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A review by billywraithcyrus
The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities by Ching-In Chen
4.0
What kind of justice do I want to see in society?
In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon cautions us about a form of justice that simply seeks to reposition those who are at society's bottom at society's top, and then remove the people at society's top and relegate them to society's bottom. He reasons that simply replicating the structures of power and oppression with different actors in the roles isn't justice but just another permutation of injustice albeit flip-flopped. Can we really claim justice in a society where someone is always at the bottom?
But I also understand that with generations of pain and oppression and anger, that may not be fulfilling to all people. Is there value in revenge, in punitive systems? Is there a reward in finally seeing those who called you their enemy suffer like you once suffered? Where does that leave concepts like transformation and accountability? Is transformation as important to the individual as it is to the society?
This shit's hard.
That's one of the things that is so compelling to me about The Revolution Starts at Home: the challenge of what kind of justice we should strive for in society. I absolutely agree with the basis of the book's entries that incarceration, isolation, shame, and banishment do not remedy causes of interpersonal violence. I also think it takes a really benevolent person to be a victim of an aggressor yet want them to have an opportunity to heal so they do not perpetuate the violence the victim experienced onto others. And I'm not sure that's something we can demand of a survivor if they're not ready to be in that place of benevolence.
That said, there is so much more to this book than simply this dilemma. I am totally here for alternative interventions that give people an option besides calling the police. Nobody should ever have the police as their only option for (maybe) survival. Nobody. That response in and of itself can be as terrorizing as the initial violence itself, if not more.
I hate that our society is constructed in such a way that the presumptive way to teach people is through fear and coercion. Don't hit your partner or else you go to jail. Don't sexually harass coworkers or else you lose your job. This is where, to me, there is a super valuable point of trying to reimagine intervention as helping a person understand that the reason you don't do harmful things isn't because you yourself will get in trouble, but rather you don't do harmful things because they are harmful to other people, full stop.
A big part of that is cultivating empathy in people who have a low yield of that sense. I'm all for helping people grow into empathetic beings, but this also brings up another critique I've seen recently that I'm still working my way through: delineating our goal to address social injustice.
We can have more than one goal, obviously. This certainly shouldn't be a binary choice. If anything, though, I think the goals can be complementary if they're done tactfully.
I think by teaching privileged people, like folks with male privilege, to center the experiences of people targeted by oppression, like femme people, in their efforts to improve the condition of the world, it has the natural by-product of also guiding people with privilege toward into just being more decent, empathetic people. Yes, there's the by-product that they also don't get in trouble for harming others, but that should naturally follow rather than being the superficial goal of this work.
I guess there's the question of your motivation, though, and that certainly should be critiqued. I personally always keep at an arm's distance any suggestion that the anti-racist training I do is really beneficial to white people because they, too, suffer from white supremacy. While that is true that white supremacy fucks with white people, too, that ethos cannot be primary (I say this knowing full well that most people's impetus for change is their own self-interest).
The Revolution Starts at Home really pushed me to consider a lot this in really difficult, thoughtful ways. Ways that were really challenging to me, even though I think I'm probably above-average in empathy and social justice stuffs. In a lot of ways, this was as eye-opening to me about some things the way that Patricia Hill Collins' Black Sexual Politics was for me when I read it for the first time at the age of, I think, 24. I've reread BSP a few times since then and it still holds up for me. I'll be interested to reread The Revolution Starts at Home to see if the same holds true for it.
I will grant, though, that a lot of the activist work that's documented in this book does seem to take place in coastal, metropolitan places (Oakland, Boston, San Francisco). I'm left wondering what a model for community accountability might look like in rural areas. I don't fault RSaH for not including that aspect in the book - they published what was submitted to them when this was a zine. Just musing, I suppose.
This book is an awesome resource, not just for how community accountability process took place in several examples but also because of the curricula that were developed by the activists who are working to create transformative justice in their communities. I love how open-source this work is, and I really am eager to get into this work and hopefully be able to contribute to the growing body of knowledge that is community accountability.
I will say, though, that at times it does come across as if the organizers who contributed to this book were kinda flying by the seat of their pants when creating ad hoc community accountability interventions. I realize that's partly the nature of the beast - there isn't really a great model for how to do this well and reliably - but it did leave me with several questions that I don't know how to answer.
In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon cautions us about a form of justice that simply seeks to reposition those who are at society's bottom at society's top, and then remove the people at society's top and relegate them to society's bottom. He reasons that simply replicating the structures of power and oppression with different actors in the roles isn't justice but just another permutation of injustice albeit flip-flopped. Can we really claim justice in a society where someone is always at the bottom?
But I also understand that with generations of pain and oppression and anger, that may not be fulfilling to all people. Is there value in revenge, in punitive systems? Is there a reward in finally seeing those who called you their enemy suffer like you once suffered? Where does that leave concepts like transformation and accountability? Is transformation as important to the individual as it is to the society?
This shit's hard.
That's one of the things that is so compelling to me about The Revolution Starts at Home: the challenge of what kind of justice we should strive for in society. I absolutely agree with the basis of the book's entries that incarceration, isolation, shame, and banishment do not remedy causes of interpersonal violence. I also think it takes a really benevolent person to be a victim of an aggressor yet want them to have an opportunity to heal so they do not perpetuate the violence the victim experienced onto others. And I'm not sure that's something we can demand of a survivor if they're not ready to be in that place of benevolence.
That said, there is so much more to this book than simply this dilemma. I am totally here for alternative interventions that give people an option besides calling the police. Nobody should ever have the police as their only option for (maybe) survival. Nobody. That response in and of itself can be as terrorizing as the initial violence itself, if not more.
I hate that our society is constructed in such a way that the presumptive way to teach people is through fear and coercion. Don't hit your partner or else you go to jail. Don't sexually harass coworkers or else you lose your job. This is where, to me, there is a super valuable point of trying to reimagine intervention as helping a person understand that the reason you don't do harmful things isn't because you yourself will get in trouble, but rather you don't do harmful things because they are harmful to other people, full stop.
A big part of that is cultivating empathy in people who have a low yield of that sense. I'm all for helping people grow into empathetic beings, but this also brings up another critique I've seen recently that I'm still working my way through: delineating our goal to address social injustice.
We can have more than one goal, obviously. This certainly shouldn't be a binary choice. If anything, though, I think the goals can be complementary if they're done tactfully.
I think by teaching privileged people, like folks with male privilege, to center the experiences of people targeted by oppression, like femme people, in their efforts to improve the condition of the world, it has the natural by-product of also guiding people with privilege toward into just being more decent, empathetic people. Yes, there's the by-product that they also don't get in trouble for harming others, but that should naturally follow rather than being the superficial goal of this work.
I guess there's the question of your motivation, though, and that certainly should be critiqued. I personally always keep at an arm's distance any suggestion that the anti-racist training I do is really beneficial to white people because they, too, suffer from white supremacy. While that is true that white supremacy fucks with white people, too, that ethos cannot be primary (I say this knowing full well that most people's impetus for change is their own self-interest).
The Revolution Starts at Home really pushed me to consider a lot this in really difficult, thoughtful ways. Ways that were really challenging to me, even though I think I'm probably above-average in empathy and social justice stuffs. In a lot of ways, this was as eye-opening to me about some things the way that Patricia Hill Collins' Black Sexual Politics was for me when I read it for the first time at the age of, I think, 24. I've reread BSP a few times since then and it still holds up for me. I'll be interested to reread The Revolution Starts at Home to see if the same holds true for it.
I will grant, though, that a lot of the activist work that's documented in this book does seem to take place in coastal, metropolitan places (Oakland, Boston, San Francisco). I'm left wondering what a model for community accountability might look like in rural areas. I don't fault RSaH for not including that aspect in the book - they published what was submitted to them when this was a zine. Just musing, I suppose.
This book is an awesome resource, not just for how community accountability process took place in several examples but also because of the curricula that were developed by the activists who are working to create transformative justice in their communities. I love how open-source this work is, and I really am eager to get into this work and hopefully be able to contribute to the growing body of knowledge that is community accountability.
I will say, though, that at times it does come across as if the organizers who contributed to this book were kinda flying by the seat of their pants when creating ad hoc community accountability interventions. I realize that's partly the nature of the beast - there isn't really a great model for how to do this well and reliably - but it did leave me with several questions that I don't know how to answer.