Rosa K’s Reviews > We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice > Status Update

You cannot have safety without strong, emphatic relationships with others You can have security without relationships but cannot have safety-actual safety-without healthy relationships.

Security and safety aren't the same thing. Security is a function of the weaponized state that is using guns, weapons, fear, and other things to 'make us secure,' right?

Our charge is to make imagining liberation under oppression completely thinkable, to really push ourselves to think beyond the normal in order for us to be able to address the root causes of people's suffering. That's the politics that we should be focused on, a politics that attends to the grievances that people have in their day to day life The everyday. The mundane. Not the spectacular or the excess.

What do the spectacles of policing-as well as the response to it-both reveal and camouflage in regard to the 'terror of the mundane and quotidian,' a terror that is often taken for granted, even in critical commentary?

How do we rightfully account fo the increased militarization of the police as a problem without forgetting what joy James reminds us: 'the dreams and desires of a society and state will be centered on the control of the black body' - or as jared sexton emphasizes: Black people serve as 'the prototypical targets of the panoply of police practices and the judicial infrastructure built up around them'

Amid this, we are left with the difficulty to name both the spectacle and the quotidian violence Black people in the United States experience day after day from the police and the racially deputized. What do we call this incessant violence? How do we describe it beyond the spectacular event? occupation? War? Genocide? Life? Death?

Yet one gets the sense that the only way to generate a modicum of concern or empathy for Black people is to raise the stakes and to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the violations and the suffering. To circulate repeatedly the spectacular in hopes that people consider the everyday. It's a fools errand because it often doesn't garner the response desired or needed.

Understanding that harm originates from situations dominated by stress, scarcity, and oppression, one way to prevent violence is to make sure that people have support to get the things they need. We must also create a culture that enables people to actually take accountability for violence and harm.

Prison is not feminist because it re-creates the same sexual violence and the same fear, the same kinds of oppression. It is the pin on the head of the rapist and sexist system that we live in.

We can’t have complicated conversations about sexual violence because then you are accused of rape apologia, or you are accused of coddling rapists. That is very, very limiting. It means that we are not going to be able to uproot and really solve the problem ultimately.