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Forgiveness isn’t a personally useful frame for abolition because forgiveness + criminal wrongdoing still animates a carceral logic of punitivity where you’re deciding a person is worthy of your mercy and grace. https://twitter.com/thegrapevinetv/status/1335631400687595521
When I got robbed at gunpoint, whether I forgave the person or not is inconsequential. I didn’t press charges because it wasn’t worth weaponizing the state against a black kid in Oakland and marking him with a criminal record that’d stand to deprive him of even more.
Him going to jail wouldn’t get my things back and it wouldn’t un-traumatize me. But it might traumatize him and negatively alter his life in a way that me wanting him to “learn a lesson” in jail wouldn’t have intended.
I still don’t know if I forgive him, but honestly matters a lot less than my understanding of how the anti-black state disciplines. The police didn’t care about me shaking + crying either, the officer I talked to was more concerned about the fact I was “enabling crime.”
