Maybe all power is an illusion, a lie we tell ourselves and each other? Violence on the other hand is painfully real. All violence is about power though and hence the absurdity in the root of all violence. Violence is worldbuilding and power making. It’s a forceful attempt to turn an absurd lie into a false reality.
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“I think also interpersonally that I might be able to numb out to another person’s pain that I might be causing is part of how hurt and harm can work.”
-Dean Spade with Shira Hassan in a podcast
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“The stories we tell about our suffering define what we can imagine doing about it.”
- Aurora Levins Morales
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Find out here about Cassius Marcellus Clay, the fearsome and fearless abolitionist Muhammad Ali was named after
Cassius Marcellus Clay: The Fearsome Abolitionist Muhammad Ali Was Named After
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The Power Of The Christian Worldview
Everyone has a worldview.
Some people think they don’t. But everyone interprets life through a set of assumptions about God, truth, morality, suffering, purpose, and eternity. Your worldview is the lens through which you see everything — politics, family, money, sexuality, success, pain, and death.
The question is not whether you have a worldview.
The question is: Is your worldview strong…
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Reading The Color of Violence again by Incite! women of color. And like… if ever there was a case against abolition, it’s in this book lmfao. In two out of the three case studies of transformative justice after a man raped someone, the aggressor did not comply lmao. It is almost laughable if it wasn’t for the fact that baked into every procedure is the externalisation of harm onto the body of the woman.
I quote:
Scenario 1
Dan is a Black man in an urban area who is active in the movement to end racial profiling and police brutality. He is also works with young people to organize against institutional racism at an organization called Youth Empowered. He is well-known by progressives and people of color in the area and popular in the community. Over the course of three years, four young Black women (ages twenty-one and younger) who were being mentored by Dan approached CARA staff with concerns about ongoing sexual harassment within their activist community. Sexual harassment tactics reported by the young women included Dan bringing young people that he mentored to strip clubs, approaching intoxicated young women who he mentored to have sex with them, and having conversations in the organizing space about the size of women’s genitals as it relates to their ethnicity. The young women also asserted that institutional sexism within the space was a serious problem at Youth Empowered. Young women had fewer leadership opportunities and their ideas were dismissed.
[…]
Although we think that this work has created a safer environment at Youth Empowered, Dan still has not been accountable for his behavior. That is to say, he has not admitted that what he did was wrong or taken steps to reconcile with the people who he targeted at Youth Empowered. However, at the time of writing, we expect that he’ll continue to go to these meetings where these conversations about sexual violence (including his own) will be discussed in the context of building a liberation movement for all Black people.
Scenario 2
Kevin is a member of the alternative punk music community in an urban area. His community is predominantly young, white, multigendered, and includes a significant number of queer folks. Kevin and his close-knit community, which includes his band and their friends, were told by two women that they had been sexually assaulted at recent parties. The aggressor, Lou, was active and well-known in the music community, and he was employed at a popular club. Lou encouraged the women to get drunk and then forced them to have sex against their will.
[…]
Some members of the community may regret that they were ultimately unable to compel Lou to follow their demands. However, CARA feels that it’s not unreasonable to think that their work did have a significant impact on Lou. After experiencing the full force of collective organizing which asserted that his behavior was unacceptable, we venture to guess that Lou might be less likely to act in manipulative and abusive ways. In any case, we think their work may have also compelled other members of the community to think critically about the way in which consent operates in their sexual encounters, which is important work in preventing future sexual violence. Also, it’s important to remember that this community did, in fact, stay with their accountability process for the long haul-they now simply have their sights set higher than Lou.
The Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence; Taking Risks Implementing Grassroots Community Accountability Strategies, by a collective of women of color from Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA), p.256-259 (scenario 1) and p. 260-263 (scenario 2). Emphasis is my own
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My thoughts on this: Failure! Abject, resounding, complete failure! And it’s all couched in vague cracker language!! “We expect” “conversations” “some may regret” “we venture to guess” “might be less likely”.
So it’s radical abolition all the way up until a man sexually harms a woman and then suddenly everyone defaults to sounding like a White House press secretary??
Also, the entire process is just centred around humanising the rapist man, protecting the rapist man from the prison system, ensuring the comfort of the rapist man throughout the process. Not once did I read of anything centring the victims mentality or process. Not once!!
Patriarchal! Mind bendingly patriarchal!! It’s giving plantation it’s giving obsequious African slave trader at Elmina Castle smilingly inviting the Europeans to take a look at the Africans held below, and trying to placate the wailing aggrieved families of the captives out the other side of their mouth. I swear, we Black people will never be free until we can stamp out this tendency of those among us to rush to placate the enemy.
It’s not just that they failed, what is gagging me is that they refuse to reckon with the failure in any meaningful way. It’s like when someone already has their conclusion and does their experiment after. The experiment does not produce the results they want, so they simply bend language until failure resembles success. Genuinely disgusting.
I encourage people to read it for themselves to draw their own conclusions.
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IL Y A 178 ANS | Abolition de la peine de mort politique ➽ http://bit.ly/Abolition-Peine-Mort-Politique
Le 26 février 1848 marque une étape majeure dans la suppression de la peine de mort. Un sénateur du Second Empire explique en 1867 l’évolution de la peine de mort en France. Il montre comment, de la suppression de la torture à la loi de 1832, puis à l’abolition de la peine capitale en matière politique en 1848 et 1853, la législation a progressivement humanisé la justice sans renoncer à l’ordre social
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Reading of the Week!
Hello all! This week’s reading: “Visualizing the unequal treatment of LGBTQ people in the criminal justice system” by Alexi Jones discusses the over-representation of queer individuals in the United States’ prison system and the potential reasons for this.
Jones cites research which found that 20% of youth in the juvenille justice system are queer, compared to the 4-6% in the general population. Queer adults were found to be 2.25% more likely to be arrested than straight individuals.
Further, a study by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force found that 1 in 5 trans people who had contact with police were harassed by police. The National Transgender Discrimination Survey found that 1 in 6 trans people have been incarcerated, and at some point, 47% of black transgender people have been incarcerated.
This article directly relates to the work we do at Power Blossoms, and it is often an underdiscussed aspect of criminal justice reform. We encourage you to read the article as Jones goes into further detail and gives suggestions for further research.
Visualizing the unequal treatment of LGBTQ people in the criminal justice system
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‘Chain-Gang All-Stars’ by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
This book falls in the same genre as 1984 or Brave New World, where Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah takes an already existing shortcoming of our society and expands it to its most literal/visible sense through the lens of sci-fi. Violence and profit have always been intertwined, and media’s investment in the former is just one of many. The individual must retaliate.
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Slave Hounds and Abolition in the Americas*
We were casually watching the Westminster dog show’s hound group final and the Bloodhound was introduced as a dog bred to “track escaped criminals and other lost persons” and I nearly choked with rage.
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Sassetta, The Blessed Ranieri Frees the Poor from a Prison in Florence (1437-44)
And yet it wasn’t this unassuming image that I took with me as my final impression as I was driven out of the temple but rather the thought of a panel, also almost miniature, in which Saint Rainerius flew through the air, in front of the smooth wall of the prison in which he had blown a hole, with a wave of his hand, in order to free the paupers who had been thrown into the cellar. The saint wasn’t floating: he was roaring around like a bullet, his legs disappearing in a flaming cloud. The wall that he was set against was of a cool gray, a few of the prisoners had already escaped from the hole at its juncture with the smooth earth, fleeing toward the left on the square and into an alleyway off in the distance, while another, in gown and belt, was in the process of heaving himself out of the dungeon. There was a tiny, dark door in the foreground, above some steps on the short side of the building, with the opening revealing the thickness of the stone walls. The bleak, cube-like building took up two-thirds of the space of the image, the gray scale was divided into three, from the light gray of the shadowless, regular surface of the ground to the muted gray of the front with the protruding staircase. The building in the background on the corner of the alleyway, half castle, half market hall, exhibited arrow slits at the top, and beneath, a row of arched, shuttered windows bore slanted awnings which sheltered the stalls, the doors of which were pulled shut. The patch of sky in the upper left and the halo of Rainerius were rendered in gold leaf.
—Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance (Volume 2)
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The Frederick Douglas Bicentennial
As he was born into slavery, Frederick Douglass (Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, 1818-1895) had no idea of his exact date of birth, although he traditionally celebrated it on Valentine’s Day. Two hundred years ago! To quote a famous idiot, Douglass “is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job, and is being recognized more and more”.
Douglass was about 20 when he escaped his…
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Abolition du PEQ et immigration en région
L’entêtement idéologique de la CAQ et du PQ nuiront à Chicoutimi, martèle Québec solidaire
Continue reading Abolition du PEQ et immigration en région
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Reading of the Week!
Hi all! This week, we’re looking at the history of deviancy and social fear in the United States again.
“The Strange Particularity of the Lover’s Preference”: Pedophilia, Pornography, and the Anatomy of Monstrosity in Lolita by Frederick Whiting outlines the birth of “stranger danger” in the United States in the 1950’s and how this increased inter-community surveillance. Whiting illustrates how stranger danger, specifically in sexual assault cases, is generally a myth. Often, like in Lolita, the abuser is well known by the victim and is respected within their community.
“Stranger danger” allows for the over-policing of minority communities and it forces us into a permanent state of suspicion of our peers, which is counterproductive in building community.
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everyone and their mother is an abolitionist but it somehow comes back to meaning so little
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Québec Solidaire
Québec solidaire se mobilise contre l’abolition du PEQ
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