I want us to have an abundance of skill in facilitation and mediation when what needs to be addressed is at the level of misunderstanding, contradiction, mistake, or conflict. I want us collectively to be able to use precise language and to be comfortable asking each other questions for the sake of providing each other the absolute best, most

These teachers also helped me see the limitations of restorative justice—that it often meant restoring conditions that were fundamentally harmful and unequal, unjust. If the racialized system of capitalism has produced such inequality that someone is hungry and steals a purse to resource a meal, returning the purse with an apology or community

But one layer under that, what I hear is: We cannot change. We do not believe we can create compelling pathways from being harm doers to being healed, to growing. We do not believe we can hold the complexity of a gray situation. We do not believe in our own complexity.

Movements need to become the practice ground for what we are healing towards, co-creating. Movements are responsible for embodying what we are inviting our people into. We need the people within our movements, all socialized into and by unjust systems, to be on liberation paths. Not already free, but practicing freedom every day. Not already beyond

“Instead of asking whether anyone should be locked up or go free, why don’t we think about why we solve problems by repeating the kind of behavior that brought us the problem in the first place?” —Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Moving towards life affirming movements includes asking:

We are afraid, and we think it will assuage our fears and make us safer if we can clarify an enemy, a someone outside of ourselves who is to blame, who is guilty, who is the origin of harm. Can we acknowledge that trauma and conflict can distort our perspective of responsibility and blame in ways that make it difficult to see the roots of the harm?

principled struggle is when we are struggling for the sake of something larger than ourselves and are honest and direct with each other while holding compassion.2 It is when we take responsibility for our own feelings and actions and seek deeper understanding before responding (by asking questions, or reading the referenced materials). It is when

Emergent strategy suggests that we must work hard at getting abolitionist practice functional at a small scale so that large-scale abolition and transformative justice are more visible, rootable, possible.