Abolitionist and Healing Justice Philosophy
Core Beliefs
As a healing justice organization, we believe that Black people, as well as all oppressed people, must be free from systems of domination as well as the transhistorical and intergenerational trauma these systems have created. We believe that freedom is first expressed as our fundamental capacity to choose responsiveness over reactivity. In responsiveness, it is more likely that we can choose to experience the sensations of our minds and bodies, reducing hyperreactivity and allowing us to experience more fluidity. When there is more fluidity, there is more potential for care, and that care helps us to reduce violence against ourselves and others. Freedom is our agency to choose how we want to be in a caring relationship with ourselves and the world around us.
Spiritual Abolitionism
As an abolitionist organization, we believe that abolition is more than a critique of power and how social systems work to grant and deny people resources that they need to survive. It is more than just abolishing the material carceral state with its prisons, police, and surveillance. Spiritual abolition is dreaming and then beginning to live beyond the violent indoctrination of the binary that enables people to express dominance over others. Abolition is a fluid, ephemeral word that demands that I stop basing my dream of a liberated future on the preservation of the “good” qualities of present systems and enter the real struggle of imagining brand-new ways of being in a relationship with myself and my communities. These relationships are not based on dominance, overconsumption, or trauma and despair. We abolish anything that prevents us from being in direct, honest, and compassionate relationships first with ourselves and then the communities we belong to.
Healing as Liberation
As an abolitionist healing justice organization, we believe that healing is liberation, and as we heal, we are also divesting from the systems and institutions that have been the root of our dis-ease. This divestment opens up the space for us to remember our humanity, which means we center care for ourselves and others while embracing our fundamental right to be well, safe, and happy.
“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”