Transcript:

00:00

SHIRA HASSAN: One thing to remember about transformative justice that's really important is that communities have been solving problems without the state for generations.

00:09

MARTINA KARTMAN: The idea of transformative justice can get really overwhelming, and so thinking about it as an everyday practice is a really useful way to move from theory into the ways in which we're all doing this all the time.

00:19

RACHEL HERZING: You know, while sometimes situations of harm can be very very complicated to figure out how to address, the truth is that most people, most days, are trying something. And I think we really need to honor and elevate the kind of everyday things that people do to intervene in situations of harm at all scales, that don't get kind of the fanfare and the attention that more complicated processes sometimes get. And so maybe that's like, intervening with a stranger on the street. Or maybe that's, you know, preventing somebody from driving home drunk. Or maybe that's, you know, stepping in when you hear your neighbors fighting, right? And and those require risks and they require a certain amount of confidence in your capability to do well in that, but a lot of people who are not trained people and who are not professional people try things all the time every day. Because most people don't feel like they can rely on the criminal legal system to give them the kind of support that they need or that they want and they don't trust them necessarily not to make situations worse.

01:28

MIA MINGUS: I think a lot of harm that happens is, it's like death by a thousand cuts, little cuts. And we often don't pay attention until there's so many little cuts that we're bleeding out, and then we rush to, you know, we rush to the crisis and the emergency and we drop everything. But what if we started rushing and dropping everything when the little cuts happen? Or when there's just maybe four or five little cuts instead of when we're bleeding out? I think about that when I think about responding to violence and harm without creating more violence and harm because I think a lot of that to me speaks to how do we, how do we operate in a more longterm understanding of violence, a more generational understanding of violence? So that, you know, that we move past just the immediacy of a feeling of revenge or that we need to get back at somebody, for example, or a feeling of hopelessness, to actually say: this is an opportunity that I can respond to this, I can either respond to it with more violence and harm, right, and escalate it? Or i can take this opportunity to figure out how do I de-escalate this and what would that look like?

02:36

PRIYA RAI: The everyday building blocks of transformative justice are things like, how do I say, give a good apology? How do I have hard conversations with people in my life? How do I try to be intentional about the way I interact with people in my life in the tiniest ways every day because that is how the big things become possible later? And so really focusing on our small moments, our 1000 tiny moments all the time, I think is so foundational. And I hope that this renewed interest or this current popular interest in transformative justice and community accountability can lead us down a road of building skills and capacity for the tiny moments. Because without that, actually we can't do the big shifting of conditions or culture.

03:25

MARTINA: I think about transformative justice as an everyday practice as a, as like, a real call for me to actually do my own work. Like it means that I'm not just going out in the world and like teaching TJ or holding other folks, but that I am engaged in my own healing work, that I'm engaged in my own processes to self-reflect on the impact I have in the world and when that is harmful and when it is not. It means that I'm checking my own behaviors so like, just really starting from within. But it also means that I'm taking the time to know my neighbors, right? Or the people that I live with, that we take the time to sit down and ask each other like, if I faint or if I go through a hard time emotionally and I need support, or if I'm having, like, a manic episode, what do I want and need? And then I'm actually doing that in my own circles, first. So that i'm talking to my roommates. I'm talking to my neighbors. I'm talking to my family, right? Like setting clear plans and breaking isolation in so many ways.

04:28

SHIRA: At Young Women's Empowerment Project what we worked on trying to do was make accountability not scary. And to talk all the time about the mistakes that we made, to get support for mistakes that we made, and practice it in tiny ways, so that when bigger things happened, it was more scary but less scary than it would have been had we not been practicing, like owning mistakes and making mistakes all the time. I think the more we have practice at experiences of accountability on the smaller scale that are safe where we know we can admit things, then the better the chance is that we'll be able to step into something when we've done something really wrong.

05:14

MIA: Okay this is something that I love to talk about! So this is... some examples of the small things, when I think about that, are things like best friends working out conflict between each other instead of turning away from each other. Because the thing about all of this is that if we're not going to use prisons and the police, for example, if we're not going to use the criminal legal system, if we're not going to use the foster system, then it's it's us who's going to have to be responding to these things. And if, you know, I always say this, forget violence, harm, and abuse - we don't even, we're not even good at handling conflict or misunderstandings well! And so I feel like if we can start there, rather than like, leapfrogging that, and then being like, why don't these responses to these big things work? And so when I talk about the small things, I mean like, you know, a lot of times in our political work, really great work falls apart, not because of outside forces, many times they do fall apart because of outside forces, but also they fall apart oftentimes because of the internal dynamics. Because people don't know how to handle basic conflict. Or because something that started off at a very low scale, like if we think about violence on a scale of like one to ten, ten being like the worst and most severe, things that started off as like a one or a two escalate into like a seven or an eight, and you're like, how did this happen? Or a five and a six. So when I think about small things, I think about that, like people who, again, are tending to the little cuts. So friends who are able to work out conflict. When you're able to have generative conflict with maybe like your partner, for example. People who are making and forming and building and cultivating quality relationships with their neighbors, or able to work out conflict with their neighbors in ways that actually deepen that relationship. All of those types of little things, to me. People who are investing with each other and in their skill sets and building their capacities, to me these are all part of the things that, not only are small, they may not even be harm yet, but they're small forms of maybe, sorry, conflict maybe. But also I think that they are often the, like you said, like the building blocks and they're training ground that we can practice a lot of these skills in.

07:30

LEA ROTH: So I feel pretty optimistic about the increase in awareness and excitement about these ideas. Some of the young people that we work with, they wouldn't have known these terms, but they have these values, right? And they practice these values when they try to informally mediate conflicts between their friends, when they, you know, listen to their impulses to try to minimize and reduce harm, right? And I think that a lot of people have these values. A lot of people do intuitively do these, I think that a lot of these processes are just what it means to be humans in community. And it's exciting to have labels and spaces where people are coming together to highlight that these skills aren't active for a lot of us. Some of us have been very underdeveloped in these skills. But a lot of us, I think, are very good at these skills. And sometimes we channel those into social work or education or into our families,our friend groups, like different professions that we're a part of. And a lot of that is very trivialized as feminized labor, right? It's this emotional, reproductive labor, transformative labor, that is systematically devalued. And I think that having a space to really value, like, whoa, that's what it would take to work against this giant harm of incarceration that is out of control in the United States, that is what it would take to break these cycles of violence and harm that happen in so many of our families and communities. I think that's a really big thing, is that there's a lot of disrespect around doing conflict work, doing emotional labor for people, and so my hope is that labeling this, formalizing this, will increase respect and value for the work that so many of us are already doing to intuitively prevent, respond to, and minimize harm.

09:25

SONYA SHAH: If we can all come together on the same page to really build a world and a culture that's about community solutions to dealing with harm when it happens and not using the state, that's an incredible thing. If we really want to create a culture where saying like, hey you know, do you think you need to be responsible or accountable to that, is the same thing as saying like, hey, did you put your seatbelt on, right? Then, you know, we really have to be really good at not letting, kind of, capitalist modernity make us be tight with our own stuff, with our own material, with our own tools that we've created, and just give it away. One of the things that I think is very real is that even when you just read a piece of paper, if you're someone who's like, I really want to be accountable, I really want to do this work, I really want to create a pod, you know, I want to make this a part of my life, is that even just reading a book or a piece of paper, we don't always know what to do. So I think the more that we're talking about it, and the more that we're doing like trainings, or just conversations, or workshops around how to listen well, you know, how to be accountable, how to work on yourself, how to be self-reflective, what is shame. you know, what do you do when you feel shame, that are really simple ways that people can understand, oh, when I feel shame this is what happens to me, this is where I'd like to be, you know. What keeps me from accountability is dot dot dot. You know, when I'm being told that I did some harm, what are the things that I go through and how do I want to be or show up in those relationships? If we can just teach some basic workshops like to the masses on those kinds of things, I think that would be, that would do a lot to further our movement, and kind of see… and create a culture where people are working with each other to be accountable.

11:23

MARTINA: It might mean that we actually sit down and like, have the hard, vulnerable conversations with our friends about like, here is what it looks like for me when I'm going down a bad path, like when I'm starting to spiral, whether that's like a shame spiral or mental health support that I might need. Or it means that we're telling, like we're aware when our loved ones have like seasonal depression even, right? And that we're tracking what that person needs in those times. It might mean that I if i notice that one of my friends doesn't go out when they're having a hard time, like I actually don't hear from them because they're kind of holed up in their house, that I'm checking on them if that's what they need. Or if I have another friend that goes out Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday when they're having a hard time, that I'm tracking that and I'm supporting them when that's what they need. And it means like, yeah, if someone's going through a hard time that I'm showing up in whatever way that person has self-identified that they need. So it might be like, not talking about it at all, but i'm coming to do the dishes and I'm driving your kids to school. Or that we're like, really sitting and we're processing it. And in situations that I can think about, it's meant having people come sleep on my couch when they're escaping domestic violence. Like I've had, I've gotten calls from friends that are not even people I know directly, but I know someone... I live in like the south end in Seattle, like, I know someone in the north end who is literally out on the street right now. They just left their house. They've got their suitcase. They don't have anywhere to go. And, like, here's their cell phone number. I'm like, great. I'll call them. I'll have them come sleep over tonight and then the next day I'm going to sit with them and like map out a plan, like where do you plan to go, who can you stay with, what can you do, right? So it's like, how we show up in those moments when that person would otherwise be there on the street, or like, in a shelter where there's a bunch of cops.

13:03

MIA: If we think about accountability not as this destination, but if we think about accountability as a skill or a skill set, then it's a muscle that we can develop. And that, you know, you don't start bench pressing like 100 and 200 pounds right away. You start out small and you build up. You don't just run a triathlon by yourself, I mean maybe some people can do it off the bat, but you know, you train, you do all of that! You know I think about the ways that we need to build that kind of muscle memory in ourselves. And if you're practicing good apologies, if you're practicing proactively taking accountability, even for small things, you know like if you didn't send out the agenda for the meeting, don't wait till somebody says, where's the agenda? Say, hey, I didn't do this, I'm sorry I missed the deadline, here it is now. Or here's when I will send it out. these are small ways that we can begin to build our skill sets up. And also, to me, these are small ways that we can begin to address low levels of the things that allow for conflict to happen in our lives and that I believe can prevent a lot of conflict.