What Does “Community” Mean to Us Abolitionists?
As I grow in my understanding of prison and police abolition, I’ve increasingly wondered what it looks to be in community with one another as abolitionists. We talk a lot about “right relationships” and relational repair and community, but lately I’ve been feeling unsettled about the sort of spaces we’re creating — and I know I’m not the only one. What follows is not meant to be a screed or a soapbox, but a series of reflections that I and my loved ones are mulling over these days.
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First, some context: I grew up in a fringe religious community that most people consider to be a cult. From a young age, I witnessed the social death that can befall a person when they step out of line. In this community, if you broke any of the explicit or implicit rules that organized the entirety of our lives, you would be put under something called “The Discipline.”
The Discipline was a type of social ostracism that was sustained, intense, and intended to provoke profound shame. Community members who were under The Discipline were not allowed to take part in communal spiritual rituals, and were generally prohibited from socializing with others. When our community had collective mealtimes, those under The Discipline had to sit alone in a corner and eat on their own. They were also subjected to a level of social scrutiny, ridicule, gossip, and scorn that could break a human being.
During their time under The Discipline, community members had to meet with the community elder (essentially, the spiritual leader of our group) to repeatedly confess their sins and delineate the steps they were taking to become better people. This process typically involved fasting, countless hours of prayer, intensive Bible studies, and a public re-commitment to the rules of our group. Only after many months — or even years — of social ostracism and confession could these individuals re-join the community as full-fledged members — and even then, the stigma of their time under The Discipline followed them for the rest of their lives.
As a young child, I knew The Discipline was violent, manipulative, and unethical. Later, as a teenager, I made a commitment to myself not to replicate the sort of harm that I was witnessing. As an adult, however, I briefly became someone who did exactly that.
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When I was 24, I befriended someone I’ll call Abby. Abby was a white woman (for reference, I’m a white genderqueer person) who worked in the same research lab as I did, and we quickly became close friends. We also mutually befriended a handful of other people in our lab — people with a broad range of identities and lived experiences. Our friend group regularly met for work lunches, happy hours, game nights, and more.
A couple of years into our friendship, Abby made the choice to move to a predominantly-Latinx neighborhood in our city. Immediately, all of us in our shared friend group disowned her — she was contributing to gentrification, and we felt she clearly ought to know better as someone who purported to be an antiracist feminist. Within the span of two weeks or so, Abby lost virtually her entire support network in the city. As far as I am aware, none of us have ever reached out to Abby since.
What troubles me most about this incident is not the instant and total severance of Abby from our group, though there is a lot I could say about that. Rather, what troubles me most is that, a few months after the debacle with Abby, another person in our friend group — I’ll call them Casey — sexually assaulted someone else in the group. And instead of similarly severing this person from the group, most people maintained some level of friendship with Casey because we thought it was the “abolitionist” thing to do. (ETA after an important and thoughtful comment I received on this: Casey has now gone through multiple steps of an accountability process, and the survivor in the situation did not want police involvement. I have personally taken a couple years of complete space from Casey until their mentor confirmed to me the concrete steps Casey has taken towards personal transformation. I continue to sit with great discomfort around the situation, however, and I’ll be up-front about that).
Lately, there have been many moments where I’ve found myself awash with literal nausea over how the dynamics in this friend group played out. I’m not saying that in a perfect world, Abby’s choices would go entirely un-critiqued while Casey would be cast out of society forever. What I am saying is that the vitriolic backlash to Abby stands in diametric opposition to our collective, tepid response to Casey, and I think this demonstrates a truth about some abolitionist spaces: we are all too willing to cancel someone for ideological impurity, even when more explicit acts of violence are downplayed or outright ignored. Why is that? Why do some of our “communities” function this way?
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I hold my breath when I enter abolitionist spaces.
I told a friend this recently, and she immediately laughed. “I know exactly where you’re going with this,” she said. “Are you afraid of saying the wrong thing?”
That’s exactly where I was going with my comments, even though — through some combination of white privilege, “flying under the radar” due to the oppressed identities I do hold, luck, and good friendships — I’ve never actually been cancelled. You don’t have to have been cancelled yourself, though, to live perpetually with a low-grade fear of it. Not when you’ve seen it happen to so many others that you become hyper-aware of the possibility of it happening to you.
Several times, I have seen abolitionist spaces implode because of festering arguments, ideological tensions, and other rifts that we were not equipped to resolve — nor did we (seem to) want to. We excused overt harms like sexual harassment because we thought it was abolitionist to put up with those sorts of things, but we shunned people for issues like misusing social justice terminology or not showing up to enough meetings. Each time I saw the beats of the cancellation process play out, I would think: This is just like The Discipline, but this time we’re calling it abolitionist. Only unlike with The Discipline processes, I never really saw someone re-enter the abolitionist spaces they’d been expelled from. That feels significant in and of itself.
I want to offer a small but concrete example of how these tensions and anxieties have played out for me. Awhile back, I overheard a domestic violence incident down the hall of my apartment building. A few minutes later, the survivor of the assault came banging on my apartment door, begging me to call the police on her behalf because her abuser had destroyed her phone. I called the police immediately, staying with the survivor to talk to the officers and corroborate her account. The entire time, I thought: None of my friends can know I’m doing this. No one can know I talked to the police, not even on someone else’s behalf. My fear of cancellation by other abolitionists was so great that I made up fantastic scenarios by which my friends might find out I’d interacted with the police, and then I’d lose my community — community? really? — in one fell swoop.
It’s not normal to live like this. This isn’t community.
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I know I’m not the only one feeling these tensions, because I’m increasingly having conversations with friends of mine, of all identities and backgrounds, who are also feeling suffocated. Awhile back, a friend of mine joked about abolitionist spaces: “We call ourselves abolitionists, but we can’t even come to agreement on who’s doing the dishes tonight.”
Recently, another friend of mine remarked: “I prefer being friends with people who’ve been cancelled.” Struck by this, I asked them why. They shrugged and said simply, “There’s more breathing room for me.”
They’d been holding their breath in abolitionist spaces, too. I’ve heard plenty of other people make similar remarks, but always in one-on-one conversations. I don’t think most of us would admit such tensions publicly. After all, who wants to get cancelled for talking about the way we cancel each other . . .
I don’t want to belabor the point, so I guess I just want to say it right out: I don’t think you can truly be an abolitionist if your kneejerk response to any instance of relational rupture is to instantly cancel the person responsible for it, and cast them out forever. We as abolitionists are used to thinking of incarceration as a type of death. I am beginning to recognize that profound, sustained social ostracism is a type of death, too.
People need to feel like they’re still salvageable after they’ve fucked up. Most of the time, you can’t ostracize and shame someone into behavioral change. Or you can, but they will come back a scarred, frightened, and angry person who may be even more likely to lash out and fuck up in the future. I am especially interested in thinking about what it means to achieve relational repair in the instance of ideological impurity, because that’s where it seems a lot of these kneejerk responses are happening. We can’t be in beloved community if we don’t believe in repair — and if the practicing of that repair doesn’t form a basis for our politics.
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I want back pretty much everyone I’ve ever helped cancel. And even the people I don’t want back don’t deserve to be disappeared forever.
I think I’ve been learning my lesson, by the way. Recently, after a heavy conversation with a friend, I said: “By the way, I’m not going to cancel you over things like this. And if you fuck up in the future, I won’t participate in shunning you. I care about you enough to keep at this relationship.”
My friend teared up. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard someone say something like that,” they told me. “And I want to reciprocate everything you just said.” We both agreed that having this conversation gave us an unexpected sense of relief — relief we didn’t even know we’d needed. Since then, we have felt held by each other with a steadiness that simply doesn’t exist in many of our other abolitionist relationships.
I want more conversations like that one. I want more elasticity in my relationships — the knowledge that our relationships will flex and strain and undergo stress, yes, but they won’t snap the moment something goes awry. I want relationships less like a tightrope walk, less like perching on the edge of a cliff. I want relationships that don’t live under the spectre of public humiliation in the town square. I want abolitionist spaces where people don’t walk in holding their breath. I want relationships that are predicated on the type of value that I saw painted across a picnic table awhile back: I love you like you were me.
I’m not saying we all have to be in relationships with one another no matter what. I’m just saying that beloved community isn’t supposed to feel scary, and the “community” we have right now does feel scary, at least to some of us — perhaps more of us than we realize.
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In closing, I want to reflect on some words from adrienne maree brown’s booklet “We Will Not Cancel Us.” I certainly don’t have the audacity to assume that adrienne maree brown would co-sign anything I’ve said here, but I find her words to be deeply resonant regardless. In her book, brown writes that she has “felt a punitive tendency root and flourish within our movements. I have felt us losing our capacity to distinguish between comrade and opponent, losing our capacity to generate belonging” (2). S
he writes that this tendency towards punishment “breed[s] a culture of fear, secrecy, and isolation” (47). Crucially, she envisions abolitionist movements as “a vibrant, accountable space where causing harm does not mean you are excluded immediately and eternally from healing, justice, community, or belonging” (41).
I dream of the same things, and I’m dreaming this alongside many others who are trying to make an intentional shift from punishment and ostracism to healing, mutual growth, and beloved community. May we practice towards the world we wish to inhabit!
