Locked Down, Locked Out (22 page)

As I exit the school, preparing to step out into the thick, damp heat, I think of what “community building” might have meant for my sister’s teenage years. Kayla’s downturn started when she began to get in trouble in school and was promptly discarded from our high school and sent to a higher-security school to be with the “bad kids.” That school’s goals were straightforward: enforcing the rules and getting the kids out as soon as possible, often not encouraging them to meet the requirements needed to enter college. Another of its goals: to root out the problem children from the regular high school, to promote “safety” for the “good kids.” Soon after her transfer, Kayla tumbled into a spiraling sequence of probation, then juvenile detention, then a series of isolating rehabs, then jail, then prison. Who knows what would have happened if, at the slippery turning point, she’d been met with a welcoming community. Who knows—she might have found that physical place of peace, that place filled with familiar voices and just the right kind of silence. She might even have found a place of safety—or even better, freedom—in her mind.

“Where People Go Naturally”: Peace Salons

Peace, of course, does not have to live in a room. A couple of months after my Umoja experience, I get in touch with Tasha Wilkerson, a youth services coordinator at a church in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, and a person who is intent on harvesting those peacemaking moments. Austin is a poor, predominantly black community on the city’s West Side. It’s home to the most-incarcerated block in the city.
¹²
As Tasha watched top-down violence “prevention” efforts in her community stop and start and
stop again without making a dent, she grappled for a new framework, asking herself what moments of connection already thrived in this community and how they could be transformed into opportunities for making peace. What were the natural settings for “peace rooms” to materialize in Austin, and who would be the peacekeepers?

Tasha’s answer: Hair salons, and the barbers who run them, often the recipients of their clients’ stories of daily sadnesses, joys, conflicts, and connections. “I was thinking about the youth in the community and was considering where they go naturally, and who they trust to share what’s really going on with them and in the street,” she tells me. “I thought of salon owners because they are non-threatening, and youth go there for grooming on a regular basis on their own and accompanying their friends.”

“Salons,” in all their denotations, have always been places to which people gravitate to argue, discuss, and contemplate the big problems that rock the world and their own minds. They have ranged down the years from the Italian salons of the seventeenth century, in which well-to-do thinkers gathered at court to expound on philosophy and literature, to the vaguely rebellious French public salons that sort-of-welcomed commoners, to twentieth-century modernist gatherings geared toward imagining new genres of expression, to the African American-run beauty salons of the Jim Crow era that served as sites of economic independence and springboards for activism, to the contemporary salons that carry on that tradition, along with fostering conversations around gender, health, life struggles, culture, and relationships.

Dr. Tiffany Gill, author of
Beauty Shop Politics
, notes the historical importance of “how intentional beauticians were in using their space for political and health engagement and how these shops were linked to a national network. Women were often taught
in beauty colleges how to engage their clients politically.... This was something that was very intentional, very thought-through, very much organized at the local, state and national level.”
¹³

Like the mid-century beauty school activists, Tasha set up a program at her church to train salon owners, this time in the art of the peace circle. The program’s only been around a few months at the time of my interview, and, Tasha tells me, the salon owners haven’t been convening formally structured circles. Instead, they’ve begun slipping in the new techniques in a more impromptu way, haircut by haircut, when a conversation veers toward issues of ongoing conflict or violence. “The owners of salons use the peacekeeping and circle-keeping skills in their regular day-to-day interactions with their clients,” Tasha says. The idea is not to implement a standard response to problems, but to create an environment of honesty, understanding, and accountability where, ideally, the kernels of problems can be dealt with before they develop into deeper harm. In an interview with a local news network, Chicago organizer Cheryl Graves explains that the barber interventions are most useful for confronting interpersonal conflicts that might erupt into violence—disputes over girlfriends or boyfriends, or perceptions of disrespect.
¹⁴

Peter Newman, who coordinates the Juvenile Justice & Child Protection Resource Section of the Chicago area’s Circuit Court, has long urged the development of non-policing, alternative approaches to responding to harm. He is ecstatic about Tasha’s efforts. He tells me, “We should be going to policymakers and saying, ‘God, you’re spending millions and millions of dollars on police and violence prevention—but look what just happened in Austin! They’re supporting barbers and beauticians in doing this work.’ This is how justice happens, when the structure is up to the individual communities. That’s what’s powerful.”

Challenging the Idea of “Stranger”

What constitutes an “individual community”? Some of the most pernicious strains of violence are the forces that drive people from their homes, that inhibit even the idea of a permanent—or, at least, reliably existent—community. War does that. Settler colonialism does that. Gentrification does that. So does prison. Addressing that scattering and isolation has become a key focus of the Brooklyn-based Safe OUTside the System (SOS) collective (part of the Audre Lorde Project), which works to challenge violence that affects lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, two-spirit, and gender-nonconforming people of color. SOS’s Safe Neighborhood Campaign recruits places like religious institutions, schools, local businesses, and other public spots to become Safe Spaces, which agree to offer sanctuary to those fleeing violence and cultivate atmospheres of safety in daily life. The Safe Spaces have stickers in their windows so community members can identify them. Employees are educated about transphobia and homophobia and trained in addressing violence without calling the cops. Current Safe Spaces include bakeries, cafes, art galleries, a nightclub, and community organizing centers.

Alok Vaid-Menon, a collective member, tells me that especially in a rapidly gentrifying area like Central Brooklyn, it’s crucial to “challenge the idea of ‘stranger,’” to connect neighbors who might otherwise never meet due to the flux of people moving—or being forced—out and in. “The creation of Safe Spaces is ... about bringing people together so that we can all see ourselves in community,” Alok says. People who see each other, who realize they share a home, may well be more willing to intervene in a violent situation, more able to offer support to people facing violence, and better equipped to strengthen the community in ways that prevent violence in the first place.

Part of the process of creating safe space is transforming the conditions that pave the way for violence. Trans and gender-nonconforming people often face harassment, abuse, and violence in public restrooms, and are sometimes denied entry. Recently, SOS members worked with a Safe Space to provide gender-neutral bathrooms, aiming both to prevent the immediate violence that occurs in bathrooms and to foster a larger sense of collective safety for people of all genders.

As the Safe Neighborhood Campaign gains steam, members are hoping to take on other functions for which many people currently turn to police and prisons, such as investigating violent incidents and holding attackers accountable.
¹⁵
Alok says, “This is about making our communities recognize the power of resistance and safety that we already have!”

Growing Grace and Wisdom

Di Grennell is a Maori antiviolence activist living in northern New Zealand. Her town, Whangarei, and surrounding areas carry the weight of centuries of colonial violence—large-scale abuse that has traumatized residents and fueled domestic abuse in many families.

Di speaks of her brother-in-law, who, throughout his childhood, was regularly beaten at school for speaking his first language. In his adult life, despite his considerable wisdom and generosity, he often reacts to interpersonal problems with violence. One day, when his son threw a rock while playing and accidentally shattered the window of his father’s car, the whole family knew the boy was in for a severe beating unless someone intervened. In an interview with the Oakland-based Storytelling & Organizing Project—part of the larger group Creative Interventions, mentioned in the previous chapter—Di describes
how her relatives quickly mobilized to both shelter the boy and spur transformation:

[The boy’s] mother was on the phone to us right away. She was anxious to assure us that “that boy” would get it when his father came home.... So before he got home we burned up the phone lines—sister to sister, cousin to cousin, brother-in-law to sister-in-law, wife to husband, brother to brother. This was because my husband and his brother know that there are some lessons you are taught as a child that should not be passed on. The sound of calloused hand on tender flesh, the whimpers of watching sisters, the smell of your own fear, the taste of your own blood and sweat as you lie in the dust—useless, useless, better not born. This is a curriculum like no other. A set of lessons destined to repeat unless you are granted the grace of insight and choose to embrace new learning.

So when the father of “that boy” came home and heard the story of the window, “that boy” was protected by our combined
aroha
, or love, and good humor, by the presence of a senior uncle, by invitations to decide how to get the window fixed in the shortest time for the least money. Once again phone calls were exchanged with an agreement being made on appropriate restitution....

Next time my husband drove into the valley it was to pick up the car, and “that boy” was an anxious witness to his arrival. My husband also has very big hands, hands that belong to a man who has spent most of his life outdoors. These were the hands that reached out to “that boy” to hug, not hurt....

This is only a small story that took place in an unknown valley, not marked on many maps. When these small stories are told and repeated so our lives join and connect, when we
choose to embrace new learning and use our “bigness” to heal not hurt, then we are growing grace and wisdom on the earth.

The building of peaceful spaces doesn’t always need to stem from a formal program or predesigned initiative. The space Di’s family created was situation-specific and spontaneous, forged in a matter of hours. It could happen because the neighbors knew each other—because of their “combined love.”
¹⁶

The world over, such spaces are being forged in both carefully sculpted and spur-of-the-moment ways. Of course, those two modes overlap: The family network that allowed Di Grennell to quickly mobilize a violence-prevention strategy was already in place, even though the exact plan to shield the boy from harm wasn’t predetermined. As one of the Community Builders teens noted, the point of thinking about “safe space,” ultimately, is to set about creating it where and when you can.

Harmful spaces are being built constantly and systematically, from military bases, to oil rigs, to juvenile detention centers, to “mental health jails,” to police-targeted neighborhoods (Jazz’s “open-air prisons”), to in-school suspension rooms, to prisons. Building spaces to counteract harm is a very different kind of project. These alternative spaces originate not from a preconstructed, one-size-fits-all, power-driven monolith, but from each of us. The “call to develop something new” isn’t a mandate aimed only at lawmakers or community leaders, or at activists or intellectuals. It’s a call that all of us must take up. Voices for Creative Nonviolence cofounder Kathy Kelly notes, “Some of this country’s best minds are designing drones and weapons. We need them thinking about this instead!”

Chapter 10
A Wakeup

It’s time to understand, go open-eyed into ourselves, into our deepest fears, among our underground youth, into the futureless future, and then rise up.
The time of sleeping is over.

—Luis Rodriguez
, “The Wanton Life”

Emerging from a childhood seared by poverty and gang violence, poet Luis Rodriguez was incarcerated briefly in 1970. Later, his son spent more than thirteen years in prison. In “The Wanton Life,” Rodriguez writes of the prospect of a cultural awakening—not by way of brilliant innovation, but through the process of connecting, with both ourselves and those we have estranged, with eyes that remain open even as they drink in fear.

Incarceration may provide public reassurance that “dangerous” people have vanished and are therefore no longer in existence—but it also permits a different kind of closed-eyed comfort for those safely ensconced in non-prisonerhood. As Angela Davis notes, it veils homelessness.
¹
(Lacino, running from foster care, living in stolen cars—locked up.) It veils poverty. (Sable, lawyerless, helpless to fight the contorted charges against her—locked up.) It veils illiteracy. (The 97 percent of prisoners who are assessed as not “proficient” in reading and writing—locked up.) It
veils drug dependency. (Kayla, passed out on the street, homeless and near death, a needle in her arm—locked up.) And it veils racism—the criminalization of black and brown people, persisting over the centuries under the mask of “justice.”

Maybe, then, part of confronting the destructive force of iso-lative punishment, of the mechanisms that grant power to the prison nation, is regaining sight. This means looking with open eyes at the suffering and oppression of “our underground youth.” It means knowing that accountability isn’t only an obligation thrust upon people when they’ve done harm. In order to end the “time of sleeping,” we’ve all got to hold ourselves accountable to our community of humans.