A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending and presenting at the NACRJ (National Association for Community and Restorative Justice) Conference in New Orleans. It was a tremendous gift to learn from so many luminaries and skillful practitioners of restorative justice and to be surrounded by people from across the globe who are committed to fostering a more restorative world.
One of the highlights was a keynote address by Danielle Sered, the Executive Director of Common Justice, which operates a survivor-centered alternative-to-incarceration program that focuses on violent felonies in the adult courts. She is also the author of Until We Reckon, a brilliant book that has been a source of inspiration for me and which I’ve shared about before.
I wanted to use this newsletter to share some of the wisdom from Sered’s keynote because I believe it speaks to a topic that is the business of everyone who lives in the United States – and is relevant for all of us wherever we live – which is to begin to envision what real repair might look like at the end of this current political administration.
Sered offered perhaps a bleak but incisive take on what the future may hold: if we “win,” she said, we will be a failed democracy at best. But she was not hopeless about this reality because of the opportunity to emerge from it and begin on the path toward a multiracial and truly functional democracy, something we have arguably never achieved in this country.
In the rubble of this failed democracy, Sered makes the point that “everyone who has caused harm and everyone who has been harmed will still be here.” For that, she says, we will need to expand our collective capacity for repair, which is a topic that those of us who believe in restorative and transformative justice know something about. Some of us may have an impulse to simply inflict the worst punishment possible on those responsible, whether through incarceration or otherwise. But because our carceral system is a key part of what’s already broken, we must be able to offer credible alternatives that don’t replicate the same destructive systems. As the Black feminist writer, Audre Lorde, said: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” If we are in the market for genuine change, that will require us to be creative, to think beyond what we know and what we’ve seen, to envision something that is truly just.
This was the point in the address in which Sered invited us into this challenging but critical assignment. She instructed us to turn to someone nearby and begin to brainstorm ideas for real repair after the end of this administration. What could that actually look like? Be bold, she encouraged, and if you feel stuck, keep pushing to see what comes up. Perhaps as you are reading this, you might pause and engage in this exercise – on your own or with a partner. What do you think genuine repair could look like after so much destruction, left with a mixed multitude of egregious perpetrators of violence to passive supporters to those irrevocably harmed?
My partner in this activity and I were tentative at first and then begin to generate proposals. We could have some kind of truth and reconciliation commission for those most affected to share about their experiences and where those responsible would hear directly about the harm they had caused. Perhaps this process would lead to a determination of restitution and reparation for the harm. Companies that have profited from unethical collaboration with the administration could lose their corporate charters. We could launch a popular re-education campaign to disseminate factual information about the government’s actions, who has been affected, and who they have actually benefitted. Sered offered other ideas to consider: flooding educators with resources to teach real history, repatriating those who have been deported, taxing billionaires responsible for harm, forgiving all medical and college debt.
Skeptics among us may say this imagining is a fool’s errand. And who knows what may come to pass, what will be possible. But if we aren’t able to propose anything that is truly different than what we know, we are dooming ourselves to remain stuck inside new versions of old structures. In the end, Sered made very clear that the restoring in restorative justice is not to any previous state, but about becoming something we haven’t yet been; it’s about developing the vision of the way we wish to be in community with each other. As she put it, we are “building the world we all deserve” – and for that enormous but wildly hopeful call to action, we must all be ready to strive toward that future.