We’re fresh off some local, state and national wins in elections, education, and environmental justice. These are significant victories, and we should take the time to celebrate and reflect on them. However, I have seen people quickly move on to the next issue or “ism” to address. I want to caution against this, especially for the Black community and other non-White people, who are often expected to always be in the fight. Before I continue, I want to emphasize that yes, we should fight and resist. But that is not all we should do. Approaching organizing and advocacy in a linear way can lead to mental and physical issues, as we carry the trauma of this work in our bodies. Instead, we should develop an abolitionist framework with our organizing.
Abolition is not just about burning things down or ending something; it also represents community care, love, healing, accountability and mutual aid. Moreover, reimagining the systems and institutions that have caused harm. Since people make up these systems, it’s crucial to challenge their thinking and engage in ways that will elevate their consciousness. Utilizing this framework, which is rooted in community care, mutual aid, and healing, is essential to conducting community organizing that will result in genuine transformation.
Community care is about not pushing capitalist views of labor and productivity onto people. Seeing individuals as more than means to meet grant goals. This approach seeks to shift from transactional community organizing and forming connections based on trauma bonds. Instead, it promotes creating community solutions to prevent, interrupt, and heal from harm caused by oppressive institutions.
Another key element to this is mutual aid, a community-based support not connected to institutions or nonprofits. You generally see this done in response to a lack of aid from a government or in crisis situations. However, this is something that we should be doing routinely as a collective. We can learn a lot from prison abolitionists in this context, specifically with their ability to practice “radical revisioning” that is at times required to survive within the prison system (Davis 2003). This is centered on the ability to form relationships. Due to the formal rules that enforce punishment for minor infractions and the hierarchical structure involving those in “trustee” positions, much of this occurs informally and goes underground, despite the risks of misconduct charges (Weil & Fayter, 2020). They show up as acts of resistance by creating care packages with low resources, cooking, providing mentorship, and lending supplies, etc. Truly building safety through relationships and community. This belief that there are various ways to create safety is directly connected to abolition.
With healing, abolitionists push the need to accept that there are other forms of healing, not connected to traditional Western practices of therapy. It makes space for us to go back to our ancestral ways of healing by using water, root workers, and herbs. Developing rest practices that involve stillness, meditation, and intentional breathing that leads to healthy resistance. We can’t lose this in our movement work, and now more than ever, with the uncertainty with leadership, it’s time to reclaim these practices!
To fully implement an abolitionist framework, we must unlearn the ways in which we have internalized whiteness, such as the ideas of urgency and individualism. It’s important to acknowledge the contradictions we live with and remain open to principled struggles and continuous learning. Furthermore, engage in collective reading and studying, take time to rest, and foster community connections with others.