ABOLITION: "The Prophetic Call for Justice"

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I can't recommend this podcast (Chenjarai Kumanyaki's conversation with Ruth Wilson Gilmore) highly enough!  Of all the reporting I've heard this month, of all the commentary and analysis, this conversation stands out as particularly compelling, historically accurate, and prophetically urgent.  Ruth Wilson Gilmore sees what's happening in the streets.  She's been witness to the evolution of policing over time.  And she bears a powerful message about why the call to "abolish" the "incarceration state" is a call to economic justice, jubilee reparations and communal vitality for peoples of color, and poor and low-wealth peoples as well.  

https://megaphone.link/FLM5509757872

Gilmore carefully describes all the connections, all the ways racism is fueled by capitalist greed, all the ways racism inflicts environmental despair on communities of color, all the ways militarism/policing emerges to control and manipulate that despair for its own financial and political gain.

And almost hidden in this conversation is a short exchange about organizing, about our movements and organizing around justice and systemic change.  She says that the present moment requires movements built not around pity or contempt (does this hit you, because it hits me hard)...but around solidarity and shared suffering.  Pity only calcifies dangerous expectations around race and power and the perpetuation of systems.  Pity moves me to mission, to charity, to the kinds of activity that make me feel good about myself, or relieve me of my guilt for a while.

And contempt?  It has a short shelf-life, in the building of movements and sustained coalitions.  Contempt fires me up; but the fire eventually goes out.  Contempt (again) makes me feel good (or righteous) for a bit; but that feeling flares for a season and wanes.  Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell do and say reprehensible things.  And there are a hundred reasons to give in to contempt every night.  But contempt and pity, alone, are insufficent to build the kind of interracial, multiracial, international, multifaith movement that will bring meaningful repentance and systemic and moral renewal to the US.

Solidarity is a different thing altogether.  Solidarity means relational power.  Solidarity means listening to one another's stories, one another's grievances, one another's hope.  Listening long enough, and attentively enough, so that your story begins to weigh on me, so that your grievance begins to matter to me, so that I begin to organize my life and my week and my work around the conversations we've had and the work we've decided is most important.  Solidarity "encumbers" me to walk with you.  Not because I've lived through everything you have.  Not because I can know what it is -- to be black in America, or to be a farmworker in California, or to be gay in the 21st century --  but because I've listened long enough and carefully enough: to hear you.  And to feel and know that joining you, walking with you, struggling with you makes me human.

As a Christian -- and I think this works for just about every faith tradition -- solidarity is the substance, the heart, the cross itself.  Solidarity is the hard work of love: not the love that makes me feel like I've "made it," but the love that opens my heart to God in my brother, in my sister, in the neighbor down the street, in the sojourner who's just arrived on these shores.  Solidarity is discipleship.  And it's vulnerability, and the life of those who look to God for mercy, strength and sustenance, because this kind of friendship is hard.  This kind of friendship takes time.  This kind of friendship leads us to the Upper Room, to Golgotha, to the cross, and (somehow, some way, someday) beyond.  Freedom.  Communion.  Grace.