- Punishment is not justice.
A lot of us are drawn to
feminism because of anger.
We're angry our partners,
our brothers, our fathers.
We're angry at teachers who'd say
that girls are just not
good at math or science.
We're angry at popular
depictions of women in the media
that say that we're weak
or overly emotional.
And Audre Lorde already told us
that it's not the anger
itself that's the problem.
We don't have to stifle
it or be ashamed of it.
In fact, anger can be an
effective jumping off point
for a useful politic.
It can be a tool.
Lorde says in her essay,
The Uses of Anger,
that every woman has a storage of anger
that is potentially
transformative, potentially.
When we're angry about
injustice, that anger is valid.
But the question of what
we do with that anger
once we acknowledge its
presence is an important one.
Audre's emphasis on
potential here is critical
because anger itself is
not inheritability radical.
It doesn't innately give us
anything besides catharsis.
So, we have to think about
where that anger is leading us.
What is it prompting us to do?
When we're angry, it's normal
for us to want retribution,
to seek out revenge, and
we're socialized in a culture
that tells that's the right thing to do,
but punishment is not justice.
As a feminist, I'm not looking
for the pleasure of enacting pain,
and I'm definitely not perfect
because I've been swept up in the joy
of seeing people suffer, but
I wanna divest from that.
That joy can easily become perverse.
And in the United States,
a country that incarcerates
more people than any other,
I have to be very cognizant
of how I reproduce
these ideas of carcerality in my thinking.
When people do bad things,
and bad is in quotation marks
because that's subjective,
the easiest thing to do is to
label them and disappear them.
Disposability is a pillar of
the prison industrial complex.
But if we believe
as lawyer and activist
Bryan Stevenson says,
that people are not worst
thing they've ever done,
that can't be the path.
I loved an article by Wendy C. Ortiz
that talked about the
danger of classifying people
using binaries after we've been harmed.
Wendy is a survivor of sexual abuse.
She says, this restrictive
narrative does not allow
the full humanity of the victim/survivor
or the abuser/perpetrator,
and labeling peoples as one of the other
perpetuates the cyclical nature of abuse.
It dehumanizes one set of
people, quote predators,
as a way to superficially address
the needs of another set
of people, quote victims,
and how easily we forget
that most of us have been
both victim and perpetrator.
And this is where we talk
about restorative justice
because incarcerating
people or isolating them
does not undo harm.
It doesn't undo the physical
or discursive violence or abuse,
and it doesn't do any work toward
creating a world where that
harm does not happen again.
In fact, our current dominant paradigms
do the exact opposite.
So, not only are those means
of dealing with people
who fuck up unstrategic,
they don't even align with
my ideological worldview.
As a feminist, I believe in
the possibility of change,
both individually and structurally.
As long as people are still alive,
change is not off the table.
I wanna refrain from reproducing harm
because better is always possible,
and if it's not, why even do this?
Why even care about injustice?
It would be much easier
to just go through life being apathetic.
I say that while acknowledging
that needs of the people
who've been harmed
should always be centered,
and we can do that while developing
reconciliation mechanisms for
people who wanna do better,
who admit fault.
There's no need to
permanently discard them,
and I'm not talking about
what we do individually.
We can all set our own boundaries.
I'm talking about the ethos
we adopt as a society.
I'm 29, I've made lots of mistakes,
I've taken tons of bad positions,
but I am grateful for
the ability to come back.
It's so easy when we think
we're woke and know it all
to sit up on our high horses
and castigate the folks
who don't know better.
As I've gotten older and
realized how dumb I was,
my stance on this has changed,
but we gotta do somethin'
else, that's not it.
Thank you so much for watching.
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Thanks guys.
(gentle music)
