Spirituality and Abolition

INTRODUCTION

A dialogue between the editors, Ashon Crawley and Roberto Sirvent.

Ashon

I came to abolition because I was hurting. A riff on bell hooks’ discussion of what theory let her think about and think through, abolition as a concept resonated with me initially because I was confused, I was left wanting, I was in various kinds of pain.

I was hurting.

And I was hurting because of the deeply self-serving and egotistical practice of Christian preaching I was asked to do.

When I was a seminary student at Emory University, my field placement—a working course for students to learn on the job, called Contextual Education—was the Metro State Prison for Women, just outside Atlanta. Weekly, as student chaplains, we were asked to lead the Sunday worship service, a Christian church service that featured rousing hymns and worship songs, sometimes testimonies, and a sermon. Each of us chaplains were to preach a Sunday sermon. And, it too was a weekly reflection on the campus, a space that was far enough away from the prison that we could comfortably make declarations about what the women needed, about how the preaching and worship was necessary, about how prison saved them from themselves. These weekly reflections, along with the weekly worship, sermonizing, and, too, praying and counseling sessions with one of the women, formed the basis of our yearlong grade.

I still remember the sensory experience; it was the first time I’d spent in the carceral space of a prison. It felt like Eat, Pray, Love through the lives of others, we the seminarians having made the right decisions so much so that without any background in counseling, psychology or even homiletics, we could practice our trade on the less fortunate.

I despised it.

Why were we being asked to provide spiritual counsel when we were also in need? Why were we framed as the ones that had the correct knowledge to give, the women repositories that we could simply enter our spiritual practice into? And why was what we’d learn from them only to be obtained by paying attention to the purported mistakes they’d made such that they found themselves in the carceral space?

I’d read Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire years previous, in undergraduate Education courses, and the banking model for education was one I was familiar with and wanted to break away from. Yeh, I began to notice how that model for education was also a model for religious practices of my familiar, how preachers and pastors are often the ones framed as having the knowledge that was desirous—they heard from god more intensely and urgently and maybe more intentionally too, they were holy and sanctified and set apart, they were given leadership positions purportedly because they postured their lives through prayerful supplication and ongoing meditation on scripture. And even when they made purported mistakes—being caught in sin, more often than not, of the sexual kind—their position and identity as preacher, pastor, prophet then allowed for the easy justification of their behavior. The lay folks needed clergy because, as lay people, they are the ones that are empty vessels awaiting being filled by messages and perhaps even exonerations from clergy.

I was learning experientially that identity was taking the place of the practice of—and journey towards—justice. Our identities as chaplains and students meant we were given latitude with the mistakes and missteps we could make. The women’s identities as prisoners meant they were given almost none, everything they did was analyzed through the unalterable identity of an incarcerated person that made dangerous mistakes.

Our engagements with the incarcerated women were supposed to be grounded in the banking model, it was the contextual background of our engagements with them. We knew the right path, made the right decisions, so we were required to lead and guide and counsel. Or at least this is how we were treated. We were not prepared to give or practice a relational model for care or concern, and the pedagogy of carceral aesthetics certainly did not allow us to presume that the ones with which we met and to whom we preached had anything of real value beyond the contemplative reflection their flesh and inhabitation within concrete walls could for us provide. Like the one person that played the keyboard weekly, sang, and directed the choir. Like the one that met with me weekly and talked about her life, love, and desires.

You’re not like the other chaplains. You don’t just come in the room and pray with me.

Do you want me to? was my reply.

She said no. Indeed. I don’t think I ever prayed with her at all. I was connected with one of the women to meet with weekly, but we always talked about her family, her girlfriend at home, the fact that I actively questioned what it was I believed, that maybe I was an atheist or at least agnostic.

May I ask, are you gay?

She wasn’t trying, she let me know, to be disrespectful. She said she felt an affinity with me based on what I did but also did not say when we weekly met. Felt a sense of camaraderie, and perhaps too, something like friendship.

I was being confronted with a reality I was not prepared for. My weekly travels to Metro State were the first time I’d had regular contact with a prison. I was stunned by the sheer weight of the physical premises, the concrete and gates, the heaviness in the air as the food was prepared. It all felt like too much. It was the first time I sensed, because of inhabiting the space, the ways incarceration is a literal attempt to sever folks from family, friends, fresh air, fresh food, and a sense for the familial and familiar. A specific kind of evil, the transporting of people away from their homes and livelihoods and creating a built environment that both creates and then underscores being enclosed and captured.

I had no language, then, for abolition. I had not read the people that one committed to abolition is supposed to read. I hadn’t heard of Critical Resistance, Angela Davis was at that time still only that woman, maybe a Black Panther? that has the afro, right? But I knew, because I sensed it weekly, how terrible it was to be asked to do this kind of work that seemed to justify the status quo. I sensed it weekly, how there needed to be a different way to think about harm and violence and community and care.

I more than once got into heated disagreements, and sometimes explicit arguments, with the full-time chaplain. I’d be reminded over and over again that the work she did was unthankful, that she wasn’t paid enough for the services she provided, that it was complicated, that she was a feminist. I’m sure all these things were true. But I also came to sense and feel the ways these justifications were not in the direction of a more just prison, to say nothing of a more just, humane, and free world.

I was hurting because I felt the solutions we were offering were not at all about the incarcerated folks, that the things we offered were for our personal student chaplain benefit.

Abolition is the thing that gave me the language for structural harm, for a feminist praxis that took seriously the intersections of race, class, gender identity, sexuality, disability, without ever attempting to justify the caging of people. Abolition gave me a way to think about what harm is, how it happens, and what is necessary to repair the breach after harm happens. Abolition is what convinced me the search for innocence is futile and a distraction, the search for innocence disallows the occasion to think against the various ways we harm because we occupy time and space in ways that are structured by inequity, exclusion, violence.

Roberto

I was never assigned an abolitionist text in college. Or in graduate school.

I came to abolitionist theory during my early years of teaching. I had been doing some research on American exceptionalism and the ethics of patriotism. I noticed that although liberals claimed to be more honest than conservatives about the dark history of the US, they still insisted that the US had noble founding ideals. And that a true patriot tries to live up to our country’s greatest aspirations.

It was only by stumbling upon abolitionist discourse that I came to understand the dangers of liberal patriotism. Abolitionists don’t fight to build a kinder, gentler prison, so we shouldn’t fight to make a kinder, gentler nation-state. You can’t reform a plantation. This is what abolitionists taught me. The prison is a plantation. And so is the US. What are the founding ideals of a plantation? What are the aspirations of a plantation? What are the ideals and aspirations of a settler colony? I think we all know what a settler colony tries to do, what it aspires to do.

Some might say, with all the good intentions in the world, that the nation isn’t broken, it’s just unfinished. But what violence is necessary to finish the nation, to finish the national project? What violence is necessary to create a more perfect union? Mariame Kaba and a whole host of others have taught us that prisons aren’t broken; they’re working exactly as they’re supposed to.

The same can be said of the US. The US is not broken. This is how it’s designed. All this violence, all this cruelty. This is what the US does. This is what a capitalist state does. This is what an empire does. This is what a settler colony does. This is what a genocidal regime does.

It’s how a plantation operates.

This language, this vocabulary, this grammar—they were instrumental in helping me think through American exceptionalism and the vices of patriotism.

My university education never taught me about the genocidal logics of America’s aspirations and founding ideals, but Assata Shakur and George Jackson certainly did.

Yet while I luckily, and gratefully, came to abolitionist theory, I can’t say that I’ve actually come to abolition.

I don’t live an abolitionist life.

Sure, I might be an academic who assigns radical texts in class. But to what degree can we describe this as an abolitionist practice? Something Keguro Macharia tweeted a while back really stuck with me. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I read the people I read as an undergrad—Fanon, Butler, Lorde, Rich, Spillers, Irigaray, Foucault, Freud, Cone, and others—in classes, he wrote.¹ I think I’d have a very different relationship to them.

I think because I didn’t—I assembled bibliographies and read on my own—I never thought of them in disciplinary ways. They were never attached to a field or department, he adds. They were simply people who thought about and toward stuff I was learning to think about and toward.

Yes, my students get to read George Jackson, Assata Shakur, Amilcar Cabral, Audre Lorde, and letters from political prisoners. But they’re reading them within a very violent institution: the university. No matter how hard I try or tell my students to not worry about their grades, the disciplinary structure of the classroom remains. There’s still a worry about not pleasing the instructor, an expectation that an expert authority will explain the right interpretation to them, and a danger that the instructor—with so many institutional pressures—will whitewash or dilute any revolutionary message from the readings.

It’s really difficult for an academic to be an abolitionist.

When I try to explain to my students that I don’t consider myself an abolitionist or anarchist, even though these theories make up so much of my syllabi, I share with them a couple stories:

When I was growing up, we’d sometimes stop at a McDonalds or Pizza Hut after a baseball game or when we received our school report cards. After putting our order in with the person at the register or exiting the drive through, my dad would almost always tell my brother and me one thing: If you don’t study, you’ll end up like one of them.

Like one of them.

This advice took on many variations. Sometimes it was framed as a question.

Do you know why they’re working at McDonalds? my dad would ask?

No, papa, why?

Because they didn’t study, he said.

I had this bullshit ingrained in me from the time I was ten years old. I mean, how do you unlearn that? Hearing the same thing over and over again every time I go to a fast-food restaurant? It’s toxic shit.

This isn’t to blame any one parent or guardian. Despite this insidious papa speech as he would call it, my father is a man of many virtues. Yes, I grew up with some toxic shit drilled in my head. But who knows what kind of toxic shit I’ll drill into my son’s head?

It’s true, as Morgan Bassichis says, that the very systems we are working to dismantle live inside of us.² So yes, I’m not alone in having to unlearn and dismantle so many violent systems that live inside of me. But for some reason, I still can’t consider myself an abolitionist.

An abolitionist I know recently had two friends released from prison. This abolitionist moved in with their partner, who is also an abolitionist, so their two formerly incarcerated friends could live in the now vacant apartment.

Who does that? An abolitionist does. And I have plenty of abolitionist friends like them. Heck, I even have friends who don’t identify as abolitionists who would do the exact same thing.

Yet I wouldn’t.

I’d like to think I’m the type of person who would give up my apartment for a formerly incarcerated friend. But I’m not. And I don’t know why. Perhaps I’m way too attached to comfort, security (Ashon—I think you once so brilliantly called this the ruse of security), and predictability. An abolitionist life seems to require that I renounce all that.

And to be clear, it’s not that I can’t see myself as an abolitionist because I myself am not a community organizer or activist. Abolitionist practice—and abolitionist spirituality—occur in many spaces and places. As fahima ife writes so eloquently about their book, Maroon Choreography:

Maroon Choreography is a performance in black study, so inherent in the book is a desire and practice to reclaim the local, small scale, the necessarily mundane tenderness of being together in person—walking and moving and wheeling together outside, offering shared attention to the earth, talking with each other, listening to each other, tending to each other, crying together, feeling each other, vocalizing desire, holding desire, remembering where we have already been, wanting and collectively trying to figure out how to end up somewhere else, partying inside a rented house, dancing together at midnight, loving and not loving, fucking and friction and rubbing, pleasure for pleasure’s sake, smoking, being real fugitive together, drinking, convening, coming and coming again, black sensuality, preparing a meal together and eating it, sharing a home, laughter, the hours inside the clearing, the hours spent together recursively weeping, the hours spent retracing where we have already been, reclaiming the night, reclaiming the secret—so that mundane life becomes so intentionally and fully integrated in shared activity it stops being mundane, becomes marvelous. Being together in person as to create the possibilities for living in common, for sharing. And in all that active and communal marvel we move beyond the impulse to refer to ourselves as activists and community organizers or even artists and instead try to figure out what it is we want to do together.³

The many abolitionist friends I look up to have been trained in a particular way. Maybe we can call it a form of spiritual discipline (of course, I know Ashon and I want to trouble this idea of discipline—perhaps find other words for this practice—given its common ties to punishment). They’ve developed certain habits, cultivated certain abolitionist virtues. Whatever it is, it probably came from the daily practice of saying no to the traps of empire and yes to the nourishing possibilities dreamed of and practiced by our ancestors and friends.⁴

In what ways can we see this daily practice as a spiritual practice?

Ashon

Spirituality is the space between. It is the seemingly immaterial impression felt. Like a comforter or quilt on skin on a cold morning, the warmth of a layer between fabric textile and the epidermis, that miniscule space between is where the heat is felt. Another way to say it is that we never touch anything, our material makeup with atoms demonstrates this, that electrons orbit atoms, but they repel one another. Electron repulsion is the truth of the material world at the quantum scale, but this does not preclude us from feeling, from sense perception. We feel things, we sense things because of the space between. This space between, whether great or teeny tiny, is what allows the flow of relation. In a word, it’s the spiritual.

So when I think about abolition being a spiritual practice, it means for me it is a striving that does not have reaching a there or an end point, but is a constant unfolding of relation in difference, a continual unfolding of the practice of justice in whatever here, whatever now, of its enactment. Abolition is a posture, it is something you must do, not an identity to claim as unalterable. This I learned at Metro State, that the concern and lament over identity is precisely because there is so little desire to do the work of justice.

Abolition has to be practiced daily, it must become daily habit and reflexive, it has to be the default position and ideology. And this because one cannot wait for moments of spectacular violence and harm to happen to attempt to put it into operation, one has to live the posture of abolition as a way to connect with one’s deepest urges and longings, to connect more fully with others, to connect with earth and sea and sky and the creaturely worlds both known and not yet discovered.

Roberto

For me, abolitionist spirituality has impacted the way I think about friendships.

Not to overgeneralize, but I rarely found meaningful (or memorable) friendships in church. I was usually the person at church who asked way too many questions, and since doubt was often seen as a chief symptom of losing one’s faith, there were always talks of people praying for me behind my back. And not in the good kind of way.

Don’t get me wrong—I know these people cared. It just seemed like what they cared most about was me getting it—and by it I mean whatever narrow creed I was supposed to believe in to be a model Christian. My questions were a sign that I wasn’t getting it. Which explains all the care, concern, and prayers for someone who was backsliding.

Friendship looks very different for me in abolitionist circles.

Abolitionists taught me the dangers of a particular ideology—what many organizers describe as blood supremacy. Why, they ask, do we spend so much effort and energy investing in toxic relationships with our blood relatives, even to the detriment of our physical, mental, and spiritual health? Why do these blood relationships reign supreme? How often is the family card played in an attempt to control, abuse, or manipulate people? For example: "Hey, Roberto, it would mean a lot to us if you did X. After all, we are family. We stick together."

Abolition liberated me from blood supremacy.

Abolition taught me that I could find caring, loving, life-giving relationships with friends. And that I didn’t have to feel guilty if they meant more to me than my family. Abolition taught me that a relationship need not be permanent or even long to be meaningful (Ashon, your work has been so instrumental in helping me see this).

In what seems like some of the most random moments, I sometimes find myself crying tears of joy just thinking about my friends—and the extraordinary love, support, and encouragement they’ve given me. I don’t know why I cry. But I do. And it’s hard not to call it a spiritual experience.

My students always ask about my plans for raising my son Jayden. I’m honestly terrified of how ill-equipped and unprepared I am for the questions he’s going to ask me, the struggles he’ll face, the advice he’ll seek from me.

My friendships make parenthood a little less terrifying. When it came time to pick Jayden’s godparents, we picked eight people—many of them self-identified abolitionists, many of them not, but all who mean the world to me. I know I’ll fail Jayden. And for the thousands of times when I really won’t be able to help him the way he needs, I’ll at the very least be able to point him to eight friends who will help him refuse the ways of the world.

The ways of the world. The church was supposed to help me resist these. To refuse wealth, power, privilege, status, fame. But it didn’t.

Jayden’s godparents (only two of which are part of a church) help me refuse the ways of the world. They are my models.

So, in a sense, an abolitionist spirituality of friendship does for me what the church couldn’t—or wouldn’t—do.

My friends Amber-Rose Howard, Colby Lenz, Dean Spade, Troizel Carr, Liz Murphy, and Hilary Malson show me this. Although it’s common to find ego-driven people in every organizing space—even abolitionist ones—these friends of mine have no desire to be seen, recognized, or applauded by the world. They know there’s nothing sexy about mutual aid. They know to be skeptical of organizers who want to make a name for themselves, who want to leave a legacy, or who want to be seen as a radical or revolutionary. Abolitionist spirituality demands that we renounce these desires. So, my friends are my sages. My friends are my spiritual counsel.

Finally, Ashon, I know we’re both big fans of the show Craig of the Creek. I can’t help but watch the show through the lens of friendship, abolitionist spirituality, and what K’eguro Macharia describes as practicing freedom.

I see Craig, J.P., and Kelsey and I think: "I wish I knew how to be a friend like that when I was younger." But if I’m really honest with myself, I really wish I knew how to be a friend like that right now. I also wish I had their imaginations.

I keep thinking of that episode where the gang is playing tag, and after thinking through what the game is actually about, they realize the only thing they must do is not play the game or win the game, but end the game. What a beautiful picture of creative destruction – a destruction that is done collectively, courageously, and even joyfully. Truly a glimpse of freedom.

We began with this reflection conversation between Roberto and Ashon because Spirituality and Abolition is not, in the final assessment, an attempt at what is reductively considered to be academic rigor. We are not trying to produce a set of arguments that will find their