Ian Partman /
Survived and Punished /
New York, USA /
The summer before entering sixth grade, I watched from my living room as George Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges for his murder of Trayvon Martin. Every summer after, in a strange succession, I watched as more and more black people were executed at the hands of the police, and, perhaps more brutally, as those police officers received little more than slaps on the wrist for their extra-judicial murders.
Feeling almost incapacitated by the senseless state violence (which I would later come to understand as the very condition of our white supremacist normal), I turned to books, films, photos–anything I could get my hands on that would give me a sliver of understanding. As these summers swelled, and with them, protests, riots, and uprisings, so did my knowledge.
Now it feels difficult to define precisely when, but at some point, I began to recognize the fundamental contradictions of the state apparatus that many of us term the “prison-industrial complex.” It was no longer lost on me that the very same system that let police officers indiscriminately kill and target black people with impunity was the same system that disproportionately and indiscriminately incarcerated black people. These contradictions angered me, and it was with this rage, which I couldn’t describe or fully make sense of, that I became an activist.
So, let me rephrase: every summer after, in a strange succession, my passion for a world better and greater than the one given to me and to other black people around the world, in the duress of our white-supremacist normal, grew stronger and stronger. It is precisely this passion which has led me to the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights, and this passion illuminates my summer project.
As a Human Rights Fellow, I will be working with Survived & Punished NY, a nonprofit organization that campaigns and organizes for the abolition of custodial sentences for victims of sexual violence, who were incarcerated for “failure to protect,” self-defense, and other forms of criminalization aimed at caging human beings for their attempts at survival. At Survived & Punished, I will be working to build communication networks between our volunteers, legal assistants, and currently incarcerated people. I will work directly with the mass commutations team to advocate for the release of prisoners in the state of New York.
I will also provide research and other assistance for our ongoing collaborations with human rights programs, law clinics, and other prison and police abolitionist organizations in the Americas. Further, I will conduct individual research on sexual and domestic violence within what I call the “carceral apparatus,” researching transformative justice strategies and assisting another nonprofit, Project NIA.
As it stands, abolition is an impossible project. Many of us have internalized the belief that prisons and police–and the whole of our white supremacist normal–is all that there is. Abolition, thus, is steadfastly utopian, the work of the future. Perhaps for many of us who are vulnerable and proximate to state violence, the utopian is our only claim to the world.