#eh.#full disclosure: I am Black and queer and poor#and I have had the immense displeasure of being the victimized party during such attempts at “restorative justice”#my experience was basically a room full of breathless white people demanding my public forgiveness#because their transgression became public knowledge when I refused to protect them#and all anyone wanted to talk about was the reputational damage of these whites#there was vague lip service about policy changes#but mostly I was just so mean for not keeping the situation “private” (read: secret)#I'm willing to humor the idea of restorative justice when y'all can implement it better#because too often it requires the transgressed upon to forgive and the transgressor to...what?#guess what op! some racists mean it#MOST racists mean it#YOU can feel free to throw your titty in their mouths if you want#my Black ass will be cutting losses#I'm too fucking old and I've been in this shit too long to keep playing house with white radicals#sorry this a really sore topic for me because I've experienced the worst version of it#and I don't trust radicals who wanna put all of their eggs in the restorative justice basket#very white very low effort very exploitative of marginalized laborrrrrrrrr#this was a neat read but I'm not holding hands with you bitches anymore#if someone calls me the N word I do not immediately think “oh they've been coerced!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”#notice who makes the effort there!#once again putting the onus on the transgressed upon to do all of the work
^ wanna add these tags to the post if you don't mind because this is a vital issue to restorative justice being restorative and just and not just a smokescreen for further violence, and I want to give my thoughts on how we might navigate this (pre-emptively sorry for the very long post incoming, I'm incapable of making a succinct point when it comes to this topic).
I don't think restorative justice should be thought of as a fundamentally white thing, frameworks of restorative justice built by white people are frequently shoddy and poorly thought out. The idea of restorative justice being "a brand new radical theory invented by white leftist intellectuals" turns it into a hypothetical that fundamentally emerges from European culture, when restorative justice was initially introduced to modern Europe through centuries-old existing practices of various Indigenous nations. Restorative justice has been done better, by Indigenous people in the Americas and around the world.
I include some quotes in this reblog of this post about the Wendat nation's traditional framework for justice (which is only one version of restorative justice, ofc). I also touch on the justice system of DAANES / Rojava, a modern autonomous administration in Syria which uses restorative justice. Rojava is a Kurdish term, and the Kurds are an Indigenous ethnic minority that has faced intense oppression throughout West Asia, and as a result their model for governance in Rojava is built around being explicitly multiethnic.
Notably, both the Wendat and Rojava systems of justice take into account gender in a way that I think is very important for not just gender but how restorative justice needs to deal with marginalization as a whole. In Rojava, any issue regarding women (especially issues of marriage or sexual violence) must have women involved in the justice process from start to finish. On an institutional level, there must be gender parity across systems, including the justice system, and women can seek recourse on the most basic level by going to their local Mala Jin (women's house) to get support from their community. The Mala Jin are required to be consulted in any legal issue concerning women. Similarly, in the Wendat nation and many other nations, women had their own independent councils which had authority over their own issues.
Obviously, gender and race are different issues. But one can easily imagine how "restorative justice" could be used to excuse gendered violence by having a bunch of men demand a woman who was abused by her husband forgive him and prevent divorce. This is why Rojava is modeled the way it is, on every level; ethnic minorities are treated similarly, having their own democratic organizations and positions in councils to ensure they have a collective voice. The (Kurdish, Assyrian, Yazidi, Arab) women of Rojava have meaningful power over their lives and social organization, and they make sure that restorative justice is built to work for marginalized groups, rather than simply assuming the system itself is just so inherently good and moral in theory that everything will work out if its kept gender/race/class neutral.
It's not just a matter of implementing a system and then expecting everyone's mindset to change. Both the Wendat and Rojava systems involve a certain culture that facilitates people engaging in these systems, and the Rojava Revolution has involved dedicated work to spread the political and philosophical framework that underlies its justice system and allow it to function. In cases where restorative justice utterly fails, its a lot of times the result of either a poorly-made framework, people lacking the theoretical/cultural understanding to use that framework properly, or both.
The models of the Wendat and Rojava come from cultures that were/are both communalist and anti-authoritarian. For many Indigenous nations, the idea that someone could be forced to obey a political leader, or even that a child should be forced to obey a parent, was ridiculous and unjust. Leaders had to be constantly generous and persuasive to get people to follow them, and people had the inherent right to refuse orders. That is a very different way of relating to people than in more authoritarian cultures, like most European cultures. So trying to just cut + paste that kind of justice system without adopting any other part of the culture or political framework is obviously going to fail. It is a very European-Enlightenment way of thinking to imagine that if you just build a system that sounds really good and moral in theory, then in practice you can act and think however you want and the system will always spit out good results because it just looks so good on paper (this video from The Alt-Right Playbook isn't really relevant to restorative justice, but it is where I first heard this cultural idea of "the system will Just Work, no matter how many bad ideas are in it!" & I think it explains why a lot of white leftist attempts at various things are shitty. People don't want to put in the effort to do good, they just want a system that lets them act however they want and still feel good).
Any restorative justice system worth its salt should preempt situations like the above. No victim who is marginalized should be in a position where they, alone, have to defend themselves against a group of people who do not share their marginalization, even if those people (claim to) have good intentions. The system should be built specifically with that situation in mind, in order to ensure that no group is able to hoard the power and control what justice looks like. It should be a ground rule that if an incident involves people of a marginalized group, that the system has a way to ensure that group has authority over the proceedings. If the victim is a Black person, step one should be bringing in other Black people to support the victim and ensure that the victim as an individual, and the community as a whole, has not just a perfunctory voice but the power to dictate what restorative justice looks like in that situation.
If an attempt at restorative justice is not foundationally anti-racist and built to force white people to deal with discomfort and distress and social consequences for engaging in racism, it does not deserve respect. When cis/male/white/upper-class people are never made, in a justice system, to do any restorative acts that challenge the privileges they gain from those positions, the only clear end-goal of the process is the victim's forgiveness. And rather than that forgiveness being the natural result of a process that amends the harm done to them, the whole process collapses into "how fast can we get this person to shut up about what they went through?" because the process has been built for the comfort of the offenders, not for restoring harmony in the community to ensure the well-being of all its members. Good restorative justice sees the reform of offenders as a practical way of establishing that safety and harmony for everyone; if it didn't demand anything from the offenders, it would be completely inept. In one of those quotes in that post I linked, the restorative justice process is explicitly meant as an alternative for the victim('s family) demanding violent retribution, with the idea being "if they are not satisfied through restoration, they will demand blood and probably take matters into their own hands, so our restoration system needs to be genuinely effective to keep the peace." There was no assumption that the victim would just have to get whatever the community decides they get and have to deal with it (which ties back to the cultural anti-authoritarianism).
& to be clear: when I say "coerced" I don't mean "people don't really mean it when they are racist." I definitely think they mean it. The fact that racist thoughts and desires and actions are socially constructed by systems of power and taught to people to maintain power, rather than being natural expressions of inherent badness or entirely neutral objective observations about the world, don't make them any less real. My point with describing this as coercion is to emphasize how integral socialization & culture is to people's choice to do harmful things, not to say they don't really believe in those harmful things or are simply tricked into doing them. People's racist thoughts and feelings can be as intense and genuinely held as they are the result of people socialized into a certain way of thinking. My goal is to make it more obvious to the racist people that the things they feel and think and do came from somewhere, because somebody is benefiting from them feeling and thinking and acting that way. They don't just coincidentally happen to believe racist things because they are such smart independent thinkers from such an objective superior moral culture; powerful people made them racist to facilitate their own greed and power, and they should be angry at those people for socializing them into immoral beliefs instead of getting angry at non-white people for pointing out that their beliefs are immoral.
