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† Criminal InJustice is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Kay Whitlock, co-author of Queer (In)Justice and Considering Hate, is contributing editor of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

Interdependence and Radical Imagination

by Kay Whitlock

Structural violence – racial, gendered, disability-related, economic, and ecological – is solidifying and intensifying in the United States.

These varied manifestations of violence are deeply, even organically, interrelated. They overlap and mutually construct and reinforce one another. There is no single cause, unless we want to label it “supremacy ideology” – the idea that some lives are intrinsically more worthy than others. The notion that some sentient beings (white people, for example, or human beings in general) are superior to other sentient beings.

No. This is a lie. Supremacy ideology is always a lie meant to justify various forms of structural violence; to naturalize oppressive patterns of dominion and servitude.

All of our lives – and fates – are interdependent, often in ways we do not see because we do not take the time to discern the subtle as well as obvious interrelationships. And because we have not been encouraged to discern them.

This, in turn, inhibits our visions of what justice could be. Here’s one possibility; there are many more:

Justice: the evolving pursuit of trustworthy, respectful, and non-exploitative relationships, together with accountability for interrupting, preventing, and addressing violence, in its myriad forms, against individuals, peoples, communities, and ecologies.

 ~ Whitlock & Bronski in Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics

 The political climate today seeks to destroy any such vision. Black Lives Matter to many of us, but not to the nation’s police forces, or to those who happily administer systems that produce diminished life chances for Black people. How many indictments of police officers responsible for the extrajudicial executions of Black people – women and men, cis and trans – will produce the change we need? There must be accountability, to be sure, and right now there are almost no options for obtaining it beyond current structures and practices. But by focusing so much of our justice concerns on individual officers and today’s corrupt and unjust courts, don’t we run the risk of reifying the idea that racist violence is only perpetrated by individual “bad apples” and not entire systems of economic and political dominion?

What is being done to shift public consciousness, to change the public imagination’s understanding of justice? To lift up a vibrant, meaningful, and compelling sense of the interdependence of lives and fates?

How much denunciation of political and religious demagoguery will produce the compassionate, just, even beloved communities we must have in order to survive?

How many charts showing the chilling (and raced and gendered) upward distribution of income and wealth in the United States will produce vibrant forms of economic justice?

How will alarming stories about climate change, how will Cecil the Lion stories and debates about whether the lives of lions matter as much or more than human beings actually produce a respectful, reverential, and widely shared commitment to the well being of nature and species other than human – a commitment essential for our continued collective survival?

It’s difficult in today’s climate to even imagine – much less organize around – bold justice visions that could produce deep structural changes, not just policy “reforms” that are never implemented fully or with any significant degree of integrity.

The Criminal Injustice series at Critical Mass Progress cannot tell anyone else what to do, but we can challenge ourselves to strive for and articulate bolder visions.

And that’s precisely what we’re going to do.

In the New Year, expect us to emphasize the themes of interdependence, transformative (radical) imagination, and how these might be addressed strategically in our work.

Our efforts may well be discomfiting, awkward, unfinished, tentative, and sometimes controversial. But we intend to challenge ourselves to explore what Angela Y. Davis describes as “new terrains of justice” with more vigor, and to ask at every turn: What, in this instance, might justice look like?

We don’t pretend to have definitive insights, much less answers. But we’re desperate to do our part to break out of the usual terms of justice discourse and debate. Those “usual terms” are prisons in themselves; they are stifling, stingy, and create a form of civil death by killing any possibility of justice, democracy, and a life-affirming, generous public sphere. For those who say the refusal to focus exclusively on policy reforms is impractical and intemperate, we say we are not willing to be practical and polite participants in various genocides and ecocides. If there are changes to be supported, we intend to ask: to what end? What is the larger strategic vision? How does this serve as an active steppingstone to structural transformation?

We are grateful to so many others whose work stirs our own imaginations and insists that we not settle for less than what is really needed. We know deep change doesn’t come quickly; we have well over 100 years of activism between the two of us. But we know that deep change won’t come at all if we don’t have cultural strategies to accompany political organizing – and disruptive, radical imagination to inform that cultural effort.

We send warm greetings and gratitude to you all as this year comes to an end. We’ll see you in 2016.

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