“I came to theory because I was hurting . . . I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend — to grasp what was happening around and within me.” — bell hooks, from Theory as Liberatory Practice
When I came to abolitionist theory, I came to it broken, enraged, and fresh out of experiencing identity-shattering violence. I came to it as a college student who had seen the legal system fail my survivor friends, and who had personally experienced the Title IX system’s failure to protect student survivors of sexual violence. I came to abolitionist theory as a last resort because everywhere else I had turned had failed me and others I loved. That I had turned to existing systems in the first place was a signifier of my whiteness and other privileges; that those systems had failed me and my loved ones was a testament to the systems’ utter inability to respond meaningfully to intimate violence.
So I came to abolitionist theory slowly, searchingly. I came to it as the kind of hostile, doubting, bitter survivor that the abolitionist movement so often doesn’t seem to like. I came to it as someone who asked questions, and the more questions I asked, the more I realized that some in the movement seem to see such questions as a threat or a danger.
This essay is meant for such survivors — people who ask questions about abolition not to derail, to diminish, or to disparage, but to grapple meaningfully with a set of ideas and principles that purport to respond to our lived experiences with violence. This essay is in defense of asking questions, because questions hone our praxis and clarify our vision.
My first experience being told not to ask questions was with the very person who mentored me into an abolitionist worldview in the first place. Sarah, as I’ll call her, was a professor and mentor of mine for several years, and had been a steadfast organizer in abolitionist and transformative justice spaces for many more.
One afternoon, I found myself in Sarah’s office discussing what the world could/will look like if prisons and the police were abolished. At the time, I was working in a local unisex barbershop with a man who directly identified himself as an active white supremacist — red shoelaces, iron cross tattoos, and all — and I mentioned this offhandedly to Sarah. “In a world without prisons, what do we do about white supremacist violence, then? What do we do about Nazis?”
A dark look crossed Sarah’s face — to this day, this is still the only time I’ve seen her angry. “I knew you were going to ask something like that eventually,” she said forcefully. “I knew it. Questions like that don’t help the movement, Jax. They hinder it. I think you should unpack why you felt the need to ask me that.”
I stared at her, taken aback. I had meant the question in deep earnestness. For me, as a Jewish, gender/queer, disabled person, the question of what to do with Nazis in a post-prison world is not an exercise in emotionless, theoretical abstraction. It is a very real question that feels materially important to my life and the lives of many with whom I felt and continue to feel kinship. For g-d’s sake, I thought annoyedly, I literally work alongside someone who wants to obliterate entire groups of people like me. And I’m not allowed to ask what abolitionists plan to do about that?
I dropped the subject with Sarah, apologizing (albeit insincerely) for my troublesome question. I walked away from her office that day feeling disillusioned. I couldn’t help but think: only weak movements dissolve under the pressure of inquiry.
Since that moment in Sarah’s office, I have repeatedly witnessed similar online and real-world interactions between abolitionist leftists and survivors who dare to ask questions about how a world without prisons and the police would/will operate. Each time, the experience has left me with heartache, and it’s not just because I have my own survivor wounds I am still actively tending to. Indeed, sometimes the consequences of ignoring survivors are devastating.
I will never forget the instance in which an anarchist group bailed a man out of prison, only for that man to then kill his ex-wife and children. I found out much later that the man’s ex-wife, a survivor of his long-term abuse, hadn’t even been alerted to the fact that he was being released in the first place. She and her children had no chance to plan for safety because they were not consulted — yet whose perspective could possibly have been more relevant to the situation than theirs?
Survivor knowledge is embodied, living, and critical.
At the risk of being too blunt, I simply don’t understand how anyone could feel threatened by survivor questions in the first place. If you’ve been inculcated into carceral logics your whole life (and most of us have), it’s completely reasonable to have questions about our visions for a post-carceral society. Abolition is an imaginative project, a creative project, and a bold project — it flies in the face of everything most of us have been taught about safety and accountability. Asking questions about it is a deeply human and understandable response.
I am not denying that some people ask questions out of disdain or stubborn disbelief. I’m not saying derailers don’t exist, or carceral-minded infiltrators don’t exist, and so forth. But we have to give people space to grapple meaningfully with new and radical concepts, and part of that means making intentional and loving space for inquiry. To me, asking questions of our movements is one of the most important things we can do to further them.
Beyond the above, I also fear that silencing survivors’ questions reproduces the silencing they (we) have already experienced as a result of intimate violence. How is telling survivors “I refuse to hear your concerns and questions about this political project” not replicating the lack of care and meaningful address that survivors already experience in day-to-day life? Isn’t abolition meant to be profoundly motivated by love for those most impacted by violence? And if so, where is that love reflected in shutting people down when they ask sincere questions about safety, accountability, and healing?
I am accountable to many communities in the work that I do, and in the variety of forms that work takes. But I feel accountable to survivors of intimate violence more than nearly anything, not the least because it is one of the communities that I entered into the youngest — age 5, or thereabouts. I am driven by a deep love for survivors and our rage, bitterness, questioning, doubting, healing, believing — the whole spectra our desires and journeys can take.
I am also grateful to survivors’ questions because I think they are practical in a way that only questions borne of lived experience can be. I still want to know what fellow abolitionists would do about the man at my college who abused me and six others, refused an accountability process, and has (to my knowledge) never taken responsibility for the enormity of the pain he inflicted on us. I still want to know how the violently white supremacist man I worked with fits into Sarah’s and others’ visions of a post-carceral world. And I still want to know what fellow abolitionists would do in a range of other situations where I have seen support circles falter, accountability processes not produce the desperately needed results, and survivors resort to carceral institutions (which also then failed them) because abolition was not taking root in us as we had hoped it would.
Questions are warranted in these and other circumstances. I believe we owe it to survivors to ask why our visions fail us in some situations, why our alternatives to police and prisons do not always meet survivor needs in the ways those survivors deserve. As my friend L. says, If our alternatives aren’t viable, they aren’t alternatives. Survivors and their questions alert us to the ways in which our organizing still isn’t daring enough yet, creative enough yet, persistent enough yet, loving enough yet.
On some days, I say I am an abolitionist through gritted teeth, white knuckles holding resolutely onto my politics. Some days, the days when I am most in pain, I pull like a wild animal at the rope that tethers me to my beliefs.
Other days, I am surrounded by survivors who are similarly full of hope, doubt, inspiration, dismay, grief, rage, and desire. I witness healing, faltering, healing, faltering — healing. I stand at the intersection of anger, fear, and love, and I hold hands with countless beloveds who are on journeys parallel to mine. I stay up at night wondering what a post-carceral world will look like for us, and I call up others who are similarly kept awake.
We still can’t quite picture it. None of us can. So we will keep asking questions.
