on community, cooptation, & definition as a moving target

I often see a lot of hand wringing about the word “community” — what it means, who’s included. i care a lot about definitions and specificity, as i’ve written before, but i also don’t see definitions as static or unchanging. our definitions depend on our relationships, on our needs, on our contexts. definitions are created as a process, a negotiation among the people involved. sometimes we need a narrow definition, and sometimes we need a very broad definition.

it just kinda depends.

when i see so much pondering over the question of what counts as community, it reminds me of some of the responses to my call for community accountability after my experience of rape and abuse five years ago. whether they worked closely with my rapist in the very same collective, whether they had their work published in a magazine where my rapist was an editor, whether they hung out with this person socially, a sudden distancing happened where many folks became sure that they were not-community and definitely not-responsible.

not everyone, of course. many people acted in solidarity with me, as i documented in my zine learning to exhale. but the phenomenon of folks distancing from “community” still feels worthy of attention.

i was clear then as i am now that rape is not an individual problem, that patriarchal violence is a collective and systemic problem. some folks wondered why i didn’t publicly name who raped me and why i wasn’t content with a response that cast out a single person. a lone wolf rapist would have better fit their conceptualization of harm as individualized. but as i wrote back then in my open letter, it’s much easier to remove one rapist from a community than it is to interrogate the conditions that led rape to occur in that community.

and to that, some folks replied: what community?

what i think a lot of academics and theorists get right about their definition of community is that there isn’t one single agreed upon definition. what i think many miss is that there is a process that happens where people work collectively to define terms, and that process is an ongoing negotiation.

in some contexts, we want to be really specific about who we mean by “community.” we want to know specifically who’s picking up the kids, who you’re going to turn to when harm happens. pod maps can be a useful tool for defining community when we need specificity.

when i approach the definition of “community” as an organizer, i think of it as a constant expansion. how do i get more people to understand themselves as part of a community reflecting on the ways they contribute to rape culture? how do i get more people to understand themselves as prison abolitionists? how do i work to get people who think of themselves as prison abolitionists to expand their definitions of the communities included in their practice of abolition? to make sure their lens includes folks targeted by family policing, folks incarcerated in psychiatric institutions, includes children and especially children who are Black queer trans and disabled?

while some academics and theorists work to pin down a definition, as an organizer, i’m moving the pin faster than you can publish. i’m actively working to change the definition of “community.” i’m working to bring more people into the fold, support more people in understanding themselves as part of this community, as people who have a stake in this fight. as an organizer, i am working to expand the most commonly used definitions of terms to reach the margins. in angela davis’s words, “i am no longer accepting the things i cannot change. i am changing the things i cannot accept.”

i’m saying: you may or may not have previously been part of this community reflecting on your role in contributing to rape culture, so i’m inviting you to join me, get on the bus, let’s do this together.

so sure, i’m sure you can find a loophole where you don’t have to reflect or take a certain position or action because you’re not really part of this community anyway, but my work as an organizer is to close that loophole and create the conditions that compel you to act. to show you that community is expansive, and it includes you. and that community accountability requires us all.

this isn’t a critique of books; i love books. folks who have been to my home know that i have books falling out of the coffee table, towered over my bed, in stacks along the floor. i don’t have enough furniture to contain the books i collect. & i know the limitations of books, just like i know the limitations of definitions: they mark a moment in time.

it’s not a critique of books; it’s a critique of theory without practice.

as more and more folks called themselves abolitionists in and after 2020, but actually supported reforms that further entrenched criminalization, many of us called out the cooptation of abolition. this trend of cooptation made me more cautious about sharing about abolition and transformative justice in under 240 characters. my social media platforms grew after cocreating #8toAbolition in 2020, and i was Very Online sharing to over 20 thousand twitter followers, only to see folks regurgitate my words in their paid articles and books, watered down and devoid of context or practice.

for awhile it really bothered me.

what i understand now is that some cooptation is inevitable, and some of it is just the learning curve. yes, you’ll get plenty of white academics exploiting the work & ideas of community organizers to write their little books and make their little documentaries, because their egos are so big, and they love abolition now that we’ve made it popular! yes, you get those, and those people are colonizers. but a lot of what i realized felt like cooptation is just new kids, little abolitionist eggs, who like what they’ve learned so far, and they’re running with it, and they still have a lot to learn, but hell, who doesn’t? who among us isn’t called to check themselves, to notice gaps in our analyses, to recognize our areas for growth? i don’t trust anyone who claims to know it all.

with newcomers on a learning curve, i don’t worry as much about cooptation. i see learning as a natural part of the process of negotiation involved in (re)defining terms.

but then we have the distancers — the ones who evade a definition, because keeping things vague and undefined is working for them. so if i say “hey, your community has a rape problem,” and you can’t deny the rape so you redraw the lines of the community in a way that casts out the individual rapist, and say “what community???” then i know you’re just mincing words, and my work as an organizer is to draw the lines again to make sure your skin is in the game.

and if at the end of our negotiations, you define the term in one way, and i define it another way, then at least i know and use that information to decide if i want to be in community with you after all.