just an animal looking for a home

The image is a series of concentric rings, each containing two paired statements that contradict each other. The rings are formed from arrows pointing from one statement to its pair, and vice-versa. The whole infographic is labeled, “contradictions for white people in racial justice work.”

In the first ring, statement A says: “White people are a particular liability in racial justice movements.” Statement B says: “White people have specific and critical roles to play in racial justice movements.”

In the second ring, statement A says: “It can feel humiliating to have not participated meaningfully in racial justice work before now, and suddenly want to join.” Statement B says: “In order to grow stronger and win, the movement requires new people to join.”

In the third ring, statement A says: “When you’re working on ending an oppression that you benefit from, people will rightfully mistrust you and be hard on you.” Statement B says: When you’re working on ending racism, it’s good to be nice to yourself and patient with yourself.”

In the fourth ring, statement A says: “White activists need to listen to, defer to, and take leadership from POC.” Statement B says: “Because ‘POC’ is not a monolithic identity that all believes one thing, white activists need to cultivate their own analysis and judgment over time.”

In the fifth ring, statement A says: “One specific role for white people is being tough about holding one another accountable.” Statement B says:” Another key role for white people is extending compassion, care and patience to other white people.”

sokka + art

bonus:

psychiatry in its current form as a web of institutions that operates through / for the benefit of race and capital needs to be seriously grappled with if we’re to advance an answer as to what an abolitionist response to psychological / behavioural difference looks like. if we think of “mental illness” as a “real,” “natural,” “neutral” or prediscusive thing such that the only problem (if we even see one) is that too MANY or the WRONG people are getting caught in the net of its institutions (for example I saw someone describe forced institutionalisation as “misuse of mental health resources”)—then we’re not thinking it through adequately. I don’t mean to understate the difficulty of the work of unlearning & reimagining (necessarily occurring in conjunction with work on the ground) that ALL prison abolition does, but I think the naturalisation of mental illness might make this one a particularly hard leap for some people–challenges to the supposedly biological nature of mental illness met with a lot of pushback when some of us started a conversation about it On Here 3-4 years ago, including/especially from mentally ill people.

to that end, some readings connecting psychiatry to race & capital, and connecting prison abolition to deinstitutionalization:

Creating Racism: Psychiatry’s Betrayal

Jonathan M. Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (2010, on libgen) talks about “how race gets written into the definition of mental illness"

An interview with Jonathan Metzl on the book

Liat Ben-Moshe, Genealogies of Resistance to Incarceration: Abolition Politics within Deinstitutionalization and Anti-Prison Activism in the U.S. (2011, dissertation)

– “Deinstitutionalization: A Case Study in Carceral Abolition” (2014)

–, Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (2014, also on libgen)

– “Why prisons are not ‘The New Asylums’” (2017)

–, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (2020)

Emily Thuma, “Against the “Prison/Psychiatric State”: Anti-violence Feminisms and the Politics of Confinement in the 1970s” on how the Coalition to Stop Institutional Violence “forged an understanding of institutional violence that linked the politics of mental health to the repressive punishment of women prisoners’ agency, and the expansion of medicalized incarceration to hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality”

“Kamilah Brock: Woman held in mental health facility because police didn’t believe BMW was hers”

also check out this prison abolition syllabus, notably the “Carceral Intersections” section