"Self-care and healing and attention to the body and the spiritual dimension—all of this is now a part of radical social justice struggles."
“Fania: A lot of people think that restorative justice can only address interpersonal harm—and it’s very successful in that. But the truth and reconciliation model is one that’s supposed to address mass harm—to heal the wounds of structural violence. We’ve seen that at work in about 40 different nations; the most well-known is, of course, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
In South Africa, the commission invited victims of apartheid to testify, and, for the first time ever, they told their stories publicly. It was on all the radio stations, in all the newspapers, it was all over the television, so people would come home and tune in and learn things about apartheid that they had never known before. There was an intense national discussion going on, and people who were harmed felt vindicated in some way.
That kind of thing can happen here, also, through a truth and reconciliation process. In addition to that sort of hearing commission structure, there could be circles happening on the local levels—circles between, say, persons who were victims of violence and the persons who caused them harm.
Angela: How does one imagine accountability for someone representing the state who has committed unspeakable acts of violence? If we simply rely on the old form of sending them to prison or the death penalty, I think we end up reproducing the very process that we’re trying to challenge.
So maybe can we talk about restorative justice more broadly? Many of the campaigns initially called for the prosecution of the police officer, and it seems to me that we can learn from restorative justice and think about alternatives.
Sarah: Fania, you told me when we talked last year that your work on restorative justice actually came about after you went through a personal transition period in the mid-1990s, when you decided to shift gears.
Fania: I reached a point where I felt out of balance from all of the anger, the fighting, from a kind of hypermasculine way of being that I had to adopt to be a successful trial lawyer. And also from around 30 years of the hyperaggressive stance that I was compelled to take as an activist—from being against this and against that, and fighting this and fighting that.
Intuitively, I realized that I needed an infusion of more feminine and spiritual and creative and healing energies to come back into balance.”
(H/T Sherise Bright)
