From the Community | Transformative Justice – The Stanford Daily

Two weekends ago, a Stanford undergraduate shared a series of images on social media containing explicit endorsements of anti-Black racism, slavery and depictions of violence against other students. There were immediate calls to expel Chaze Vinci to protect Black communities on campus.

Over five thousand signatures have been collected on a petition to have Vinci expelled. To illustrate the threat he poses to our community on campus, screenshots of his arrest record are framed next to his social media posts, alongside a photograph of him smiling in a Stanford T-shirt. Even as University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced Vinci would not be returning to campus this upcoming quarter, students continued to demand he be permanently removed from campus.

As a Black graduate student I understand the hurt, fear and outrage that has surfaced in response to Chaze Vincis online behavior. It has affected me in ways I wont put to words. But Im troubled by how our need for safety has been framed; Im cautious about the strategy that is taking shape.

To substantiate the danger he poses to the Black community, weve widely appealed to Chaze Vincis arrest record. This appeal resonates with a claim at the core of our judicial system: individuals engaged in criminal behavior are a threat to the broader community. Theres a humorless irony in using his past in this way: by invoking criminality in an effort to keep Black students safe, were appealing to the same logic that has been used, historically and presently, to justify state-sanctioned violence against Black communities.

Maybe this approach is necessary. While Stanfords administration bloviates about their progressive social values via email, they have done little to earn the trust of Black students on campus. Anticipating an inadequate administrative response, I can imagine how students would advocate for their safety, first, by employing the most legible narrative available in that moment, and second, by channeling this need through conventional administrative responses, such as expulsion.

But this approach will fail us not simply because were appealing to the same rhetoric used in service of anti-Black racism, but because this strategy is misaligned with our needs as a community.

Violence unfolds across multiple timescales the transient episodes that take place between individuals, the rhythmic imposition of social norms, the glacial construction of economies. Yet so many of our legal and emotional frameworks for conceiving of and responding to violence are fixated on the momentary interactions between individuals. By collapsing the interdependencies between history and intention, context and consequence, we do more than misunderstand the nature of interpersonal harm: our systems for accountability fail to create the conditions necessary for healing, much less address the circumstances that give rise to violence. Instead, we depend almost entirely on a strategy of safety through exclusion, removing community members to keep them from causing further harm a premise of the carceral logic under which our judicial system operates.

Condemned by both liberal and conservative communities on campus, marred by his criminal record, it will be relatively easy for us to exile Vinci. It may even be necessary. But how does this strategy relate to our broader political commitments? When we remove someone from our community, they are forced into other places, with other people; do we have any responsibility to these communities? There is an assumption (or at least a hope) that punishment will lead to some form of behavioral change; if we believe that this change is possible, then, what conditions are best suited to bring about this process? We might believe that people who have harmed others deserve opportunities for healing; what role should accountability play in this process? Critically, how do carceral strategies relate to our capacity to address the structural dimensions of anti-Black racism both on and off campus?

We need to design systems of accountability that enhance not undermine our capacity to address structural forms of violence, systems that are, in their very design, centered on our communitys needs for safety while also preventing further harm. This process will require novel frameworks for holding people who have hurt others accountable, and it must include the recognition that our actions are codetermined by our lived environments not as a route to avoid individual accountability, but to reconceptualize it. So often the harms that take place between individuals reveal broader patterns of institutional violence, economic coercion and social conditioning; to create the environments necessary for healing within our communities, we must dismantle the cultures and institutions that engender this violence.

These ideas have long been operationalized under the rubrics of prison abolition and transformative justice frameworks. In my time at Stanford, Ive met so many people across the University who are committed to these principles. I know that we are all, in our own ways, actively working to understand how we can embody these ideals in our day-to-day lives. In doing so, we are confronted with the same lesson, time and time again: intellectually understanding these ideas doesnt mean we know how to bring them into the world. Because, yes, learning to outmaneuver the prevailing conceptual and administrative frameworks is a formidable task but also because the most intimate aspects of our personal lives (our emotional experiences, desires, fears) have been entrained by deeply unjust institutional practices. These include the ways we respond to harm, yearn for safety, react when we learn weve hurt someone. Speaking to members of the Stanford community about Chaze VInci, so often there is a tension between our political analysis and our emotional needs. Its a difficult feeling to grapple with, especially without a strategy for how we might align the two.

What might that strategy be? And, more generally, how might we respond to Chaze VIncis behaviors within a transformative justice framework? Its easy to hope for neat solutions to this question industry-scale strategies for how we should respond to violence or protect people who have been hurt. But that isnt how developing these practices works, nor should it. As broad as these ideas might seem, transformative justice requires an intimate understanding of the individuals and communities involved, the harm that has been done and the resources we have access to in our response. In fact, adhering to simple heuristics can perpetuate the harm taking place in our communities. Sometimes, well-meaning communities underestimate the challenges that emerge in caring for people who have been harmed or holding the people who have hurt them accountable. Sometimes the systems that take shape are brittle and can easily be exploited, providing cover for individuals to avoid accountability.

It is not necessary that Stanford as a set of policies and administrative practices participate in this process on campus. If nothing else, the work of abolitionist organizers in this country is a testament to the possibility of developing community-based responses to violence even in the face of brutal, totalizing institutions. But there is a world where Stanford commits itself to this project. This commitment would create new possibilities for how we design systems of safety and accountability on campus but it would also come with its own concerns. Especially given institutions and communities steeped in carceral, disciplinary modes of punishment, we have to acknowledge that developing transformative responses to violence will require humility. We might want to establish partnerships with existing organizations and individuals who have been developing transformative justice frameworks in their communities for generations people with experience strategizing around safety and accountability in the face of interpersonal violence and institutional neglect. Fortunately, there are many transformative justice and abolitionist organizations (The Kindred Collective, Project NIA, Safe Outside the System, Sylvia Rivera Law Project) as well as organizers, storytellers, artists and healers within them (Cara Page, Mariame Kaba, Ejeris Dixon, Dean Spade). Reaching out to these organizations and organizers (along with so many others impossible to list here) could provide us with a grounded approach and considerable expertise as we reimagine our administrative and community response to violence. Establishing these kinds of long-term relationships would also create an opportunity to materially support organizations and individuals that are doing transformative work in their communities.

Amid a pandemic, and following a tide of uprisings in response to state-sanctioned violence against Black communities, we are preparing to resume our in-person lives on campus. Fraught as it will be, it is a moment for us to reevaluate what it means for us to be together and to redraw our intentions for the communities we want to create not only in terms of how we respond to harm, but how we cultivate our relationships in the days, months, and years that follow. We owe it to ourselves and to each other.

Originally posted here:

From the Community | Transformative Justice - The Stanford Daily