How mothers (and others) are making prison abolition possible

This article How mothers (and others) are making prison abolition possible was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The first time I met Kim Wilson, we were sitting across from each other in an Ethiopian restaurant in West Philly. It was empty, as restaurants often were during the first year of the pandemic. We sipped tea and talked about her family as we looked at childhood photos of her children. She had put out a call through her podcast “Beyond Prisons” for people to reach in to her oldest son who had been moved to the secure housing unit, and I was one of many people who did. With time, I had grown close to both of her sons, and my relationship with them was the impetus behind our meeting.

I was familiar with Wilson’s politics as an abolitionist, having listened to her podcast, and was an organizer myself. But we sat at that table as two mothers who understood the struggles that come with parenting, with trying to keep everything together as single parents in particular, and as two women connected through a shared love for her sons. That was the root of our bond. 

Now, years later, I am thrilled that Wilson has co-edited a collection of essays with Waging Nonviolence board member Maya Schenwar called “We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition.” The new book explores the ways that parenting and caregiving shape and make possible prison industrial complex abolition (and vice versa). I was able to read an advanced copy when writing a blurb for the book, and was struck by the ways I felt seen as a person who engages in abolitionist projects and relationship building because I am a parent and caregiver. I don’t just happen to be a parent, rather it informs why and how I do this work. 

Abolitionists are frequently disparaged by public officials and the media as being naive and idealistic. The people who come together to initiate abolitionist projects and collectively maintain them over the long haul, however, are often people who have a “stake” in disrupting and dismantling carceral logics and institutions. They are people who have been subjected to various forms of state violence and organized abandonment. They are victims of interpersonal violence. They are loved ones of people who are incarcerated. They know intimately what conditions create safety and have a clear analysis of how our current society actively undermines those conditions.

If you put 10 abolitionist organizers in a room and ask them what abolition means, you’ll likely find consensus. Ask them how we do it, what our strategy should be or what we should prioritize, and you will likely get 10 different responses. For me, abolition is, as Maya writes in her introductory essay, “the work of tending relationships, of supporting our communities, of defying the brutality of racial capitalism by actually caring for each other.” This is how we cultivate spaces of joyful and generative connection amidst all this death and despair, as we grow the world we want and deserve.

By shifting our attention toward this “quieter and less visible” political work, we can start to see how abolition and parenting/caregiving are intertwined. In her forward to the book, anti-violence activist and distinguished professor Beth E. Richie highlights how the needs and critiques shared by parents and caregivers in response to their immediate material conditions overlap with the larger, structural demands and critiques that are foundational to abolitionist praxis. For the authors in this collection, cultivating radical resistance through care, to use the language of contributor Dorothy Roberts, is how we move us closer to freedom.

The book itself is divided into four sections which focus on lessons from loved ones on parenting and abolition, the role of parents in social justice movements, caregiving beyond the nuclear heteronormative family, and what caregiving toward abolition looks like in practice. It is an extraordinary collection of essays that demonstrates, in the words of contributors Alejandro Villalpando and Susana Victoria Parras, how “It is in our everyday interactions with humans and all life-forms where the real work lies… we know that together, we can withstand anything and interrupt the degradation with connectedness, care and dignity that begins in the home.”

Given my positionality as a parent and organizer, I want to zero in on the essays grouped under “Parents and Caregivers in Movement.” Dorothy Roberts demonstrates how white supremacist institutions, from the slaveholder to the Department of Children and Family, use family separation and disruption as a form of social control that targets Black working-class families. Although the impact of the family policing system in its current iteration is most visible within the home, it is part of a continuum of racist family separation practices that include incarceration and immigrant detention and deportation. 

In her discussion of how Black mothers have resisted this violence by radically caring for their children from enslavement through the present, she makes clear how the weaponization of their children raises the stakes for Black women engaged in these struggles. Roberts highlights the work of JMACforFamilies, an organization that seeks to abolish family policing and build community amongst system-impacted parents. It was founded by a Black mother named Joyce McMillan, whose two children were taken from her after an anonymous caller reported her for drug use.

Similarly, contributor Holly Krig co-founded the abolitionist collective Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration after being detained in Illinois’ DuPage County Jail while pregnant. As part of their work, they organize Reunification Rides to take children to visit with their mothers incarcerated at Logan and Decatur prisons, also in Illinois. It is a way to push back against family separation through incarceration, and mitigate the damaging effects it has on children and their mamas. According to Krig, “We can build from where we are, inside our own homes, on our blocks, reaching out along our own channels, outsmarting bars and walls, to create the interconnected communities of care about which [abolitionist organizer and author] Mariame Kaba and so many others have been speaking and organizing into the world.”

Part of how organizers who are parents are connecting with other impacted people is through the modalities of parenting that are shared by people raising children under similar conditions. In her essay on the formation of Mothers Reclaiming our Children in 1990s Los Angeles, Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes how the cofounder, Barbara Meredith, “forged an alliance among women in the projects, in spite of her own outsider status, by appealing to a power achieved through coordinated maternal practices; they made critical the activities of mothering as necessary, social and consequential by doing, as a group, what they already knew how to do as individuals.”

To be clear, mothers have played a significant role in abolitionist projects and along with other women in the family, often provide the life-sustaining support that their incarcerated loved ones need to survive — including but not limited to, answering phone calls, putting money on their books and showing up for in person visits. But the authors of this collection have a range of identities as parents and caregivers, and the unconditional love they exercise through their work as abolitionists is directed far beyond those in their immediate communities.

Dylan Rodriguez, in his essay on how the experiences of parenting can provide critical tools for people engaged in abolitionist struggles, says this best. He writes, “Parenting and caregiving can resituate ‘love’ beyond privatized relationships and individualized feelings by exemplifying a generalized, radical way of being in relation to other beings. What might it mean to consider abolitionist community as a project that cultivates a form of unconditional love that extends beyond specific people to the fight itself?” 

Kaitlin Noss’ essay on learning from international communist activist and journalist Claudia Jones demonstrates the political power of parents in the context of contemporary struggles for control of public education and schools. Jones recognized that local fights regarding education and access to public resources for their children could politicize marginalized parents toward broader struggles for economic security and social justice. But as Noss explains, the political consciousness of parents can also be leveraged by conservative forces as a means of capturing control of the state, as evidenced by groups like Moms for Liberty.

What we parent toward matters. We are living in an era of immense uncertainty, precarity, violence and destruction. The climate is increasingly unstable, millions of people are in prisons and jails, untold millions are struggling to meet their basic needs — this, in the richest country in the world. On top of failing to provide for the welfare of its own citizens, our government invests in the instability, deprivation, exploitation and death of peoples in places like Palestine and the Middle East, and uses its influence to impoverish countries like Cuba and Venezuela that dare to forge their own path. 

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn write in their essay, “Identifying and naming injustice, organizing and agitating against it in the company of comrades, breaching barricades and overcoming barriers — that’s where freedom explodes onto the scene and comes to life as three-dimensional, vivid, trembling and real.” That work of political education, of building and sustaining community, of creating liberatory spaces and projects begins at home and in our neighborhoods. 

Whether or not you identify as an abolitionist, this insightful collection of essays is essential reading for people engaged in social justice work. It shows how our relationships with those we love, care for and protect, are the connective tissue that make new worlds possible.

This article How mothers (and others) are making prison abolition possible was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/11/we-grow-the-world-together-book-parenting-prison-abolition/