I was swiping through Instagram stories when I saw a humorous TikTok video poking fun at the pressure that many parents feel to stay calm when disciplining their children in public. Embarrassed, they timidly smile at onlookers and diplomatically negotiate with their screaming kid, only to blow up with rage and reach for the belt as soon as they make it into the doorway.

At first glance, corporal punishment and child abuse seem hardly related to the issue of police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement’s demand to defund and abolish police in the United States. At the very core, however, both of these social issues are rooted in the same cultural logic of punishment that has been completely normalized in our society.

Whether we hit children into submission, violate — if not murder — a “criminal suspect,” or put masses of people in prison cells, the unspoken assumption is all the same: the act of violence is a punishment, and it is an earned consequence that the wrongdoer must endure and suffer in silence in order to correct and socially atone for negative behaviors.

We see this in the way that many people desperately look for ways to justify indefensible slayings of Black people like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Eric Garner, and many more. The long-standing cultural belief that people are subjected to deadly violence or coercive force by law enforcement because they did something to merit such a punitive response is deeply engrained not only in our social institutions (like the police or prisons) but in the cultural imagination itself.

For many, being confronted with the idea that people are subjected to violence in our society because this is how our culture teaches those with power to control others is deeply uncomfortable.

Conceptually, the idea of violence as a mechanism by which society is disciplined shatters the illusion of a distinction between “good” and “bad” people and threatens our psychological investment in ideas like morality, goodness, and safety that are framed precisely in terms of these binaries.

The impulse to defend and justify how violence is weaponized to control, surveil, and dominate oppressed people shows that violence is considered to be an integral part of our cultural communication and a legitimate means of settling interpersonal disputes, particularly misbehavior.

As such, the need to frame violence against victims as warranted punishment extends far beyond the issue of racist policing. Most of us pick up on and internalize such violent ways of relating to each other early on in life.

It is hardly surprising that cultural narratives of punishment are so well-established, since we are taught to think of violence as legitimate punishment since childhood.

If we are not “disciplined” through violent physical and emotional abuse as children, then most of us have been at least put in the corner, shamed or in some other way isolated from others as punishment.

However, if we fail to learn the lesson when we grow up, the metaphorical “reflection” corner becomes the jail cell. Law enforcement authorities mimic the patriarchal rule established in the family unit on a national scale.

Despite the ample evidence to suggest that economic poverty, substance use disorders, and lack of opportunities trap oppressed communities in cycles of criminalization, in a patriarchal culture the wrongdoers, like children, are penalized, isolated, and put away to reflect on their misdeeds.

All this is to say that the way we are taught to relate to another — ultimately, fearing each other and deriving a sense of comfort that those who terrify us are kept under control — deeply shapes how our culture determines who is deserving of punishment and who is entitled to enact it.

More than that, how we think about harm and punishment has profoundly shaped social practices, public policies, and budget priorities, such that in the United States there are more police in schools than counselors, 250% more prison cells than hospital beds, and 28 states with death penalty laws.

So, as abolitionists, we want to call attention to the way in which we have accepted and taken for granted this system of enormous violence and punishment as the primary and only way of living with others.

Rooted in the history of Black resistance practices, the abolitionist movement looks to shift these cultural norms towards embracing notions of healing, compassion, and holistic justice as equally viable paths for nurturing a society in which all people are free from fear and domination.

Abolition calls forth a world where each and every one of us has a birthright to be our whole selves and live in full dignity.

Therefore, in calling for defunding the police and investing in communal wellness, abolitionists offer a fundamentally different model for thinking about human interconnectedness and social belonging.

Instead of punishing, policing, and locking communities in cycles of violence, we can choose to center the ethos of radical love and collective care by providing our communities with compassion, dignity, and financial resources that would lay ground for stable access to safe and affordable housing, education, healthcare, and economic opportunities.

Abolition challenges the limits of our imagination and calls on our inherent capacity to imagine otherwise — to think outside of the regime of violence and to envision alternative ways of being in this world.

Abolishing policing is a necessary step towards ending four centuries of racial violence against Black people but it is only the beginning.

To build truly anti-racist, feminist social structures that work for and empower all of us, we must radically shift and re-imagine how we relate to each other. As prolific Black feminist abolitionists Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba teach us, we must heed the call and decriminalize our imagination by not merely dreaming or wishing for change but actively working towards the kind of world that we know, with all of our being, is possible.

Source: Read on Medium