Kai Zhang
New York City
Streetwise and Safe
It’s Friday, June 24th, smack in the middle of the summer of 2011. I’m in Detroit all weekend with Streetwise and Safe, learning about the various ways in which grassroots organizations across the country use alternative DIY media channels to empower our communities and pursue social justice. SAS will be leading a workshop tomorrow morning on LGBTQ street youth “know your rights” media, and showing the videos, blog, and criminal justice system interactive website we’ve created this year.
(http://www.streetwiseandsafe.org and http://justicemap.streetwiseandsafe.org) We have been preparing for this event for the past month; and we held a fundraiser two weeks ago to allow everyone in the group to travel to Detroit. Now we are totally pumped for our presentation!
The AMC is an amazing space. It’s an annual conference that has been bringing together hundreds of radical and dedicated North American activists since 1999 from New York to California, Toronto to Oaxaca, to share strategies and tools for community organizing – and it’s absolutely inspirational.
The workshops that I attended today, on transformative justice, theater of the oppressed, and street-based youth self-advocacy, engage questions that have been burning on my mind since the beginning of the summer. I want to write about each workshop, in relation to the work we have been doing at SAS, as a way to structure my reflections on my experiences with SAS. At the end of each day of this three-day conference, the highlight of my summer, I will update this blog with my thoughts.
I visited a morning workshop by Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization that seeks to “build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe. [They] believe that basic necessities such as food, shelter, and freedom are what really make our communities secure. As such, [their] work is part of global struggles against inequality and powerlessness.” Critical Resistance is currently engaged in a movement in Oakland against Gang Injunction policies, which are used to police particular neighborhoods in racially discriminatory ways, to “create safety” for the benefit of business-owners in an increasingly gentrified city. I’m inspired by the ways in which CR partners with allied organizations, particularly arts organizations, relentlessly lobbies a hostile City Council, and continuously builds up a larger and larger people’s movement.
The idea of Transformative Justice, which Critical Resistance advocates, is critical to the work that SAS does. It is a systems-based way of looking at restorative justice, which seeks to address the root causes of problems using community-based deliberative processes; to create a people-driven, harm reduction-focused approach to justice, which allows the community to focus on transformative learning and take care of its own internal problems through accountability in social relationships, rather than rely on the retributive justice approach of external policing for punishing perpetrators, in a way that marginalizes people of color in systematically oppressive ways. According to CR, the Prison Industrial Complex is the contemporary system of slavery, institutionally designed to oppress people of color, so they advocate for “abolitionism” of the prison system, racial profiling, and police abuse. Streetwise and Safe adheres with this conception of the criminal justice system, and we believe that the criminalization of sex work is extremely racially discriminatory. Though all sex work is against the law, “high end indoor escorts,” who are predominantly white and of a more privileged class, are rarely prosecuted against; rather, it is street workers, who are predominantly people of color, queer and transgendered, young people, who are disproportionately policed and punished under anti-prostitution laws. The policing of bodies and sexuality has historically been a main way by which the state controls people of color, from indigenous to slave, to immigration codes. The founder and Urban Justice Center lawyer, Andrea Ritchie, writes extensively about this topic in historical and international context, in her newest book, Queer (In)Justice. I will not elaborate further on her historical arguments in this blog entry, but invite you to read her well-researched and impressive book.
I am interested in the connection between domestic transformative justice initiatives like the ones pursued by Critical Resistance, and international transitional justice models for post-conflict states. How do these processes treat victims and perpetrators? Both are victim-centric approaches, which focuses on reparations and healing. However, both also perceive the complex characters of perpetrators, that often perpetrators are victims in another context; and both approaches to justice focus on the restoration of the perpetrator to a functional role within the community, within the network of social relationships that should rightfully enforce and sustain accountability.
The sex worker is treated both as a victim and a perpetrator/criminal via different justice approaches. The criminalization of sex workers is, as mentioned earlier, highly discriminatory, and is not conducive to harm reduction work, as it effectively pushes the sex trade further underground, enabling gang and pimp violence against sex workers. However, the treatment of sex workers as mere victims is also problematic, as it reduces the narrative of these workers to one of helplessness, and promotes a puritan moralism towards sexuality which is problematic; by focusing only on the helpless and “blameless” sex slave/victim, advocates for this type of sex worker ignores the strength, struggle, and daily actions of resistance and resilience that sex workers must employ to survive, and also ignores the vast majority (according to the Sex Workers Project at Urban Justice Center and NSWEP) of domestic and international sex workers who go more or less willingly/knowingly into sex work for economic opportunity as labor of greater payoff. This is a very controversial subject; however, regardless of whether the majority sex workers are in fact “enslaved” or “knowing” (migrant) laborers, legislation against “sex trafficking” is used to police borders in highly discriminatory and oppressive ways; and so the transformative justice solution is to decriminalize prostitution for the purposes of harm reduction. Regulating rather than outlawing sex work allows for better outcomes in public health, and better protects sex workers from violence.
Among the grassroots social justice organizations at AMC, the use of the term “sex worker” rather than “prostitute,” and the belief that decriminalization and harm reduction is better than intolerant border policing – is pretty much agreed upon by everyone. However, in mainstream liberal media, this is still a very controversial stance; and the favored perspective tends to be the one advocated by well-funded and PR-friendly anti-trafficking organizations.
One particularly inspiring afternoon workshop I visited today was by a Chicago group called YWEP – the Young Women’s Empowerment Project. They are a youth-run organization composed of female-identified street workers between the ages of 13 and 23. They have produced amazing media materials that humanize sex workers, including numerous zines, websites, videos, and CD’s, as well as a UN-recognized participant-generated research project. The latter is particularly inspiring for me – these young ladies conducted their own research over the course of two years to identify the greatest dangers and stresses to young sex workers – concluding that policing is of great harm to this community, that 30% of sex workers complain about abusive police encounters while only 4% complain about coercion from pimps, and the vast majority of this substantial interview population are not trafficked or enslaved but rather are impoverished young people, who enter the sex trade knowingly and (more or less) willingly as the best means to survive among limited options.
I am very interested in learning more about community-generated research. These young women were trained by a professional academic researcher in data-collection methods, and then they went about collecting interviews and focus groups on their own, encouraging creative expression through artistic media. I believe more research should be conducted in this manner, and I would be interested, as an academic, in exploring effective models for this type of community-generated research, and training other organizations in this approach.
Connecting again to the broader international perspective of transitional justice strategies, I read an interesting article by Matilde Gonzalez on collecting oral histories in Guatemala from the K’iche indigenous peoples after the human rights abuses of the civil war. The article is called “Local Histories: A Methodology for Understanding – Community Perspectives on Transitional Justice.” In the article, Gonzalez writes about how open interviews based on trust and patient relationship-building with interviewees, which focus not on the suffering of victims but on the agency and resistance they enact, is effective for recording a local community-based oral history, “microsociology,” which better captures the complexities of their experience under institutional violence and structural oppression by the ladino state. Gonzalez writes that research process itself should be a means for psychological and social reparations, that it ought to be informed by mental health techniques, and that the researcher should help interviewees engage in a “critical reading” of their experiences in larger historical context, in order to facilitate their finding greater meaning in their life narratives, and engage in creative and thoughtful healing through the act of sharing their stories. I am really inspired this concept, and would love to dedicate my life to this type of social research in support of struggles for global justice.
The idea of healing is a very significant one to me. Above all, I hope that the theater and artistic work I do with SAS will be healing and will help participants in the process of personal growth. This is tricky, because thinking on the art form of theater, or spoken word performance, there appears to me to be a double-edged relationship between performance art and justice pursuits. On one hand, it can be very empowering for untold stories to be boldly told to an audience; on the other hand, as a former competitive spoken word artist on the New York City team for national teen competitions, I have always been made wary of the way this competitive “sport” generates an Oppression Olympics of sort, where young “artists-made-superheroes” peddle their victim stories in a strange contest that fetishizes individual suffering without adequately addressing/inviting collective actions towards reconciliation of those harms. I believe spoken word is a wonderful political tool for engaging youth activism, but I disdain the ego-inflating practice of spoken word as “arte” – at least in this standardized and competitive form. I also think that the representation of sex work, as a potentially very traumatizing experience, should be done with a lot of caution. It is not clear to me how power relations between audience and performer operates on this subject; particularly since sex work itself is an inherent form of theater. Though burlesque performers find their form of art to be extremely empowering, the shock effect that burlesque invites sometimes reminds me of the self-exploitation of freak shows, and I am not convinced that it is entirely conducive to deep self-esteem and a relationship of equality between performer and audience. Sex work, itself, when seen as a performance, can be reflective of self-control and thus agency on the part of the performer; however, the interpretation of the act in such away depends entirely on the mind state of the sex worker, and I don’t think the “gaze” can always be reclaimed in such a way – there are some situations in which, I believe, sex work can in fact be extremely degrading and psychologically harmful to the performer, in spite of personal narrative to the contrary, simply because the audience member or john treats the worker in such a way as to reduce her own narrative of agency to fragile delusion. The theatrical representation of this survival theater is especially delicate because I am afraid that it may, consciously or less consciously, re-trigger trauma. This would be completely contrary to the purposes of the exercise, which is meant to empower – to boost self-acceptance and self-esteem. However, I have reservations as to whether any theatrical reenactment of sex work might be doubly self-exploitative, particularly when facilitated by a student researcher from a privileged institution; I am very uncertain as to whether or not a public display of such a theatrical project would be ethical or beneficial for participants, and I am wary of how it would impact the relationships I have with other SAS members. If it is a healing process to be creative within the group, it may be better to perform for each other than for a larger public audience; or maybe I am wrong, and public performance would be absolutely the most empowering thing… I am not sure at this point.
At the end of the YWEP workshop, the facilitator asked participants to meditate on our greatest passion, whatever inspires us most. I realized that healing is my greatest passion; that more than anything in the world, I would like to work in a healing capacity in service of people who have suffered human rights abuses, violence, or trauma in the United States and globally. I am passionate about equality an social justice, but deep inside, I am not convinced that complete equality is possible for our species, and I am actually more urgently concerned with helping to heal people who have suffered from oppression and inequality – global structural violence being one form of daily oppression, daily suffering, and daily trauma for the majority of the world’s people. I would like to work on oral history research, or community-based sociology, but only if the research process is innately helpful in some way to the subjects. I am still dealing, personally, with issues of violence and trauma, and I realized today as I was listening to the liberation messages of the spoken word artists of the AMC opening ceremony at the end of this first conference day, that the only way for me to heal from my own sense of irreconcilable hurt and maddening isolation is through participating in this movement, through playing some small part in this endless fight for justice and human dignity. Being at the AMC, in the company of all these amazing people, is such an important healing experience for me, and I absolutely live for this community – I don’t know what I would do, or if I could find the energy to do anything at all, if I ever were to stop being a part of this struggle.
One application of this framework of transformative or restorative justice must be to one’s own psyche. Transformative justice within means being kind to one’s self when one errs, and restoring the deviant part of one’s self to the whole, rather than punishing oneself in alienated self-loathing. This is especially hard for me, as I am constantly frustrated with myself, and too prone to guilt, negative emotions, and destructive handling of myself. So one message I learned today, that encapsulates one of the most precious lessons I have gained from my experience with SAS, is that one can be self-confident without being disgustingly selfish; I admire the celebratory attitudes of the POC activists here, who are not afraid to proclaim their own beauty and strength. I often feel vaguely undeserving and somewhat of a failure – but I must remind myself that we are all deserving of articulating our unique experience and point of view, that in fact, we all must believe in ourselves in order to take good care of ourselves, and sustain our activism in the long run, with courage and intention.
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I carried little Mariah in my lap as she slept during our bus ride from New York City to Detroit. She is the sweet baby daughter of one of the SAS members. I thought about how different my life would be if I had kept my baby, if I were a mother right now – how much that responsibility would change me. Suddenly, holding this little sleeping girl in my arms, I couldn’t stop crying – this is what we really work for – what we fight for: to create a better world for our children. We must heal ourselves to be better for each other and for the next generation.