It’s popular to hide and hide from our feelings, and anything we think can be perceived as weakness or vulnerability. We attempt to present ourselves as unfeeling and run from any implication that our feelings play a role in the decisions we make or the futures we envision for ourselves and those around us. Ironically, we do this operating from the feeling that is fear.
Abolition is a vision for the future—a world where we’ve divested from police, courts, and prisons; because instead of pumping money into the criminalization of the most disenfranchised among us, we’ve put that money into addressing the root causes of crime; like poverty, unemployment, poor housing, starved school systems, mental health issues. Fear doesn’t create that world.
While fear won’t create that world, it is precisely what keeps 2 million people locked behind bars while the social ills that led them there rage on, unaddressed. It’s what keeps us protesting all over the country with signs that read:
THE SYSTEM ISN’T BROKEN, IT’S WORKING AS INTENDED
All while continuing to invest in that system. It’s not fear of the people we’ve locked away, it’s fear of reckoning with the fact that despite incarcerating more people than anywhere else in the world and spending more money on some local police departments than other countries spend on their militaries, you aren’t and don’t feel any safer. The fear is in starting over, the daunting task of what it would mean to start from scratch. The fear of trying to create something new and possibly failing. Fear is why people often remain incarcerated despite overwhelming evidence of their innocence and public outcry—because fear won’t allow the system to face them, to face its wrongs, or to face us. It's the fear of admitting fault of this magnitude. The fear of admitting that all the harm mass incarceration has caused was for not and knowing that what’s been done to people, communities, generations, cannot be made right.
Fear, just like guilt and defensiveness, cannot create— but it does keep us stuck in place, hiding our problems behind bars.
An acquaintance asked me why I became a Public Defender and advocate around abolition when I could be a corporate attorney and make more money. I told him that I love Black people and in a criminal system that disproportionately targets, arrests, and incarcerates us, I don’t think the only Black person in the courtroom should be the defendant. I believe some of the harmful effects of the criminal system can be minimized by being represented by a person who looks like you, understands you, where you come from, what you’re up (and have been up) against, and will humanize you to a court that only wants to see you as a docket number; but that overall, change won’t come from within the system because the system needs to go. He replied “yes, but I don’t want you to fight an uphill battle,” and I thought to myself, he must not have heard me when I said I love Black people.
What’s love got to do with it? Everything.
I love Black people. I love our Blackness and I love every way we continue to enrich and fill the world with laughter, joy, and undeniable coolness, even though the world has only ever seemed intent on stealing it from us. I love Black people so deeply that even in our joy I feel our pain. How do you unlink the two in a people that laugh to keep from crying? How do you ignore pain you are always in? A people so loving deserve to know love, not just resilience.
The love is what makes our reality hurt. But painful as it is, it is nevertheless, reality.
For me, there is no but. When I said that I love Black people, I’d meant it to be the end of the conversation, not the beginning. But his “but” reminded that we don’t all have the same understandings of love and what it requires of us. In fact, many don’t realize it requires anything of them at all. But as bell hooks insisted, love is not just a feeling, it’s better understood as both a verb and a choice. She quotes Erich Fromm, “Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
There’s an understanding that any fight against systemic racism is a lifelong one. With that, can come a feeling Audre Lorde has called despair, Angela Davis has called hopelessness, and my acquaintance described as an uphill battle. I think of it like wading in the water to keep yourself afloat because otherwise, you’d drown. It’s not about choice, it’s about survival. Audre Lorde advised us, “There is no Black person who can afford to wait to be led into positive action for survival. Each one of us must look clearly and closely at the genuine particulars of his or her life and decide where action and energy is needed and can be effective. Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us, wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we choose.”
There are no new problems, new approaches, or new feelings. In the same vein, there isn’t one way to address any of those problems, there isn’t one role to play in a movement, and there’s no one path that will bring us salvation. You don’t have to be a Public Defender, or a lawyer, or an organizer. How you choose to love is entirely up to you and the genuine particulars of your life. But if you claim to love a people, a community, or equality, you do have to do something. To love people or community is to act in their best interest, to fight against what oppresses them, to envision a world where they can thrive, and then to work to make that world possible.
Our feelings aren’t the problem, our failure to do anything meaningful with them is. A white woman once asked Audre Lorde “Are you going to do anything with how we can deal directly with our anger?” and she responded “How do you use your anger?” because as she explained, she does not exist to feel her anger for her. We all have feelings and we all have a role to play in change if we embrace our own feelings and channel them into purpose. The danger in not claiming, naming, and using your feelings is that it allows them to be swallowed by fear. Then we remain stuck, because fear hides but love creates.
Love & Abolition