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Personally tired of a very pacifist understanding of restorative or transformative. I also believe that you can be Abolitionist and that sometimes accountability includes consequences. It is carceral when it upholds and replicates colonial, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism.
I get that punitivity as an affective/cultural edifice can circulate in carceral ways but that does not mean the carceral is understood in terms of just ‘punishment’ imo bc that is how accountability qua consequence can be dismissed as “not abolitionist.”
Carceral punitivity criminalizes behaviors that oppressed people take up in attempts to either survive capitalism/colonialism/cisheteropatriarchy or to resist that trio. Accountability however should at times mean folk face material consequences for being abusive.
Some of my comrades and I were reading this text looking at indigenous Afrikan models for addressing harm and sumn that jumped out was how a number of them focused on material restitution and impact to community (not just individuals).
Im also from the hood and have seen + grew up on stories of ppl arbitrating disputes through violence and the issue is settled afterward if the community has developed (and follows) cultural codes to autonomously enforce that. Im sure those things came with us from Afrika
Lastly, long before I was abolitionist, my friends and I (all noncismen) moved in non-carceral ways when it came to abusive niggas in our circle. We would call them in, hold spaces to talk thru it, get these niggas to understand and they would make it about themselves
What happens after that? Or if they go right back to doin xyz bc it is socially encouraged and reinforced? On the road to the demise of patriarchy, capital, colonialism we gotta have material consequences imo to stave that bs off from these niggas.
Material consequences don’t always have to be violent but Im just sayin they should be on occasions. Imo. And if they gon be we gotta make sure we keep the State out the equation and that means accounting for how, for example, pigs really will side w cishet BM against Black TW.
The carceral state gets weaponized against self defense by Black trans women and other marginalized genders. I feel then that the right to its use as a form of community consequences and accountable outside of carceral state needs to be defended on those grounds by abolitionists
I affirm transformative and restorative justice. I just think we need to devote as much thinking and skillsharing as we do to those models toward creating cultural infrastructure of material consequences for these niggas + networks of (self) defense for the most marginal
