this is yummy and complicated and has had me thinking for the past two days to and from bart, so i thought i would weigh in.

i remember at mmmc a conversation with a non-constituent organizer (and i’ve had this conversation a lot i think) who was saying that us participants all wanted her to be honest and say what she really thought/felt/experienced, but she was also super aware of the power dynamics in the room and how her organization and life was funded by people in the room, and that hence most folks wouldn’t *really* want her to be honest, because it might fundamentally upset their ideas of themselves, and she had a hellava lot to loose in that conversation.

big breath. so all i’ve been thinking is wondering how we (people with wealth/class privilege) fundamentally upset the ideas of ourselves (the normalcy of philantropy as a progressive response to people with wealth) while keeping people at the table and open to the challenge? that’s the big question hey?

thinking a lot about envelope pushing over here. so glad to read your words.

love and respect,
bruin.

Serena, I think you’re missing a crucial point in how we found people to buy the house. We didn’t sell to people just because they were black, but because they were committed anti-gentrification activists with intentions to not flip the house because of those politics. We looked for buyers through an organization of black anti-gentrification activists because the neighborhood was 99% African-American. Our intention was to sell to people who wouldn’t flip it. That said, the owners can do whatever they decide is right and we didn’t write any clauses into the deed to make sure it wouldn’t be flipped.

We sold the house for twice what we had paid for it, and $5,000 less than the appraisal. I don’t see that as giving the house away to people just because they are black. We had figured out that $60k was the right amount to sell for, to not mess with the home values of others on our block, and that’s why we didn’t sell for $100k, or $45k when the buyers tried to talk us down. It was hard to stick to that number, but I’m glad it worked out.

I also want to clarify that I didn’t move out of the neighborhood because it was scary. I say I wouldn’t move there again because for five years I didn’t feel right about taking up space as a house of white people in a black neighborhood. I’ve talked about why I don’t think that’s “reverse racism” in other comments.

Thanks for joining this conversation.

I’ve found Dean Baker to be pretty straight up and easy to digest in detailing what’s going on. His bog is: http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press. He writes, “The economy is going into a recession due to the collapse of the housing bubble” which is essentially what happened. Major banks started gambling, taking risks by loaning poor people money via high interest loans that they thought the global capitalist giant of an economy could back, or get away with. But it started biting them in the ass because we don’t pay a living wage in most states and so folks couldn’t keep up with the loans. Banks offered fake money, in other words, and it has caused a trickle effect throughout our markets, and because US capital is tied up with other countries, it’s affected the global economy as well. This is a simplistic answer, but it’s how i understand it. That coupled with the outragious avenues created through hedge funds and massive pay-outs to CEOS, you get economic volatility with so much disparity at the top and bottom of the economic scale.

I like the positive abolition instead of negative abolition frame - this is what we are talking about here. I am eager to keep looking at this site and thinking about how to do this with other people. Thank you for posting this!

Thanks so much for this awesomely thorough response! My hopes are high that somewhere, somehow, there is a way to move out of the all-too-familiar impasse of “feeling really inspired about movement-building and prison abolition, and really sad and distressed about philanthropy.” I mean, my hopes are high *because* I know people like you and so many others are really putting energy into work around this. Maybe in my craving for concrete examples and tactics, I need to keep that helpful and necessary long-term perspective in mind.

Love,

Jess

I got to the briefing a bit late, so I missed some of what Jamie and the rep from the Funding Exchange (which houses the Beyond Prisons Fund) said - they might have touched on other examples of funding abolition. Maybe someone who knows more than me can chime in with specific examples of other places where this is happening - I know the Funding Exchange funds a lot of organizations doing abolitionist work (this newsletter touches on a lot of that, including the Beyond Prisons Fund: http://www.fex.org/assets/library/80_enewsseptember2008.pdf).

But like I said, the panelists mostly talked about strategy for doing abolitionist organizing rather than about philanthropy. I did scribble down a bunch of notes - a lot of what I found most inspiring was the focus on creating and building just alternatives to the PIC. Generation 5 and Creative Interventions are both organizations that do anti-violence work with a politicized, social justice framework which views the criminal legal system as a perpetrator of violence rather than the savior of survivors that the State makes it out to be. Sarah Kershnar from Gen 5 gave examples from their work of the ways that the State gains access to communities and families by intervening in intimate violence, and uses the role as intervener to criminalize poor communities and lock people up. Transformative justice, which Gen 5 and Creative interventions use as an organizing framework, offers really good ideas and models for addressing community and intimate violence in ways that doesn’t involve the State: http://www.generationfive.org/index.asp?sec=3&pg=48

Angela Davis talked about positive abolition instead of negative abolition - like how slavery was abolished without creating new structures that would allow former slaves to build safe, sustainable lives and have self-determination, and without the input (mostly) of former slaves. So lots of the problems inherent in slavery didn’t actually go away but just came back in other forms that still exist today as institutionalized racism and all its manifestations - hence the need for an approach to prison abolition that isn’t singularly focused on tearing down the PIC, but also on working towards a world in which prisons aren’t necessary.

There was so much more good stuff, and it was great to hear it all from people who have all been involved in this work for a really, really long time. A lot of what folks talked about was focused on movement building for the long haul, since dismantling the PIC and building a new society won’t happen over night (and how hard it is to get funding for movement building in a philanthropy world that tends to be so short term and focused on tangible results and deliverables). Kai Barrow from Critical Resistance talked about how movement building is about fun, pleasure, culture, spirit, beauty, vision, and art - and I always love it when people say those things.

So I was left feeling really inspired about movement-building and prison abolition, and really sad and distressed about philanthropy - which, as Nepon brilliantly put it, is literally invested in a system based in exploitation to survive and function! It’s such a horrible trap and contradiction - that even rad social justice funders like the Funding Exchange can’t escape investing in that system in order to keep funding the organizing that is fighting against it.