Dialogue Notes:

• Have been working in anti-trafficking work, grappling with gender-based violence in a way that doesn’t amplify white feminism
• Work in restorative justice and prison reform, haven’t explored this topic specifically within the prison system, want to get more versed in talking and responding about this
• Interaction recently highlighting different ways people come to abolition, confronted with someone with very different lived experiences coming at it different way
• Work with people targeted by systems, want to not perpetuate that, trying to unlearn my nice white lady training, have interacted intellectually about experience of sexualized violence and recognizing the ways racialized perceptions led to my reactions, want to not collude with oppressive systems and further my understanding of racial identity development
• HIgh school teacher and teaching at San Quentin, not a lot of other spaces to discuss this in nuanced way, read NYT article about all the untested rape kits, want to think about sexual violence as sticking point in abolitionist work
• Reflecting on different ways community has held space or not for two people I’ve lost recently, one more resourced in community and one more marginalized and alone. Interrogating why there are so many white women, white genderqueer people doing work requiring creating accountability structures in relationship to POC, now I’ve become more authoritarian at work, just getting things done, and I am burnt out on trying to counteract capitalism, how do we have an abolitionist movement without an answer to sexual violence? It’s because of patriarchy and capitalism. Tired of the question about how abolition responds to sexual violence and not having an answer.
• My mother experienced sexual violence and can’t tolerate me shutting down her experience – brings up question – How do we not throw survivorship under the bus?
• Referring back to NYC untested rape kits. I am thinking about how these tests are going to lead to more people in trials and courts and prisons. My friend was concerned about how these tests being untested shows lack of care about women and violence against women. Really reconciling with our two different responses.
• Both valid responses, and there is just a lack of real responses and accountability, no way to address violence without more violence (reference Until We Reckon: Mass Incarceration, Violence & the Radical Possibilities of Restorative Justice)
• #metoo has made me recognize how much violence I’ve normalized
• Called out by co-worker for not “supporting” her in issue when she was calling out a POC man for making her feel unsafe, but he had never made me feel unsafe, so how was I supposed to respond
• When is it not restorative justice, but just wielding power?
• What types of violence we legitimize and what we fight, how that intersects with our identities
• Same in anti-trafficking work – I have experiences of knowing that there are times when we are perpetuating white supremacy, but complicated “who am I to tell you that you’ve internalized some white supremacy”
• I’ve trained myself to metabolize the violence of my clients (in community mental health) in order to be a safe and stable object, I’m so habituated/skill set as part of my work, If I don’t, I’m seen as delicate/fragile, what happens if I’m not sensitized to what is said to me, I’m looking at other people’s harm. When we look at situation through everyone’s identities.
• White women experiencing violence from above (white men) and then leak down/out, and there does need to be a space to do that. (cycles of violence in wrong context – because not socially supported, etc, no other outlet)
• Thinking about Emmett Till’s accuser and the reason’s actions because “justified” – relative
• White women have been active perpetrators of violence, stripping of agency by white men, quotes from Kathleen Blee:
  • If white women represent innocence and potential racial victimization, then white men represent actual, engaged racial agency.”
  • “If racist white men want to criminalize or do physical harm to Black and Brown boys, then racist white women develop language to justify this mission.”
• Reductionist vs accountability.
• Situation at work when co-worker was put on discipline, then fired within 3 months, complicated because org led by POC, wasn’t sure when/how to speak out, then all of a sudden there was a safety issue when he came in, wasn’t sure how to hold “safety” in a context of when it seemed manipulative. Don’t know how to navigate. Not sure where allegiances go, and don’t want to make assumptions. Some tokenizing as well. Bring someone in and setting someone up for failure, because not resourced to shift that starting position – intention to hire with diversity, but don’t create infrastructure to support.
• In experiences of abuse, trauma response can be disproportionate. One person’s experience can be real, but doesn’t necessarily equate to the level of accountability expected of the other person. How do you structure that conversation? Increased sensitivity to harm, to who can be a target. No way in our culture for any preparation for healing harm done. Not maps for that, not training. How do you heal being dominating?
• All the ways we are failed by carceral feminism. Untested rape kits demonstrate that protection isn’t even there.
• Because system is “taking are of the problem” there are no healing ways
• Survived & Punished has talked about this: prisons maybe have decreased risk of sexual violence, but experience of sexual violence doesn’t increase my chances of incarceration
• Looking at history of Emmet Till demonstrate how Black boys can never be victims. Reduced racism to racialized misandry based on the ways Black men are constructed within white supremacy. Where are Black women in this? What mechanisms are there for Black women to respond to sexual violence?
• The ways that women of color and women who are poor are criminalized
• Carceral feminism is designed to work for white women. White lens on how communities of color are criminalized.
• Carceral feminism as it relates to trafficking has been used as a way to justify police presence in Black and brown communities. So difficult to place anti-trafficking work within this
• Talking to someone involved in feminist movements in the 70s talking about expansion of incarceration in response to trafficking. Has been used in CJS with prosecutors to justify reaction/presence in POC communities. Anti-trafficking movement is still very white dominated. Attempt to take anti-trafficking movement away from white women by women of color leads to WOC justifying the use of these criminalizing strategies.
• One narrative around policing and surveillance, but completely different one around trafficking
• When trafficking is happening across borders it’s in response to economic scarcity. Led to criminalization of consensual sex workers. Thing that’s coming in to control and make you safe and stop the people who are going to hurt you inside the system need to be criminalized criminalizes you, everyone.
• What do you mean by trafficking? Working with people who have been exploited or impacted by the sex trade or people who have been read as non-consensual then criminalized.
• There are families who say this is the only way to keep their kids safe – to replicate the same systems and work with probation. But criminalizing your child never keeps your kid safe.
• INCITE! and CR say we must have alternatives, an answer for sexual violence. Whenever freaked out though, ability to think creatively diminishes.
• Folks who have charges around sexual violence are placed on sensitive needs yards with folks who are deemed gang-dropouts. Divide that exists inside prisons limits what’s possible without folks inside. How do the mechanisms of controlling and creating division  within incarcerated populations rely on the collective us not answering that question.
• Formerly incarcerated friends won’t get down with folks who have been charged with sexual violence.
• BATJC workshop series shifted perception of transformative justice and RJ from healing being an outcome, but not a goal of the process. Recognize the ways we try to pin survivor healing in direct relationship to the person needing accountability. Have to ask, what if the person doesn’t take accountability in the ways you want them to?
• When the response to harm isn’t proportionate, how do you take accountability for something so big? Divorcing healing from accountability in that respect, specifically the expectation.
• We don’t have mechanisms to hold the gray area, especially with identity at play.
• Initial response to separating accountability and healing is rage… it’s really hard to do your own healing. Why do i have to do all the work? Why can’t the person who harmed be accountable? Concept feels gendered and that sucks.
• The solution to what we’re supposed to be doing as white women is to be silent, listen, and not speak in conflicts around race. Women and people socialized as women feel that. I know how to do this, to be quiet – that’s what i’m supposed to do to show up here. Feels like gendered violence. No solution because some people do need to be quiet. Imagine that’s experienced differently for men.
• Feeling in those instances unsafe in one dimension or experiencing violence in one dimension, and wanting to provide an alternative experience on the race side. Feeling pain on the gender side. Tried to provide that different experience along race for very long, but saw women of color not tolerating the gendered violence. In trying to provide an alternative experience to white supremacy, perpetuating misogyny.
• People who have caused harm have to show up willingly to repair. Are people entering into those dynamics, in the workplace for example, showing up with the desire to repair? As teacher of 11 year olds, kids don’t care when showing up as non-authoritarian white person disrupting the system.
• Can anyone show up authentically? Even with interpersonal harm without any work obligations, still hard to know authentic desire for healing. At home, even with best intentions and shared values, still have a hard time asking for true accountability. Requires you to be super vulnerable and can’t’ have everything because of scarcity.
• We’ve all experienced so much harm and it leaks out and you perpetuate it onto the next. Authenticity and accountability is possible, but is healing possible? It’s a given that we’re always going to be perpetuating harm. Have to learn to work in that.
• Right now we put the bad problem in jail. Or you leave your job. Thing that’s missing is commitment. If everyone is committed to each other, you ride those waves together. One thing to deconstruct at theory but another to deconstruct yourself.
• One element of white supremacy is trying to have a response in order to have superiority. Know exactly how the “Beckys” feel in those videos.
• Need to be resourced in order to respond authentically and show up without feeling threatened.
• Sered: what do anti-racist white people say when no longer superior to POC? Now we are better than these bad white people.
• Really frustrated by identity politics. Makes it impossible to respond authentically beyond those oppressive systems. In context of this interpersonal and state violence. When state violence comes in to play, it’s a trump card, and i’m thinking of that in a bigger way. How do we hold in the context of carceral feminism, interpersonal and state violence?
• Identity politics so ridgid. Can diminish a person’s ability to show up to a conversation. What happens if you do say something racist? Don’t to cause harm and add more white supremacy to someone’s experience. We can’t prevent it. Focusing so much energy to thinking about how to repair. We don’t’ live in a world where we don’t’ have trauma, we all want to repair it though.
• Silencing ourselves holds us back from having more active roles. What would it look like if we open ourselves up to small harms and then were practicing accountability? Getting opportunities do that.
• Student was harmed by teacher and was really nervous to say something. Other people said it would ruin the relationship. We need to have relationships where people can come to each other about harm to seek accountability. Need to practice having conversations when we’ve fucked up. But how often to we come to someone that tenderly after harmed?
• What is the line between restorative and punitive response? Friend in a band with someone who has sexually assaulted another person and everyone wanted them to leave. Restorative response says never leave? Punitive to have boundaries?
• Colonialism teaches us disposability. Exile is the response. How do we heal and find accountability? How can there be “leaving” without disposing of. How do we have mechanisms to pause and have an intervention?
• Book: Conflict is Not Abuse. Articulates something that I see threads of in pop culture. People disagreeing is not abuse. Power privilege race class play into dynamics that happen after.
• Anti-policing movements are carceral. Our response to harmful officer is that they need to be fired or indicted. Comes from people who have experienced the violence of that officer. Cat says let’s practice abolition on our own terms with our own folks and not have it be for the first time with a white officer who murdered a Black kid. Not going to put energy into that.
• Book: How We Get Free. didn’t use the term identity politics, but they describe it. What they mean by it is entirely different from how it’s used now. We should read Mistaken Identity. It’s a critique of identity politics and the way it’s distorting our movements by examining the history of that term. Book Club on Mistaken Identity?
• Seeing ways in which we only see race and don’t see other identities is not the way.
• BLM – Bay Area is only chapter in country that was only POC. Bay Area dynamics and hyper-white-urban community that has invisibilized POC communities and created necessity for identity politics and separate spaces to grow and learn and work. Different than in other areas.
• Have seen the ways that call out culture has been transforming and our movements are growing.
• How to position believing survivors, and context of history of how this has been used and manipulated. Power in relation to belief –
• Extra Reading: In An Abusive State, How Neoliberalism  – Laying out how non-profits took original responses to alternate responses to harm.“
  • As a survivor of sexual violence, I have long argued that “believe survivors” is a wrongheaded approach. I am not telling the truth just because I say I survived, and not telling the truth about this type of violence has dangerous consequences that should never be written off as necessary evil in balancing scales – as white women throughout history have proven time and time again. If we take intersectionality seriously and recognize that even those marginalized in one way can be part of oppressive systems in another, no one automatically deserves our trust.”
• What if instead of distrusting everyone, we trust everyone. In exchanges I’ve had, we had different experiences, both were right. But recognizing and contextualizing trust not just across identity, but across power. Trust is different than faith.
• Police are not persons when they are in their role as police, they are representatives of the state.
• Organizing is spaces of cis white men that has been positive due to seeing how they respond to certain situations of sexual violence. Exploring how to establish mechanisms within groups regarding how to address these situations when they come up, and how to view this as a political responsibility.
• Acknowledging harm that privileged ppl in activist spaces and how not to further perpetuate harm.
• How to hold hearing about someone who is marginalized/incarcerated disclose that they have perpetuated sexual harm, how to stay in connection, how to respect leadership when choice is to not organize with certain individuals based on harms they have done.