currently reading: Until We Reckon by Danielle Sered
books bought:
The White Book by Han Kang
Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair by Danielle Sered
books received:
The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri (e-galley, out 9/3)
Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness by Anne Harrington (e-galley, out 4/16)
The Warm South by Paul Kerschen (out 5/1)
Naamah by Sarah Blake (out 4/9)
books finished:
An Amateur's Guide to the Night by Mary Robison
The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri
Until We Reckon by Danielle Sered
Hey you,
I'm going to talk about violence and crime in this one, just so you know.
I just finished reading Danielle Sered's book Until We Reckon. Sered is the founder of Common Justice, an organization which "develops and advances solutions to violence that transform the lives of those harmed and foster racial equity without relying on incarceration," per her author bio. The book argues that survivors of violent crime, its perpetrators, and the surrounding communities are better served through a restorative justice process than the incarceration process.
A few months ago in this very newsletter I wrote this:
Perhaps the problem is that I don't really know what reckoning looks like in a practical sense. I have lived with my inaction, but what is my other option? I think my mistake is conflating living with and reckoning.
The dictionary says reckoning means settling accounts, but I hate when I'm reading an essay and the writer quotes the dictionary. I think of reckoning as dealing with...
What is the difference [between acknowledging and reckoning]? And how do you know when you're done?
In a chapter called "In Praise of Accountability," Sered takes us step by step through what she says are the five essential elements of accountability: acknowledging responsibility for one's actions; acknowledging the impact of one's actions on others; expressing genuine remorse; taking action to repair the harm to the degree possible; no longer committing serious harm. It's the second part I'm most interested in; in describing this step, Sered gave me, finally, a definition of reckoning:
In this part of accountability, we give up that unearned right to remain hidden. We listen. When possible, we listen directly to those we harmed. We listen as they describe how they experienced the harm we caused and how we appeared to them in the moments we were at our worst. We listen as they tell us how we felt at the time, how they felt immediately after, how they have felt since. We listen as they tell us all the ways their choices have reverberated through their lives. We listen to their pain, to their rage (at us), to their disgust (with us), to their sadness, to their fear. We listen to what they have lost—what we took from them—and what they fear they might never get back. We listen to how they are changed, how their sleep and their appetite and their safety and their love are all changed—by us. We listen and we do not explain or deny or correct or diminish what they are saying. We just bear witness to what we have done.
A few months ago, after the Kavanaugh hearings, when the whole world was a raw wound, I was desperate for this kind of reckoning, for any degree of accountability—which is not to say I'm no longer desperate for it—from any of the men who have assaulted me (pick one). I reached out to one of them, told him how I felt after what he did. A friend of mine—male—asked me what I was trying to achieve when I sent the guy a message, if the point was to make him feel bad. He said, I guess my question is, is there even anything he can actually do that will make you feel better?...I feel like maybe what you really want is for this experience to bother him and be with him all the time like it is for you. And I get that completely. But neither of you have control over that, so he can bullshit you all he wants and say that he's reflected on this or whatever, but at the end of the day you don't know if it's genuine. That is why I wanted this guy to listen, to read what I wrote. I said to my friend, After a certain point, genuineness becomes irrelevant. I wish instead I could've sent him this passage. "Him" applies to whichever of those men you think it does, maybe both.
And so I think Until We Reckon brings up fascinating ideas, and could be a useful primer for some people—but still I finished it frustrated.
Sered talks a lot about healing—the healing process, healing equity, healed people—and yet I finished the book not sure what healing means. It's the same problem I had with reckoning. Not enough in the book is tangible; so much is so generalized as to become effectively meaningless. (She writes, at one point, "Only healing heals all wounds," which is certainly...semantically sound.) There are platitudes and broad sweeping conclusions based galore, a number of which made me write "?" in the margins (such as "The work of grieving is always also the work of reopening the possibility of imagination." Maybe that makes sense to you? I do not know how it is supposed to be useful to me).
The other problem with all of the talk of healing is, frankly, that it felt beside the point to me. There is a certain point past which almost anything becomes irrelevant.
I've written about this here before—two years ago my uncle was murdered. I wrote a victim impact statement for the sentencing. (This was another exercise in utterly fucking beside the point: this self-evidently horrible thing happened, can you write us something letting us know whether or not it was horrible for you?)
First he was missing. Then, a day or two later, my sister called me and said he had been killed, and I said "That means someone killed him." And my sister said, "Yes," and the whole world went quiet for a very long time. I wrote:
When I finally got out of bed I got on my knees and clasped my hands together and I prayed, I spoke out loud, I pleaded, I begged—Let it have been painless. Let it have been a bullet, swift. Let it have been painless. Let it have been painless. And then the reporters called me and my sister, and they said they knew it was a crowbar or a shovel, they were just wondering which one?
Am I to heal from this?
Let me rephrase. My uncle is dead. There is nothing that I want this murderer to say or do. I do not care if he takes responsibility; I do not care if he acknowledges the impact of his actions; I do not care if he expresses remorse. There is nothing that I want that restorative justice can give to me. There is almost nothing that I want.
I am not interested in healing from this.
I do not have the words to comfort my mother. I cannot say, "It's going to be okay," because the simple fact of the matter is that it isn't, it won't be, not ever again, and we both know it. After I found out that John was murdered I went out and bought her a sympathy card and when I got back to my apartment I hit it under the couch so I wouldn't have to look at it. Tell me, what could I possibly have written in it to ease her grief?
Sered writes, "Accountability does for those of us who commit harm what the healing process does for us when we are harmed: it gives us a way to recuperate our sense of dignity, our self-worth, our connectedness, and our hope—the things we lost when we caused harm." But there are some harms that one does not recuperate from, and surely Sered knows this. She writes a few chapters later:
Combatting the normalization of violence is not just about grieving the lives we are already culturally primed to grieve. It is about the harder work of grieving every life lost—of saying no matter who you are, no matter what you have done, no matter how angry or afraid we are, we will still say that what happened to you was wrong, we do not believe that you are deserving of violence, we believe your life remains sacred [emphasis mine], and we will grieve you because you are one of us. That does not mean we excuse whatever harm the person may have committed. It just means that we do not excuse the harm committed against them.
I will not generalize, and I will not pretend I was thinking of others; when I read this passage I was thinking of myself, and the murderer in my life. But I simply don't think that his life is sacred. There is no way for me to reconcile that with the fact of what he did.
It felt like walking next door to ask my neighbor for a cup of sugar when his house is on fire. It felt that bizarre, to ask me to consider the sanctity of the murderer's life.
Am I being unfair toward the book's argument? Perhaps Sered is not talking about murder; one of the book's biggest flaws is that she never defines violence. She says in some cases restorative justice would not be appropriate, but she does not say under what circumstances that would be the case. I assume murder falls under the category of "violent felonies," but what do I know?
What do I want for him? Everyone asks this. I want him somewhere where I never have to think about him ever again for as long as either of us live. The specifics of this arrangement matter very little to me; I don't think I would be particularly affected to find out he was at America's worst prison or America's nicest. I don't care what kind of food he eats or what kind of sheets he sleeps on or if he has to share a cell with someone. I do not care if he suffers. I just want to be sure, always, that he is far away.
I know this is callous. I know, and I do not care.
I have a hundred more thoughts about this book, but I have taken up so much of your time already; I am sincerely grateful that you've read this far. I'll leave you with one more thought.
In The Ungrateful Refugee (which deserves an entire newsletter of its own), Nayeri writes of a discussion she had with a family friend, Pooyan. Pooyan says, "...my worldview is partly based on Darwinism. That functions as a certainty. To change that means to restructure my entire web, and that would cost too much. I'd be a different person." I wonder, sitting here, if I would still feel this way about the murderer if I'd grown up in a culture that wasn't so punitive and incarceration-focused. Perhaps it would cost me too much to fully embrace restorative justice. I want to say no at the same time I want to say yes. No, because of course I am shaped by the world I grew up in. No, because I do not doubt Sered when she writes of Common Justice's success rate, and because I agree with her when she says incarceration doesn't accomplish what we want it to, and because I do think most prisons are fundamentally inhumane, and fewer people should be incarcerated.
Yes, because in this instance, when something terrible really has happened, it turns out I don't care about punishment or healing or any of it.
Of course I will never know the answer.
Your friend,
Smalls