I really appreciated this -- I have been on both sides of these perspectives. I think if I had read this ten years ago I would have angrily dismissed it. Now I can fully appreciate where you're coming from. Working on DSA-LA's conflict engagement team helped me grow into this perspective. It gave me a lot of insight into what can be possible and what kinds of behaviors/ cultures negatively impact organizing. I really feel you because your insights must be hard won.
This was really moving. I also think fear of making mistakes keeps people from being involved at all. If our movement spaces worked harder to be direct, and do a community call-in rather than a public call out (referencing a whats up y’all video from Sonya Renee Taylor here) we’d be so much closer to the reality we want to see. We really need imperfect participation from everyone.
I agree with your other points, but I think the one under the title about punishment is dangerously naive. In my experience, the most common reason for people in movement spaces to "shun" another is that that person, usually but certainly not always a man, is known or rumored to have sexually assaulted and/or engaged in partner violence against multiple other people, most often young women or queer folks. That's probably still not the majority of cases where people decide to avoid someone, but many if not most other cases are some variety of a pervasive pattern of destructive behavior. If the person being shunned has been in groups with an abolitionist orientation, they were almost certainly asked to participate in a transformative justice process and either responded with DARVO or, less often, made a show of change that seemed more in-line with a habitual pattern of manipulation than a genuine transformation attempt while repeating the same actions.
If one of our driving principles is "we keep us safe", and the person harming our community members refuses to attempt to change and even attacks and counter-organizes against those asking them to, warning others about them is pretty much the only option left to us. It's unfair to categorize this as "punishment" rather than a natural consequence by a self-organizing community that cares about its members' safety.
(I put "shun" in scarequotes originally, because it's almost never the case that this person has been driven out of the local movement scene entirely. They might choose to bounce to a disconnected scene for their own comfort or access to victims, but people do pick sides, like in your first point, so all of our big community celebrations and protests still have known abusers, and it's still most often the people they harmed who get driven out of spaces de facto as a result.)
As for the cases that do seem excessive and punitive, targeting someone who made an honest mistake due to their socialization, who wants to change and is capable of it on a workable timeline, IMO that's most often actually a result of lack of discernment in who we should allow as close comrades. I'm sure there are cases where it's just collective groupthink among people who were socialized to think in punitive terms, but most often the charge is led by an identifiable individual who themself has been giving off all kinds of red flags that they may engage in unwarranted social aggression and/or instigate others to do so. Of course early intervention could be sufficient in many of these cases--talk to that person and let them know that that's not how we do things around here, but we are willing to listen when they just need to blow off steam--but some people are present for malicious reasons in the first place, and many others cannot control the behaviors and the internal psychological dynamics leading them to act out without a long transformative process requiring time and support beyond what the movement group can provide. Part of acting on our values means being able to recognize these situations, accept our limitations, and let people know when we can't keep organizing with them (and sometimes that also means completely avoiding them in social contexts for members' safety!).
We are doing our best to be part of a broader cultural movement that will let harm-doers know that they absolutely can change and don't need to get stuck in shame--but part of that has to be grounded in the understanding that people who have been harmed or fear being harmed by someone absolutely have the right to set boundaries, even when those boundaries feel like punishment. We need to cultivate many, many alternate sources of support and community for harm-doers so the choice isn't between continuing to extract from those they harmed and leaving them without a way to get their basic social and emotional needs met. The cycle of harm is not caused by shame that someone might rightfully feel when others draw attention to their harmful actions, but it often is driven by fear of that shame, which drives people to any lengths necessary to hold that shame at bay instead of learning to sit with it, transform it, and let it transform them. Acting like community practices that might provoke shame are the problem rather than the harm-doer's inability to process their shame just reinforces a cultural environment that promotes avoidance rather than courage in engaging with one's own shame.
Asking movement groups to try to be a long-term rehabilitation space for anyone who shows up amongst them while also sticking to their core mission and also controlling the damage? That has an extensive track record of not working. In fact, many of the group implosions you're talking about have been caused by all or a faction of the group trying to keep someone involved when it's just not viable. It's always going to be difficult to handle situations with people who are not willing and able to participate in generative conflict, but we can't keep pretending that everyone who's doing harm in our communities is on the verge of positive transformation if we just give them another chance. We need to understand that organizing in a context of severe oppressive structures requires high trust among people who are not perfect but at least able to grow relatively quickly to the point of being good enough. If enough people work at it, there will be groups with roles and social environments that are a good fit for any given person, but sometimes people need to be disallowed from certain spaces to keep community members and/or the movement work safe.
You're putting a lot of words into my mouth that I didn't say. You may not have experienced or seen the shunning that happens, but I absolutely have and so have many of my comrades. And it is not "dangerously naive" to talk about carceral behaviors within abolitionist spaces - I think it's dangerously naive to believe it's something we don't need to address. Many people pushed out and punished aren't abusers - in fact, many abusers remain protected because they know how to work carceral spaces. But I've seen time and time again people pushed out and punished because of power struggles, personality differences, non-abusive disputes, and personal relationship ruptures that are brought into movement spaces. And often then, the transformative justice process you speak is isn't offered, or what is offered is a social trial by jury disguised as transformative justice with no actual transformative goal.
This piece isn't a "this is what happens every time with every group" piece. It seems you have very specific situations in your mind this doesn't apply to - ok. There will be many. This piece is identifying patterns I see when things go wrong.
I appreciate your reply and I understand that an article can't clarify every possible interpretation of what you're talking about, but I'm frustrated because many newly activated abolitionists are reading vague yet absolute-sounding things like what you wrote and then trying to apply them to situations where they really do need to be asking someone to leave the group. People will be scared to even bring up a serious problem out of fear of being perceived as oppressors based on what they imagine shared abolitionist values are. Or they may actually get significant backlash for efforts to keep themselves or others safe. And I stand by what I said that many of the cases of shunning people for bad reasons are caused by lack of discernment of who to push out of a space—exactly those people who "know how to work" the space, but they can work people who are trying to act on anti-carceral values just as easily as they can work any other values system. Values don't protect you from manipulation. They'll just figure out whatever it is they have to say to get the reaction they want.
I suspect that many of the abolitionists acting punitively, seemingly against their values, have been psychologically manipulated into doing so—by someone who will effectively use the argument that *they* are being treated punitively if anyone tries addressing their harmful behavior. The only way to improve this situation is for our community members to get *better* at discerning who is dangerous, not admonishing people not to think "carcerally" in a way that gets many to ignore their sense of discomfort with warning signs (which need to be interrogated critically, discussed carefully, and responded to with skill, not escalated into shit-talking or worse).
You're clearly in a very different physical and social environment than me where the abolitionist scene has different internal dynamics, and you're also thinking of specific situations that aren't clear to the reader. This article goes out to people around the world and will be filtered through their own experiences. Am I putting words in your mouth, or did you not clarify that you think that some people do need to be removed from movement spaces for the safety of the members? (If that even is something you agree with.)
Wow. Okay, it's very clear that you don't wish to actually engage with what I'm saying and have no real desire to even acknowledge carceral behavior in our movements (your use of quotes around carceral is quite telling). This piece comes not only from my decades of personal experience, but also from dozens of interviews with experienced organizers. What you "suspect" is happening and what many movement workers are actually saying is happening are two different things.
Our values matter and we don't get to decide that it's to inconvenient to ignore carceral behaviors or mindsets and still call ourselves abolitionists.
You can stand by what you said all you want, but it honestly looks like you are trying your best to justify shunning and punitive behavior instead of investigating your defensiveness and what it might be trying to tell you.
The people harmed by carceral behaviors will always be the most vulnerable of us, not the most powerful. And I refuse to support behaviors that harm the most vulnerable of us, in the hope that they might cast out abusers as well. We either believe in abolition or we do not.
Every article cannot be every thing. This article has a very clear and specific scope. If you think that we can't talk about the dangers of carceral behaviors in our movements without talking about every possible exception, I invite you to write your own article about every possible exception.
“The people harmed by carceral behaviors will always be the most vulnerable of us, not the most powerful”…If we can see this is true in actual carceral institutions, and we can, then it shouldn’t be a leap to know it’s true in our systems too. Thank you, Ijeoma…this piece, this truth, touched me personally ♥️
I am trying to understand you, if I'm missing things it's in good faith because, as you correctly assumed, I haven't been in those conversations for decades. I'm trying to communicate that many people I know are also misunderstanding the terminology in ways that support abusers with more power/clout in movement spaces.
I put "carceral" in scare quotes exactly because I don't think it makes sense to talk about a practice as carceral when the people doing it don't have actual coercive power over the people targeted by it. E.g. it is not generally carceral for women who have been harassed to ask for a man who harassed them to be barred from movement spaces if he refuses to change or temporarily while he works on himself if the harassment was severe, but it may be carceral in cases where this community action could cause the man to end up unhoused or lose his immigration status or income. Do you agree with that? Because it doesn't sound that way to me from what you originally wrote and I read it twice before commenting in the first place to try to make sure I wasn't misreading you.
I'll avoid commenting on this topic in the future until I can read more about the history of these conversations—is your book of interviews where you'd suggest starting?
I think this is a lot of words for “what’s the context of punishment you most often see? My experience is around abuse, SA, and harassment so I’m struggling a bit with some of this.” Best to ask, instead of assuming and then writing a novel about the assumption.
It’s also unfair to put the emotional labor and work on Ijeoma in your final comment—you can very likely answer that question yourself and/or do some digging. It also reads as callous and maybe even sarcastic.
It is such an honor to be in community with you. ❤️🔥 I have been following your call to build community and my life has blossomed. I have been exploring my neurodivergence and deepening my understanding of humanity. Thank you for loving the world and sharing your light. My life is infinitely better for it. 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️💗💐
I really appreciated this -- I have been on both sides of these perspectives. I think if I had read this ten years ago I would have angrily dismissed it. Now I can fully appreciate where you're coming from. Working on DSA-LA's conflict engagement team helped me grow into this perspective. It gave me a lot of insight into what can be possible and what kinds of behaviors/ cultures negatively impact organizing. I really feel you because your insights must be hard won.
This was really moving. I also think fear of making mistakes keeps people from being involved at all. If our movement spaces worked harder to be direct, and do a community call-in rather than a public call out (referencing a whats up y’all video from Sonya Renee Taylor here) we’d be so much closer to the reality we want to see. We really need imperfect participation from everyone.
I agree with your other points, but I think the one under the title about punishment is dangerously naive. In my experience, the most common reason for people in movement spaces to "shun" another is that that person, usually but certainly not always a man, is known or rumored to have sexually assaulted and/or engaged in partner violence against multiple other people, most often young women or queer folks. That's probably still not the majority of cases where people decide to avoid someone, but many if not most other cases are some variety of a pervasive pattern of destructive behavior. If the person being shunned has been in groups with an abolitionist orientation, they were almost certainly asked to participate in a transformative justice process and either responded with DARVO or, less often, made a show of change that seemed more in-line with a habitual pattern of manipulation than a genuine transformation attempt while repeating the same actions.
If one of our driving principles is "we keep us safe", and the person harming our community members refuses to attempt to change and even attacks and counter-organizes against those asking them to, warning others about them is pretty much the only option left to us. It's unfair to categorize this as "punishment" rather than a natural consequence by a self-organizing community that cares about its members' safety.
(I put "shun" in scarequotes originally, because it's almost never the case that this person has been driven out of the local movement scene entirely. They might choose to bounce to a disconnected scene for their own comfort or access to victims, but people do pick sides, like in your first point, so all of our big community celebrations and protests still have known abusers, and it's still most often the people they harmed who get driven out of spaces de facto as a result.)
As for the cases that do seem excessive and punitive, targeting someone who made an honest mistake due to their socialization, who wants to change and is capable of it on a workable timeline, IMO that's most often actually a result of lack of discernment in who we should allow as close comrades. I'm sure there are cases where it's just collective groupthink among people who were socialized to think in punitive terms, but most often the charge is led by an identifiable individual who themself has been giving off all kinds of red flags that they may engage in unwarranted social aggression and/or instigate others to do so. Of course early intervention could be sufficient in many of these cases--talk to that person and let them know that that's not how we do things around here, but we are willing to listen when they just need to blow off steam--but some people are present for malicious reasons in the first place, and many others cannot control the behaviors and the internal psychological dynamics leading them to act out without a long transformative process requiring time and support beyond what the movement group can provide. Part of acting on our values means being able to recognize these situations, accept our limitations, and let people know when we can't keep organizing with them (and sometimes that also means completely avoiding them in social contexts for members' safety!).
We are doing our best to be part of a broader cultural movement that will let harm-doers know that they absolutely can change and don't need to get stuck in shame--but part of that has to be grounded in the understanding that people who have been harmed or fear being harmed by someone absolutely have the right to set boundaries, even when those boundaries feel like punishment. We need to cultivate many, many alternate sources of support and community for harm-doers so the choice isn't between continuing to extract from those they harmed and leaving them without a way to get their basic social and emotional needs met. The cycle of harm is not caused by shame that someone might rightfully feel when others draw attention to their harmful actions, but it often is driven by fear of that shame, which drives people to any lengths necessary to hold that shame at bay instead of learning to sit with it, transform it, and let it transform them. Acting like community practices that might provoke shame are the problem rather than the harm-doer's inability to process their shame just reinforces a cultural environment that promotes avoidance rather than courage in engaging with one's own shame.
Asking movement groups to try to be a long-term rehabilitation space for anyone who shows up amongst them while also sticking to their core mission and also controlling the damage? That has an extensive track record of not working. In fact, many of the group implosions you're talking about have been caused by all or a faction of the group trying to keep someone involved when it's just not viable. It's always going to be difficult to handle situations with people who are not willing and able to participate in generative conflict, but we can't keep pretending that everyone who's doing harm in our communities is on the verge of positive transformation if we just give them another chance. We need to understand that organizing in a context of severe oppressive structures requires high trust among people who are not perfect but at least able to grow relatively quickly to the point of being good enough. If enough people work at it, there will be groups with roles and social environments that are a good fit for any given person, but sometimes people need to be disallowed from certain spaces to keep community members and/or the movement work safe.
You're putting a lot of words into my mouth that I didn't say. You may not have experienced or seen the shunning that happens, but I absolutely have and so have many of my comrades. And it is not "dangerously naive" to talk about carceral behaviors within abolitionist spaces - I think it's dangerously naive to believe it's something we don't need to address. Many people pushed out and punished aren't abusers - in fact, many abusers remain protected because they know how to work carceral spaces. But I've seen time and time again people pushed out and punished because of power struggles, personality differences, non-abusive disputes, and personal relationship ruptures that are brought into movement spaces. And often then, the transformative justice process you speak is isn't offered, or what is offered is a social trial by jury disguised as transformative justice with no actual transformative goal.
This piece isn't a "this is what happens every time with every group" piece. It seems you have very specific situations in your mind this doesn't apply to - ok. There will be many. This piece is identifying patterns I see when things go wrong.
I appreciate your reply and I understand that an article can't clarify every possible interpretation of what you're talking about, but I'm frustrated because many newly activated abolitionists are reading vague yet absolute-sounding things like what you wrote and then trying to apply them to situations where they really do need to be asking someone to leave the group. People will be scared to even bring up a serious problem out of fear of being perceived as oppressors based on what they imagine shared abolitionist values are. Or they may actually get significant backlash for efforts to keep themselves or others safe. And I stand by what I said that many of the cases of shunning people for bad reasons are caused by lack of discernment of who to push out of a space—exactly those people who "know how to work" the space, but they can work people who are trying to act on anti-carceral values just as easily as they can work any other values system. Values don't protect you from manipulation. They'll just figure out whatever it is they have to say to get the reaction they want.
I suspect that many of the abolitionists acting punitively, seemingly against their values, have been psychologically manipulated into doing so—by someone who will effectively use the argument that *they* are being treated punitively if anyone tries addressing their harmful behavior. The only way to improve this situation is for our community members to get *better* at discerning who is dangerous, not admonishing people not to think "carcerally" in a way that gets many to ignore their sense of discomfort with warning signs (which need to be interrogated critically, discussed carefully, and responded to with skill, not escalated into shit-talking or worse).
You're clearly in a very different physical and social environment than me where the abolitionist scene has different internal dynamics, and you're also thinking of specific situations that aren't clear to the reader. This article goes out to people around the world and will be filtered through their own experiences. Am I putting words in your mouth, or did you not clarify that you think that some people do need to be removed from movement spaces for the safety of the members? (If that even is something you agree with.)
Wow. Okay, it's very clear that you don't wish to actually engage with what I'm saying and have no real desire to even acknowledge carceral behavior in our movements (your use of quotes around carceral is quite telling). This piece comes not only from my decades of personal experience, but also from dozens of interviews with experienced organizers. What you "suspect" is happening and what many movement workers are actually saying is happening are two different things.
Our values matter and we don't get to decide that it's to inconvenient to ignore carceral behaviors or mindsets and still call ourselves abolitionists.
You can stand by what you said all you want, but it honestly looks like you are trying your best to justify shunning and punitive behavior instead of investigating your defensiveness and what it might be trying to tell you.
The people harmed by carceral behaviors will always be the most vulnerable of us, not the most powerful. And I refuse to support behaviors that harm the most vulnerable of us, in the hope that they might cast out abusers as well. We either believe in abolition or we do not.
Every article cannot be every thing. This article has a very clear and specific scope. If you think that we can't talk about the dangers of carceral behaviors in our movements without talking about every possible exception, I invite you to write your own article about every possible exception.
“The people harmed by carceral behaviors will always be the most vulnerable of us, not the most powerful”…If we can see this is true in actual carceral institutions, and we can, then it shouldn’t be a leap to know it’s true in our systems too. Thank you, Ijeoma…this piece, this truth, touched me personally ♥️
I am trying to understand you, if I'm missing things it's in good faith because, as you correctly assumed, I haven't been in those conversations for decades. I'm trying to communicate that many people I know are also misunderstanding the terminology in ways that support abusers with more power/clout in movement spaces.
I put "carceral" in scare quotes exactly because I don't think it makes sense to talk about a practice as carceral when the people doing it don't have actual coercive power over the people targeted by it. E.g. it is not generally carceral for women who have been harassed to ask for a man who harassed them to be barred from movement spaces if he refuses to change or temporarily while he works on himself if the harassment was severe, but it may be carceral in cases where this community action could cause the man to end up unhoused or lose his immigration status or income. Do you agree with that? Because it doesn't sound that way to me from what you originally wrote and I read it twice before commenting in the first place to try to make sure I wasn't misreading you.
I'll avoid commenting on this topic in the future until I can read more about the history of these conversations—is your book of interviews where you'd suggest starting?
I think this is a lot of words for “what’s the context of punishment you most often see? My experience is around abuse, SA, and harassment so I’m struggling a bit with some of this.” Best to ask, instead of assuming and then writing a novel about the assumption.
It’s also unfair to put the emotional labor and work on Ijeoma in your final comment—you can very likely answer that question yourself and/or do some digging. It also reads as callous and maybe even sarcastic.
This is trolling, and looks a lot like sealioning.
It is such an honor to be in community with you. ❤️🔥 I have been following your call to build community and my life has blossomed. I have been exploring my neurodivergence and deepening my understanding of humanity. Thank you for loving the world and sharing your light. My life is infinitely better for it. 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️💗💐