harms, domestic violence, sexual violence, to figure out how to do that without destroying the organization, without calling the police, without just doing nothing which was really a lot of what was happening.
So that was the early start of actually some of my connections with people like Alisa Bierria who was one of the people that had already been doing this work in CARA in Seattle. I mean, they started in 1999. And so we had a gathering and pulled together some people over a couple of days in [00:53:00] 2004, and we came up with some earlier documentation, I think, of some of the frameworks that informed and were already informed by the anti-policing work we were doing, that CARA had been doing, to see how we could really… I think we called it Making Demands of the Movement at the time, but really documenting and calling out our movement for being so, really patriarchal in our handling of uh gender-based violence. And that includes violence that would happen against male identified people. I had to kind of dig it up. It’s still available on the Incite! Website to look at even what we had called it, which was Community Accountability Within the People of Color Progressive Movement.
And I think for me it was some of the early work of looking to see if we could think of frameworks and models. I love documentation and I love a toolkit so I know that it [00:54:00] was informing some of the work that we would develop a little bit more in Creative Interventions, which I and some other people started in 2004 in the Bay Area.
We wanted to have a space where people could talk a little bit more freely about things that had happened in organizational settings that they might not have otherwise wanted to share. It was a very confidential space, and I think we came up with some important lessons. So I would call that for me was an early success.
Andrea: So much of what Mimi and Kalei have named is the success for me, which is that people are thinking about these, and practicing ways of being in relationship that not only intervene in violence or promote healing and accountability afterwards, but prevent it. And are about shifting the way we are with ourselves and each other.
And so each of the kind of practices or iterations of projects that attempted to do that were successes, whether it was [00:55:00] Sista II Sista or Safe Outside the System, or Harm-Free Zones, which there were many iterations over time in many different geographic locations. I also wanna name the StoryTelling & Organizing Project version one as a success story because we would do workshops and play them the stories that were gathered and it would just open up people’s ideas. And this 5,000 page toolkit that people turn to today that Creative Interventions put out. Fumbling Towards Repair, Creative Interventions workbook, all the tools that help people find their way to what that is for themselves, I think are success stories.
And also just relationships. I’ve been in relationship with most of the people on this call through Incite! or other processes of thinking through responses to violence without violence for over 20 years in different formations. But you’re always the first people I call when I have a question or I’m trying to figure something out, or when there’s an uprising and people are saying, well, we really [00:56:00] need to move towards abolition and build community-based safety strategies. Now I’m in a work relationship with all of you around helping shape what that looks like.
And I think there were times when I would just have a regular monthly call with Ejeris Dixon of Safe Outside the System, Morgan Bassichis of Community United Against Violence in the Bay Area, that was a organization working to build safety for queer and trans people beyond policing, and Shira from Young Women’s Empowerment Project.
And we would just talk about things that were coming up in the organizations and organizing we were part of and how we would address it in ways that aligned with our values and our vision and the promise of Incite!’s politics and CR’s politics. And those relationships continue. I still get stumped by something and still call one or all of you on the phone.
And so I think those relationships and what I’m coming to understand is communities of practice and the networks that those build and the relationships between those networks are I think what really can help us shift towards new ways of being in the way that [00:57:00] Kalei described. And so for me, that’s the success story, is the fabric we’ve been weaving, the soil we’ve been tilling, the seeds we’ve been sowing, the relationships we’ve been building, and the communities of practice that we’ve been strengthening. And then the ways in which that is able to shift things in the world.
Can I say one more success story, which I think is the CR Incite! Statement, the Critical Resistance Incite! Statement on Gender Violence in the Prison Industrial Complex. Because I was thinking about the community accountability task force that the folks were referring to earlier, and I was on that, even though I wasn’t directly engaged in the work of Creative Interventions or community accountability work because I understood that if I was gonna lead the work on law enforcement violence, I had to be able to be connected to this work also, because always the first question we had was, “okay, fine, not police, but then what?”
I had to be able to point people to work that folks were already doing, and in the process learned about it and learned about my role in practicing that myself in my life. But I think [00:58:00] it’s produced what we now see in the movement to defund and abolish police is that people understand that their responsibility is not just to challenge the violence of the state, but to practice the world we want and to manifest the ways that we believe that violence can be reduced and ultimately ended.
And I remember in 2005, during Katrina, it was kind of a watershed moment ’cause Critical Resistance and Incite! had to figure out how to put that statement in practice ’cause Critical Resistance was saying “let everybody out of the prisons and jails that the state left people to drown in the hurricane, because it’s injust for them to be there and we should use this as an opportunity to massively decarcerate.” And Incite! was like, “yes, and what’s the safety plan for folks who those folks may have harmed? How do we catch the people who did harm and the people who were harmed by the people who were incarcerated, and make sure that everyone is in a different process than the one from the state?”
And so I see that now in movements to defund and divest from policing the responsibility to think about what it is that [00:59:00] we’re investing in that’s gonna reduce gender-based and other forms of violence, that those two things go hand in hand. And so it, that’s why many of us are engaged in that work, in this current context now because the success of marrying those two things or helping people understand those two things are inseparable. They’re the same struggle.
Deana: Yeah. This is really important information that not a lot of people have access to. So thinking about that, what do you want organizers who are coming into this work to know?
Kalei: Well, I would say a couple things. One is, know your history. So part of it is situating something that seems new on something that’s maybe a reconceptualization of something that was old. I think just knowing your history I think helps. Part of it’s, I think, is a cultural thing for me is knowing your elders, and respecting the work of your elders in the context in which they worked and honoring them I think is really important.
The second thing is, to do cross [01:00:00] issue organizing. This work is situated within immigrant rights, environmental justice, disability justice, looking at police violence and how that’s so closely aligned and intertwined with intimate violence. Grab for those opportunities whenever you can and intentionally try to build them in.
Andrea: I want them to look for where the work came from. I want them to listen to this podcast. I want them to read everything that Mimi and Kalei and Beth Richie and Nadine Naber and Paula Rojas, and many other folks, including kai, who was part of Incite!, have written, and organized towards over the years.
Because I think it’s really informative and, and helpful to this moment. I think sometimes people read things like The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex and don’t understand that it came out of anti-violence organizing led by women and trans people of color.
Sometimes people decontextualize organizing for community accountability and transformative justice from the radical roots it came from. [01:01:00] So I really want folks to learn more, and I think to not do what I did, which is be like, “well, my responsibility is to end state violence or to highlight the violence of the state, and some other more visionary, smarter person should be responsible for figuring out what we’re doing instead.” And recognizing that both of those things require each other and we need to be in that struggle together. So it’s not like delegating, ’cause that’s what policing is. It’s delegating responsibility for safety to someone else. And we can’t be doing that in our movements as well.
Mimi: I think I’m in a lot of intergenerational spaces now, so I just wanna start that by saying how inspired I am by some of the younger people, people that are emerging doing this work. Because when I see some of their successes in taking a very long and clunky toolkit, but applying some of those practices in such beautiful and powerful ways, [01:02:00] I am just really heartened by that.
And I learn something from other people or just had a conversation just two days ago that I was really blown away by the kind of powerful work they were doing that I don’t know that I could do myself. So I think that this wisdom has to really be seen as very, very woven together in intergenerational…
I do think that documentation is important and documentation in a world that’s less patient about reading something that might be long or listening to a longer story. I’m afraid of this kind of momentum and it’s capitalist based, y’all. It is. Is capitalist based, this kind of thing that we have to do something very quick. We have to jam things together.
It is gonna lead to fragmentary thinking and fragmentary learning that is actually not going to be enough to stop the forces of oppression that are building those types of technologies and are making [01:03:00] money off of them.
This kind of long-term relationship and evolution of our work is really important. Some of this is built over time. In one way, I think we have to never be impressed by our successes because we all know that they can be undermined in a rapid fire time, but we also have to take opportunities. And we have to take opportunities and know that we can make some kind of advance during that time and an advance that we have to hang onto and build from, even as that advance is being taken away.
I’m sure there’s some kind of a nature metaphor to describe it, but I think this is a long haul project that we have. It’s long haul in times that are pretty scary in terms of the imminent kinds of disasters that are always befalling us, and yet it is long-term work.
Deana: Thanks to the amazing organizers who kicked off this work and who are making this world a [01:04:00] better place for all of us every single day. As always, I encourage you to take the lessons you learned today and keep practicing.
Have you facilitated a process using community accountability tools or strategies? We want to hear your stories. Creative Interventions and Just Practice Collaborative want to 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 [01:05:00] more.
