a-blog-about-emergent-stategies

[a-blog-about-emergent-stategies]

Pandowrimo 

The Pandowrimo chapter of Practicing New Worlds includes a series of writings by Ritchie that respond to several prompts from adrienne maree brown early on in the COVID-19 pandemic. The first is a conversation between humanity itself and the virus. The virus knows that humanity will not learn from yet another catastrophe. The second writing envisions a past where revolution was achieved, and emergent strategies were employed, a world where the systems that made it so hard for us to make it through the pandemic were already gone. The third chronicles an alternative parallel reality where all the precautions of other countries were taken and then some. A world where people were sick, but they got better. They healed through collectivism, interdependence, and adaptation. The fourth tells the story of the pandemic from the perspective of nature and the plants. They did not appreciate our absence, in fact they missed our moments of joy and living when all they saw was tragedy. Finally, the fifth writing pictures the millions of souls that passed away through those years and what came to be of them afterwards. There is nothing concrete, with each possibility lined up in their entirety.

I really wish I had had these prompts when I was living through the pandemic, or at least Ritchie’s responses. Each one heals a wound left by the pandemic; each one represents a collective trauma that will take decades to heal for all of us. Each also completely embodies emergent strategies. They envision worlds where abolition happened and we all survived, where we worked together, where we recover from what has happened and keep on fighting.

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Abolition Creates More Possibilities (That We Can’t Possibly Imagine)

Abolition in the end, is about vision. We must have vision in order to reach abolition. We have lived so long in fear of policing and incarceration that it can be hard to find a way out of them without a little bit of creativity. To actualize our dreams we must come up with different pathways. No country or states abolition is going to look exactly alike. No person’s abolition will look identical. And that’s good! This imagination gives us hope, in creating these new worlds and possibilities we reveal every way in which we can move further from the systems we are under. Learning to bring in this creativity and coming from a place of love in our organizing makes room for a more joy in our organizing. And joy and pleasure make great motivators. Practicing New Worlds and the activists in draw from talk about these strategies like tending the soil to grow the seeds. We don’t have say over things we can’t control, but there certainly are things we are capable of.

This section speaks to me particularly as someone with one leg in academia and one leg in the arts. I have always loved artistry and I have always loved science, writing, history, and analysis. I am both a researcher and an artist. I see the importance in abundant creativity and expression as well as the hard and fast facts. This chapter goes to reinforce how people who might not have a foot in both worlds can always contribute to the abolitionist movement. We need creative visionaries to picture our future just as much as we need analytical minds to find our next step.

This is a podcast episode featuring Walidah Imarisha, one of adrienne maree brown's collaborators and a big champion for visionary fiction, that covers visionary fiction's role in emergent strategies.

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Albina Zone by Lisa Bates

Albina Zone by Lisa Bates is another piece of visionary fiction. This time we follow Tayshia, a girl that realizes that even post abolition there are still things to fight for. Albina, Portland, Oregon is a historically black part of Portland that has been affected by city planning and gentrification. In Albina Zone it is now separate from other areas and abolition has been achieved. In spite of this Tayshia still sees the issues going on at her school and the indecisiveness that exists within it. She sees the problems that still exist within her community, even after great strives were made. This aspect of the narrative is a good reminder that even after abolition is achieved, there will still be work to be done.

Tayshia’s main conflict is with her mother, who is somewhat distant and doesn’t tell Tayshia about the events of the past and how they got to where they are now. Tayshia starts to learn about these events when she has visions while listening to her mother’s old music, realizing at the climax that her mother was a part of the rallies and movement that led to the major shift. In the end they realize that they had seen each other, that the reasons for continuing to fight were something that could bring them together. This speaks to the importance of the generation that comes before us. When there is still fighting to be done, the people after us must learn how to join the fight. There is the possibility that abolition may not be reached in my lifetime, I can only hope that I work to teach those coming after me all that I’ve learned.

The Albina Vision Trust (or AVT) is working to envision and create an inclusive and diverse Albina. With focuses on intentionality, art, possibilities, and healing, it's not hard to connect the AVT to both this writing and emergent strategies.

Grrrl Like by Dope Saint Jude feels like one of the songs that Tayshia's mom might've listened to, it sounds like something that could speak from Tayshia's perspective. She is standing up to fight in the face of systems too.

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Tending the Acre by Shawn Taylor

Tending the Acre by Shawn Taylor is one of the examples of visionary fiction included in Practicing New Worlds. Visionary fiction is fictional writing that project worlds where, in this case, abolition has been achieved or that help to heal the traumas of our world that exists before abolition. It follows Marquise Hanks, a former prisoner convicted for murder, after his release and the start to his subsequent period of healing and recovery.

To me, this narrative tackles two of the most common questions non-abolitionists ask when they learn about the abolitionist movement: “What about the murderers?” and “What would we have instead of the police?”. For me these two questions are answered similarly to how they are answered in Tending the Acre, through movements of healing, recovery, and a non-policing vigilance. Two of the most interesting aspects of this narrative to me were the importance of choice and confrontation. Marquise is given choices in where he wants to be, with the staff of the place where he’s recovering know that prisoners might be alarmed by sudden lack of walls or they might crave it. However, Marquise is not given the most choice when it comes to recovery, it is not completely forced, he is not in another prison or mental hospital, but staying within the program seems suggested. There are two main problems Marquise confronts, meeting the mother of the person whom he killed and meeting his daughter, whose mother has moved on from him in his time incarcerated. These are real things that real prisoners would have to face if they were freed, accountability would be necessary. These things are hard for Marquise to do, but he gets through them, and they seem to help him. Not every one of the people in jail is a cold-blooded killer, most aren’t.

MERJ, or Migrants and Ethnic-minorities for Reproductive Justice, have also answered some other common questions that get asked in response to abolitionism.

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Abolition is Cooperative and Focused on Collective Sustainability 

Practicing New Worlds also takes into account the connections abolition has to economic justice and sustainability. Ritchie does this by focusing on solidarity economies and ways that the people have worked to exist at least in part outside of the capitalist system. People can learn to care for each other and provide as a collective. I personally love how this encourages us in America (especially in white households) to break away from norms like individualism and being able to care for yourself on your own.

I personally struggle with this concept, even though I love the idea of being able to exist outside of capitalism. I struggle to ask for help when I need it, even though I tend to need more help than some others due to disability. It is difficult for me to ask for assistance that could add so much to my quality of life. I could create an alphabetized list of times I have not been able to do something because I did not ask for help, clarification, or simply someone to exist by my side. Solutions like solidarity economies and mutual aid give me hope not just for myself but for every other person that struggles financially, physically, mentally, or emotionally.

Both of these songs, Eat Your Young by Hozier and XS by Rina Sawayama express frustration with overconsumption and our society's lack of cooperation through the point of view of the over consumers and the rich while also exploring what that means for the generations to come and our current world.

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Abolition is Nonlinear and Iterative

With movements, it’s also important to focus on the next right step, rather than trying to plan further than that; none of us are time travelers, we can’t always predict action and reaction. Abolition as nonlinear and iterative is about how often things tend to change, and planning for that change won’t always help us. Repetition is going to happen, but like a time loop (my mind is apparently set on time travel), we should always learn from that repetition. Because we know things might repeat, we know what we need to change till we get to our goal. 

The concepts of nonlinear growth and cycles feel like healing salves for our rapidly changing world. To me it felt like reassurance. One of the scariest things about being for abolition (and any social movement like it) is how quickly our world seems to be going against it; how long our carceral systems have been in place; the fact that our country was built on enslavement; how we have to continue to fight for the same things. There is reassurance that we have made progress and that we can make progress again, as long as we pay attention to the changes that are occurring.  

For me, the seasons make a really good visualization for the iterative-ness of abolition, even though they are linear. Each season always occurs every year, but they are never the same from year to year and from place to place.

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Abolition is Adaptive and Intentional

We all eventually adapted to or became desensitized to the pandemic, it would have been nice to find that adaptation and intentionality earlier on.

As Andrea J. Ritchie describes, we often interpret change as a crisis. A lot of people who are afraid of the movement for abolition might simply not be able to picture that change, it might scare them. When we adapt and accept change, we can respond more quickly and more affectively. When we focus on adaption there is less time devoted to meticulous planning. This however, does not mean that there is no organization. In Practicing New Worlds adaptation is emphasized alongside intentionality. These two concepts used together can also help to avoid the normalization that might come with new changes. If new legislation is passed, if another pandemic rears it’s head, we see that change and react to it in an organized manner.

I really wish we had held to these principles as whole in our country during the pandemic. People in communities who were hit hardest by the virus, namely people are marginalized racial identities and the disabled community, no doubt learned to adapt. They were forced to. However, we wouldn’t have had to seen that devastation and experienced that normalization, if our country was able to work together as a whole at the first person in the US who contracted the virus. I only hope that if another situation like it surfaces, the people, at least, will know to adapt and be with each other.

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Abolition is Decentralized and Rooted in Interdependence Pt. II

Cassian just before inciting a collective prison escape

A big part of Emergent Strategies (the book by adrienne maree brown) is the involvement of her interest in Sci-Fi with both emergent strategies and visionary fiction. In fact, one visionary fiction practice brought up by Andrea Ritchie is writing out liberation for a preexisting fictional world. I wanted to look at a fictional world that has already exemplified decentralization and interdependence. So I'm talking a bit about Star Wars' "Andor". Andor is a surprisingly radical piece of media coming from Disney. If I ever recommend any Star Was to someone it is going to be Andor. There is no real need to understand the universe to understand the show. It covers the story of how Rogue One's deuteragonist Cassian Andor joined the rebellion, and it's pretty easy to tell that story has extremely strong themes of prison abolition, racism, revolution, and police violence. It deals with these issues with a lot of tact for something that exists within the Star Wars Franchise.

I specifically want to talk about episode ten "One Way Out", which among other things, shows a prison riot incited by Cassian within an Empire owned labor prison where he is incarcerated for a crime he didn't commit. I think the riot pretty nicely captures these concepts on decentralization and interdependence for those with less experience. While Cassian and his floor manager Kino do make a speech over the facility intercom, there are no real leaders. Each section or "floor" leads themselves. We see prisoners explicitly helping each other, with Kino encouraged at one point in his speech, "You need to help each other. You see someone who's confused, someone who is lost, you get them moving and you keep them moving until we put this place behind us,".

Andor makes, in my mind, a brilliant piece of introductory abolitionist media. While it's not perfect, I think it, and projects like it, could do a great deal to making abolitionism more accessible for the public.

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Abolition is Decentralized and Rooted in Interdependence

This is the third edition of Roger Peet's Screen print titled "Organize 2020"

Decentralization and interdependence are two other elements important to abolition. Less top-down power allows for more situational reactions that fit with different areas. Practicing New Worlds offers the imagery of the murmuration of starlings as a way of representing both decentralization and interdependence, an analogy I enjoy quite a bit. There is an emphasis on these two concepts as a necessary pair. Decentralization does not work without interdependence, organization, and connection, and interdependence is strengthened by a collective decentralized movement. We all need to act and work towards abolition, but we all need to work together, in tandem.

I think it can be hard to picture movements without leaders. We go automatically to the biggest leaders of these successful movements, when those actions were occurring all over the place without those leaders there. They could see what was working and acted. To me this seems like one of the biggest roadblocks to successful abolition. Due to the advent of social media and this dependence on leaders, it feels as if our movements are disconnected from each other. There is no doubt that people are moving, they know action needs to be taken, but they wait for others to take those steps for them, instead of finding their role, their niche.

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Relationships Evolving Possibilities 

Relationships evolving possibilities (or REP) describe themselves as “ ...a network of dedicated abolitionists showing up to support others in moments of crisis or urgency, with care and respect for the full dignity and autonomy of the people in crisis,” and they operate under their main values of black love and liberation, radical consent, and ancestral knowledge. They mainly focus on their Radical Ecosystem Pods and Revolutionary Emergency Partners. Radical Ecosystem Pods are connections of neighbors and community members that come together to help each other in emergency, and Revolutionary Emergency Partners are responders who are part of a hotline addressing nonviolent calls usually made to 911. REP represents (heh) an organization that finds ways to replace certain strains of policing and systems that operate under punitive justice with community-based solutions focused on love and healing rather than violence and oppression. 

I for one, would love to see more organizations like REP pop up around the world, ones that can fit into their own communities and help them in the best ways possible. I dream of a world where everyone can receive help in crisis, where those deemed dangerous due to mental illness or race are not shot by police, and where connections in community strengthen and bring us together. 

While they don't have options for every city, Don't Call The Police provides alternatives to contacting the police in cities across America. This is similar to the work that REP does, focusing on specific cities.

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Abolition is Fractal

Practicing new worlds is about the application of emergent strategies to the abolition movement, and one of the core elements of emergent strategies is fractals. This is the idea that what we practice on the small scale will spiral out to affect things on a larger scale and vice versa. This concept really brings into focus how we can practice abolition at the human level, internally, in our relationships, and in our communities. It’s about replicating and practicing the abolitionist worlds we dream about both internally and externally and balancing our more lofty goals and the ones that we can fulfill today. There is also a particular necessity for accountability work and practice. We need to find practices that work at different levels with surety and purpose, and make sure that we aren’t practicing policing at an interpersonal level. 

This concept is of particular interest to me, and makes sense in tandem with the transformative justice framework and mutual aid. Transformative justice (or TJ) is about focusing on healing in community and rehabilitation instead of punitive justice and punishing individuals for harm they cause and mutual aid is a organization strategy that about helping those in your community in any way that you can, often focusing on resources and work that individuals and groups need help with. Both of these practices are about practicing in opposition to the carceral and punitive justice systems, and doing so at a fractal level. Mutual aid has taught me how to better live in community, something I cannot take for granted.

This is a non exhaustive map of different mutual aid networks and organization within the United States.

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General Info

This blog is devoted to my reading of Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies by Andrea J. Ritchie. All of the posts reference it's contents and concepts.

As each post relates to a chapter from the book, I suggest reading them in the order they appear:

Abolition is Fractal 

Relationships Evolving Possibilities 

Abolition is Decentralized and Rooted in Interdependence (Pt. I)

Abolition is Decentralized and Rooted in Interdependence (Pt. II)

Abolition is Adaptive and Intentional 

Abolition is Nonlinear and Iterative 

Abolition is Cooperative and Focused on Collective Sustainability 

Tending the Acre by Shawn Taylor 

Albina Zone by Lisa Bates 

Abolition Creates More Possibilities (That We Can’t Possibly Imagine) 

Pandowrimo 

The banner of this blog is from Molly Costello, an artist featured in the book.

And my avatar is a photo of the cover of the book from Apple Books.