Hey John,
AfroFuturism is the creative project of imagining and documenting Black people in the future. Given the violence and subjugation we’ve experienced— both past and present— the task of envisioning liberated Black bodies in the future is an act of resistance. Leaning on restorative and transformative justice resources can help you take actionable steps towards liberation.
Something I think a lot about, especially since joining the nonprofit sector, is what conflict resolution practices look like in different work environments that still uphold capitalist standards and in turn are designed to be detrimental to Black bodies and imagination. How we handle conflict resolution locally is reflective of how it’s handled globally - responding to harm with more harm. As Black History Month comes to an end, the fight for global Black liberation continues. So what healthy conflict resolution steps can you take towards practicing abolition in your life and in the movement?
Abolition is a term that’s increasingly heard throughout our movement spaces as it offers a framework for us to imagine a world free from prisons, policing, and carceral responses to harm. In order for us to make progress towards that vision, building strong conflict resolution capacities within our movement is a critical first step. AfroFuturism and conflict resolution are deeply tied to the abolition of state sanctioned violence and the ushering in of a new climate future.
Creating safe, healthy pathways to addressing conflict in your personal life, home, workplace or organizing hub can be a challenging process, but there exists a growing number of resources to help us actualize this goal:
This People’s Hub workshop, Living Into Conflict, can help your group develop tools to navigate conflict with understanding and inclusion.
Abolitionist organization Critical Resistance hosts multiple resources for “Addressing Harm, Accountability and Healing” on their website.
Project NIA, a grassroots organization that works to end the arrest, detention, and incarceration of children and young adults by promoting restorative and transformative justice practices, has a thorough “Building Accountable Communities Toolkit.”
Leaning into transformative justice resources like the ones above will give each of us the ability to bring abolition into our lives and our movement.
This willingness to imagine other responses to conflict besides war, sanctions, and violence will ensure a safe future where we can all experience joy and true liberation. A lack of humanity evident in the US military’s involvement with attacks on Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, and most recently in Ukraine is tied to this need for global transformation— against war, punishment, and policing being used to “resolve” conflicts, and an end to white supremacy and resource extraction as the driver of such conflicts. If we resist the assumption that we have to start wars and lock people up to achieve “safety”, we move one step closer to building strong, sustainable, loving, and safe movement spaces and environments.
What a radical idea - that we can envision and create a society where Black people are free to experience life devoid of violence and death due to global racial capitalism and all the oppression that stems from it. Now more than ever it is crucial to Black Liberation that we create new avenues for accountability that don’t rely on the criminal legal system and war.
Jasmine Butler, Network Organizer at Power Shift Network
