CIIS Public Programs Podcast

transcript

 [Cheerful theme music begins] 
 
This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 
 
This episode was recorded during a live online event on March 23rd, 2021. It features community leader and lawyer Zach Norris in a conversation with CIIS professor and restorative justice expert sonya shah about how we can shift our mindset and embrace a new vision for public safety that overturns more than 200 years of fear-based discrimination, othering, and punishment.  
 
A transcript of this episode is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

[Theme music concludes] 

sonya: Alright, welcome Zach. It's so exciting to be here.  

Zach: Great to be talking with you. I appreciate it. [sonya: yeah!]  

sonya: I'm such a big fan of you and [Zach: Oh, and likewise.] yeah, Ella Baker Center, all your work, and I said this to you on our initial phone call that this is like a way for me to live out my secret life of being the brown version of Krista Tippett. 

Zach: [laughs] Yes, yes! I'm glad I can help you live your best life, sonya.  

sonya: You are, you are! The privilege to interview you is the best and just sort of honestly just to like really love on people doing amazing work. So… 

Zach: Right on. Well likewise, your work advancing restorative justice is phenomenal. So, I'm really grateful to be being interviewed by you. 

sonya: Awesome. So, you know, I think people always want to know you and who Zach is and people often first want to know the person and what moves you before we talk about your amazing ideas. So, I guess it's a good place to start is, you know, [Zach: Yeah.] what’s your personal entry into this? 

Zach: No, I appreciate that. One of the when you first said that, what moves you, I thought like well, my kids are upstairs, they’re right now playing Roblox. So, hopefully that'll distract them but during this presentation if I step away for a second, it's because I'm tending to my daughters who are 8 and 11 years old, but I trust that that won't happen.  

I am from Oakland. I still live in Oakland. I was born in San Francisco. We moved to Oakland when I was a week old. I like to say it was a week too late, just because I love Oakland that much. My mom is a retired elementary school teacher. My dad is a janitor, not yet retired, former shipyard worker. And their work and their lives really shaped me growing up in East Oakland. Really shaped me but not until I was actually at Harvard as an undergrad, I went to a number of different Catholic schools, my parents and grandparents scraped and saved to send me to Catholic school.  

And then at Harvard, I saw just how differently young people could be treated when they make mistakes, right? And I saw also coming home each summer that that was a unique thing, that some of the bubble that I was surrounded by being a light-skinned African American Catholic school-attending, you know, Harvard student, like those were levels of privilege that many of my peers didn't have and they ended up in jails, youth jails, and prisons, and adult prisons because they were targeted, effectively. And a lot of the sort of statistics I started to learn as a college undergrad, just the way in which youth of color were being targeted by the juvenile justice system, and that's what led me to an interest in work at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and I've been really there ever since, starting as a law school student intern. 

sonya: Amazing. One of the things that you wrote this really deep amazing book and honestly, I'm from the East Coast, and so I don't have as much history in the Bay Area, but reading it made me feel more connected to the Bay Area because you give really, really beautiful little history lessons of Oakland and Richmond and other places. And I think one of the things that you know, we wanted to start out with talking about was that this book is about safety and you create an offer, like a really deep framework for safeties. So maybe, that's a great place for us to start to sort of [Zach: Sure.] in the meta [Zach: Sure, sure, sure.] kind of laying that out.  

Zach: Sure, sure, yeah, we'll go meta-abstract. [sonya: Meta abstract. The big picture. The big, big, big picture.] But really taking it to you know, anyone who's listening or watching this, if you took a moment and just took a breath and I feel like right now we could all use a moment and a breath and actually even before I talk about safety, I just want to, you know, invite everybody to take a breath and to take a moment and take a moment of silence for so many who have lost their lives just this week to violence. And…and I think it's an important time as any for us to remember about what makes us feel safe, especially given what's happened just this past week.  

And so, I often having learned from other folks who are in social justice movements who have encouraged us to think of a time when we felt safe. And so, I often ask people “what's a time when you felt safe?” And a lot of times people say, “well I felt safe when I was with my faith community” or “I felt safe in the context of my family, be they biological or chosen family.” “I felt safe just when I was around folks who cared about me” and there's this way in which that consistently, safety is really tied to relationship. It's tied to being in a community where people care for you and it's almost really biologically hardwired. I was listening to someone talk about sleep and they were describing how the idea behind people, you know, having different chronotypes. Like, I always wake up from like three to five or you know, I can't go to sleep from this time to this time; many believe that it's because we were taking care of each other during the evening to make sure that you know, the big predators weren't able to come and gobble us up, right?  

So, there's this biological aspect and cultural aspect of relationship that helps to ground us in safety. And yet all of our public safety systems are so geared towards actually ending relationship, severing ties. And so, when someone makes a mistake, particularly if they're poor, if they're Black, if they're a marginalized person based on gender, race, ability, then they're more likely to end up in our nation's prison system. And we've spent you know, the past 40 years building out what is the largest prison system in the entire world. We spend, you know, 53 cents of every federal dollar on the military, 23 new prisons and just one new university built over the past 30 years in California. The lion's share of every municipal budget goes to policing and so there's this way in which we've designed our public safety systems in ways that actually end relationship and sever ties. And what the book talks about is how do we actually move our notions of public policy and public safety to actually more line up with our felt understanding of what safety is? And there's no silver bullet, to use a really bad metaphor to getting there. There are a series of things that we need to pay attention to and shift if we are going to achieve greater safety inside the United States.  

sonya: Yeah, you really went to the meta, you know, and also to the real sense of what's deeply personal in terms of how we feel safe. And also, what's maybe more community-based and how we create safety. So, you know, as you're writing this book and you're talking about safety, you’re naturally also talking about crime and harm. [Zach: Yes.] You make a really important distinction between crime and harm and I'm wondering if you can just sort of speak to that right now?  

Zach: Yeah, sure, no, I really appreciate that question. Like for me, the basic distinction between crime and harm is that crime is a smaller set subset of larger notion of harm, and we tend to focus, in our criminal court system, on crime on the streets rather than crime in the suites of power. Crime in the kind of corner block rather than crime in the corner offices in ways that allow the perpetuation and continuation of larger systems of harm.  

So, what are those larger systems of harm? Those larger systems of harm are white supremacy, are patriarchy, are capitalism, and I described in the book the way in which you know, those systems have remained undisturbed even though they've caused so much harm to so many people and to the planet and our notions of safety our ways of really dealing with that larger set of harms impact, you know, not just our ability to get to safety but also the shape of our democracy. So, one of the things that I describe in the book is the difference between what I call the heat keeps us safe lie of would-be dictators and authoritarians versus the we keep us safe truth and this heat keeps us safe lie is fundamentally a patriarchal, abusive lie. It's a lie that abusive people tell. If, if one finds themselves in an abusive relationship, often that abusive partner is telling them “don't trust your neighbor. Don't trust your mother. Don't trust your girlfriend. Don't trust the people closest to you. Only trust me. Don't talk to those people”, right, and authoritarians really mimic that on a countrywide scale. They say, “don't trust your neighbor around the block. Don't trust your neighbor at the border. Don't trust your neighbor in distant lands, really only trust me”, even while that person is often disguising and hiding a lot of the harms associated with those larger systems that I described.  

And so, if we can move to a fundamental understanding that actually when you take care of the public, you take care of public safety. That when you respond to public health issues like drug use and abuse and homelessness and school discipline and even violence with a public health approach, you're much more likely to actually produce a broader suite of safety and to make everyone safe. And that is something that I think we can absolutely do, and the book really talks about like specific examples of how we move that forward and what that looks like in practice.  

sonya: Yeah. I want to ask one more thing and then get to some examples [Zach: Sure.] because I think there was something that moved me in your book, and I think this concept of looking at the structure of fear and the way that you describe it in terms of these modalities of in the heat keeps us safe lie of deprivation and punishment and isolation and suspicion. And it was really moving to think about that as a way to slice the pie, right? If we create a suspicious society, or a punishment-based society, a society where we're afraid to be close to each other and we're kept isolated and there's no belonging. And so yeah, I, maybe, just to speak to that structure of fear a little bit because I think it's really the setup for then, how do we move out of a punishment-based society out of suspicion, out of isolation? 

Zach: Right on. I really appreciate that question too, it's just like what I described in the book is an overarching kind of framework of fear that has really governed our approach to safety inside of the United States and it's divided into basically four categories.  

So, suspicion and really looking towards people who have been marginalized and othered inside our society from Indigenous people, Black folks, people of color more broadly, people of different faiths.  

Isolation, both in the context of the prison system itself, in terms of the deeper you go into it, the more isolated you are likely to be but also isolation and a broader sense of people feeling isolated from one another. So, people looking at their phones and finding out about crimes in their neighborhood rather than actually reaching out to their neighbors to engage folks in the context of what would make us more safe?  

And deprivation, as you mentioned, which you know, I think about, I live just a stone's throw away from Eastmont Town Center, which used to be Eastmont Mall, which I described in the book as used to be before that, a big car factory, right? And so, there's this way in which the, the car factory shut down, people of color moved in there is a lack of resources for Black and brown communities in Oakland, but more broadly, that is described in terms of deprivation.  

And finally, punishment being the way in which we add damage to damage when someone makes a mistake rather than actually seeking to get to the root of why that person caused harm and working with them to actually prevent it from happening again. And so, that punishment approach has an architecture, which is the prison system. But really, all of the different aspects that I mentioned have kind of a felt, physical presence in our society.  

sonya: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, along that line, sort of getting to some of those, sort of examples and strategies like criminalization has an architecture, particularly for the Black and brown community. [Zach:Yeah.] And you tell so many stories and examples and I think it's so important for people listening, it’s like we all know that there’s struggle and we know there's harm and we know there's a lot of it and oppression, but you tell these really important stories of examples of people that have used like real strategies to create relational, you know ways of being, safety care, collective care, community care. So, I'm wondering if you want to talk about some of those. 

Zach: Yeah. [sonya: Yeah!] I appreciate it. So, I talked a fair amount about the work of Devone Boggan and his work at Advance Peace, which is the organization. He's now at the Richmond office of Neighborhood Safety is the neighborhood initiative, the government office that he created, and you know, this is something that really came out of a response to violence in the city of Richmond. The city of Richmond, around the turn of the century, had one of the highest per capita murder rates in the entire country and the city council, neighbors, everyone was kind of trying to figure out what do we do about this? How do we respond, and at a city council meeting, Devone suggested that the city create a sort of fellowship program for the young men who were believed to be responsible for the vast majority of homicides in the city of Richmond and the police for different reasons, couldn't make the case on these predominantly young men, not exclusively, and Devone said, “I want to engage these folks in a program” and there was a lot of skepticism because they're like, you know, city council's like wait, “you want to start a mentorship program? How is that going to work?” But because they have basically tried everything else folks was like, “all right. Yeah, let's try it”.  

And it consisted of daily positive mentorship and support from formerly incarcerated folks who are kind of trusted in the community. It consisted of a monthly stipend, so people had some money in their pockets to support themselves and their families and travel opportunities for these young men to actually kind of broaden their horizons. And one of the things that I think was most important though than even the sort of constituent parts was that Devone really engaged these folks and said from the beginning that “everybody has looked to you all as the problem, has looked to you as the source of what's wrong in the city of Richmond. I want to engage you and hear from you about what's going wrong and how we can move in a different direction” and it was that shift, right, away from isolation towards actually having people participate, right? It was that shift away from deprivation towards actually providing folks with some baseline level of resources, and it was that shift from a sort of punitive approach. “We're going to lock you up and throw away the key” towards a more accountability framework like not excusing violence, but also engaging folks in an understanding of what led them to commit some of those acts and also to engage with one another.  

So one of the cool things that Devone did was that if young people wanted to go sort of out-of-state or further across the country they had to go with young men who were from rival neighborhoods who, as he described it, “they believe we're trying to kill them” and you know, through that process of young men coming together, not necessarily, you know, leaving as lifelong friends, but leaving with a level of respect and an understanding of one another that made it so that they would never pick up that gun again, right, and that was a huge shift, not just for those young men, but also for the city of Richmond as a whole because now mothers and grandmothers could take their kids to the park and shopkeepers and business owners could keep their stores open longer and it had this ripple effect across Richmond that I think should be replicated in cities across the country along with you know, as President Biden has just said, common sense gun controls and things like that, that we know could also help to address some of the violence that we see gripping our country year after year and even just this week.  

So that's like one of the, sort of like models that I described but I also talk about, you know, some of the on-campus work that folks within the Prism, a group called Prism is doing to challenge a culture of gender-based violence on college campuses, which really looks at a kind of holistic framework around how to address gender-based violence from a restorative justice approach, but also from a preventive approach to really undo some of the normalization of patriarchy and to create environments where young men can be held accountable but also still held in community and for me, that's a key sort of framework or way of understanding of what restorative justice is. We still hold people accountable, but they also don't get sort of expelled out of our circle of human concern and the Prism model and the work that Devone Boggan did in Richmond I think are examples of that kind of approach of like holding folks accountable, but also really holding onto them as part of the human family. 

sonya: Yeah. It’s sort of just coming to me now, just thinking about you know, I think it's hard for people to believe that actually some of the solutions are as simple as like collective care and belonging and relationship and humanity and humanization, right, and of course within a structure of also having resources and you know other things and I find myself constantly trying to convince people that this is the answer, right, like this is the I think you know, I think Van Jones has a little thing in your forward that you know, the opposite of criminalization is humanization, right? [Zach: That’s right.] Why is it so hard? Why is it so hard, so hard for people to get their heads around and wanting proof and wanting to the evidence and wanting you know, the level of the manipulation of fear, the level of the manipulation of hate and othering is so huge [Zach: It is really huge.] and I don't have an answer. It's asked of me all the time. And so, I'm like well, maybe Zach has more clue about…[Zach laughs] why is it so hard [Zach: Yeah.] for people to really feel that? 

Zach: Yeah, I would love to hear your thoughts as well because this is a deep question. I would just start by saying look, this country in many ways was founded in fear. It was founded by folks who were fleeing religious persecution and who brought that fear with them and brought that sort of, dualistic way of thinking over with them and I appreciated this grounding in the fact that we are on Ohlone Indigenous land here in the Bay Area and I've been reading about you know, just the kind of settler mentality and part of it is, to me, tied to racism but it's also deeply tied to patriarchy, right? And we, as men, cisgender men, are not socialized to exhibit our emotions, right, except for one, which is anger. Right, and I had talked about Michael Paymar’s work Violent No More, and that I think is playing out. We see it, you know in terms of the shooting in Atlanta and now the shooting in Boulder, Colorado.  

There's so many folks who are steeped in ways of being that don't allow for a full expression of our humanity, right and I don't have you know, I don't know that I have the answer but I do think that one thing that gives me hope is that this pandemic has exposed our lack of care for one another, right, in ways [sonya: Right, honestly.] that even average lay people who don't think about prisons all the time or policing…I think when they see, you know nurses dressed in literal garbage bags, right, at the beginning of the pandemic when we didn’t have basic personal protection equipment but responding to people demanding racial justice in the streets, you see police with armored gear like you could barely see their faces, you could barely you know, touch their actual, physical presence and that to me was this really glaring example of the way in which we haven't created the basic public health infrastructure to keep each other safe, right? [sonya: Right.] And so, we have always said, you know, like public health solutions to public health issues, drug use and abuse, homelessness, school discipline, a whole host of issues. We never thought we needed to say you should treat a global pandemic with a public health response. Right? But once you've gone way over the deep end and adopted this punitive othering approach to…I don't even hesitate to call it safety. To the regulation of your society, right, and once you've adopted that approach, every problem has the same criminalization, othering solution or so-called solution, right? And so, Donald Trump went to the same playbook, you know, calling it the “Kung Flu” and so all of these other racist stereotypes and blaming Democratic governors and whoever else he could point the finger at, right?  

And so that response didn't start four years ago when he got elected, it didn't start 40 years ago. Although it worsened 40 years ago when we built out this huge prison building boom. It goes all the way back to the origins of our country. And I think, you know, some of what I lay out in the book is that these concepts of restorative justice don't just work for individuals, but also, we need to figure out how we can look at them as societal-wide responses that we need to take up to really heal the harm that we've experienced in this country.  

sonya: Yeah, there's like seven directions of questions I could ask you [Zach: Sorry.] No. No, it's so great. But I'm gonna go with this one because I know it's so, it's so up and it's so live and it's personal for all of us, right and it's personal for me too, just take a minute to sort of say something a little bit more personally about some of the anti-Asian violence that's kind of happening and then ask me to put it in some context but so, as a South Asian person, which I know is different from sort of what the experience of East Asians are going through right now, but when I have been watching what's been happening and I sort of started to notice things coming up for me and I dug a little deeper, you know, I realized that there was just this lineage of anti-immigrantness that I felt my whole life that my parents have felt, this feeling that we are okay to be belittled, to be made fun of, to be shoved to the side, you know, to we’re kind of weird. And we don't talk right, you know, they're all kinds of- we eat strange foods, like and there's almost like a visceral disgust that some people feel for our actual presence. So, we had come in through, you know, the help, the back door, all especially if you're a woman. The, watching the sort of shoving of the elder man was really like a visceral replication of the shoving that we feel on the side of oppression of like really being shoved to the side. And the way that those women who were killed in Atlanta almost made less than because they were maybe confused with sex workers and just this whole wave like what you're talking about the, you know, the lies the suspicion of immigrants, all of that. I don't know if I have a question. I think I'm just like, you know, I know it's up and there's and then there's what happened in Colorado and it's up, you know, and I guess…I guess we're just talking, you know, [Zach: Yeah, I know…] my kids are at the vigil right now in Oakland, [Zach: Right on.] yeah! And yeah, you know, it just would love for you to talk more about what you're thinking about [Zach: Yeah.] all these things that are going on right now. 

Zach: Yeah, I mean I'm thinking and I'm also listening, you know, I want to read the words of Kimberlé Crenshaw who said, in regards to the murders in Atlanta, “to say the murderer’s actions were about sexual desire and therefore not about race is a fundamental intersectional failure. It denies the racial dimensions of the hyper-sexualization of Asian women and reproduces the environment that makes Asian women particularly vulnerable to harassment, abuse, and murder”. Right and I think some of what you know, I have failed as a cisgender man is in recognizing some of those intersections, right, she describes in an article that she wrote like you wouldn't go to an intersection where cars are often colliding and only view what's happening from one direction of that traffic, right? And so, understanding [sonya: That’s well said.] the way in which Asian women have been particularly targeted through this rise of anti-Asian violence is particularly important and it's important on all levels of our society, right? You know, there's the Donald Trump and his sort of big bullhorn sort of racism. Right? But there's also what this current administration is doing as it relates to its view of China and the way in which our foreign policy continues to put folks in that box that you described, right, that otherwise, you know sort of up to no good, like all of those tropes that have been applied to a number of different groups inside the United States, but I think that really understanding, you know, understanding the way in which the actions of one individual are really symptomatic of larger societal ails and that we actually need to think about both if we are going to be successful, right.  

And I think sometimes, you know, as people who know a little bit about restorative justice like in just common conversations people are like, “but what do you do about this situation?”, right, and you're supposed to like answer how to respond to, you know, hateful violence in 30 seconds, right? And it's really more complex than that. But I hope that you know the conversation that we're having gives people an opportunity to think about our immigration policy, our foreign policy, and, and to find their lane and their role in really addressing ongoing othering and marginalization of communities.  

sonya: Absolutely. I think what I appreciated reading your book is you do really a stellar job of putting interpersonal harm in the context of structural harms. And as a person, you know coming from the restorative justice world that is, you know, has been rightly so criticized for its focus on just interpersonal harm is really important and what I think you do this job of you know, not denying the experience of interpersonal harm while putting it in the context of structural harm and then making all of these connections to you know, where, you know, between, you know, the suffering of someone who lost his son in California Youth Authority and then suffered from the healthcare industry, you know, you make incredible connections of like, “look this is how it's all connected”, right? This is how rape on campus is connected to homelessness, you know, this is how- and I think one of the problems we have in sort of social justice communities and even just the way we see this is we don't make those broader connections, actions, we don't work simultaneously on policy as we work on the interpersonal peace and get kind of pigeonholed and stuck into something. 
 
Zach: Yeah, no, absolutely and I think like what your comments sparked for me is the way in which the framework of fear are these structural elements, but it's also very personal. Right? And so, some of what fear does to us biologically is it has us rely on our reptilian brain, which is the oldest part of the brain, right? It's the fight or flight part of the brain and so, you know when people are faced with these tremendously terrible harms, it's natural for us to really kind of go knee-jerk reaction. But one of the things that I hope to try to do in the book is to ask us to kind of take a step back and to hear some stories that might challenge your understanding of how we get to safety.  

And so, one, I want to, if it's okay, I’d like to tell one of those stories because you mentioned Durrell Feaster and his father Allen Feaster and Durrell was a 14-year-old kid who was getting in trouble in school. And he, you know, was doing stuff that adolescents do, as I'm finding out with my 11-year-old daughter, right, rebelling against authority and responding to his dad in ways that his dad didn't like, cutting school. He ended up, you know being sent to a group home for, for being truant some, you know hundreds of miles across California. His dad didn't have a car, couldn't visit him. He ends up, Durrell, stealing a car with someone else from the group home, gets arrested for doing so, sent to another, still more remote, youth prison in the California Youth Authority youth prison system and Durrell and his cellmate, Deon Whitfield, after, you know, nearly 18 months of continuous isolation inside of their cell, were found hanged in their cell and had died. And I met Allen, you know, his dad, at the shoeshine stand where he worked in San Francisco and you know, just got to hear him describe as he was shining somebody’s shoes. Like what happened to his son, who his son was, and over time got to know Allen and understand the level of commitment that he had. And that he basically said, you know, even though my son died, I am going to adopt every single young person inside the California Youth Authority youth prison system, and we are going to work to close these youth prisons down and that's exactly what we did.  

We organized, mostly mothers and grandmothers, Allen, and so many others, just came week after week, month after month, to Sacramento and weren't dissuaded by the responses of legislators who said, “wait you want to close these youth prisons down?” We said, “yes. We absolutely want to close them down because this isn't just the experience of Durrell and Deon, you know 3 out of 4 young people are being rearrested within one year, you know, kids were spending weeks if not months on end in isolation. The state was spending $150,000 per year per young person on this Youth Authority youth prison system”. And what was impactful wasn't necessarily those statistics but really, shifting from criminalization to humanization, right, in the ways that you described, and that Van lifted up.  

Because what we did was, we brought formerly incarcerated young people, we brought their mothers and their grandmothers. And it was that work of actually helping legislators kind of disabuse themselves of some of those stereotypes, the youth super-predator stereotype and the welfare queen stereotype that was so front of mind at that time. And through that process, we moved a few legislators to introduce legislation to close down the youth prisons, even though some of that legislation wasn't successful, other legislative efforts were that restricted the number of young people who could go into the youth prison system and over a near decade long campaign, we closed five of eight youth prisons across the state of California and just recently the Governor signed legislation to close the remaining three youth prisons in a phased out manner over the next few years. And guess what, youth crime continued to decline as we were closing those youth prisons down and that is a huge part of what I wanted to leave, you know, with folks who are listening, is that when we actually treat people with dignity and respect, it actually enhances public safety rather than the opposite. And that's the thing that you know, I think we want to hold on to and really lift up and do our best to try to move people from that fearful space to say, you know, here's what I've seen work over time and it's not going to be an overnight switch right? It's not going to be you know, we move from you know, locking, being the nation that locks up more people than any other country to all of a sudden just being a restorative justice paradise, right? But just as we decided to, you know, shift away from a sort of fossil fuel dependence to actually move towards a cleaner energy infrastructure, we can decide to move away from this punitive framework of fear towards a more care based public health approach to safety and I think you know, the youth prison story is a good example of how that's possible.  

sonya: Yeah, the youth prison story is an amazing example of how that's possible, you know and just the work that you all did and the same families, the same Black families, you know, criminalized, and having the young people criminalized to really organizing and making that happen is a really incredible story. [Zach: Right on.] I'm curious about-  

Zach: And one of the- can I just say one of the things quickly? 

sonya: Oh yeah, yeah, you can say many, many more things, you can say all the things. [laughs] 

Zach: One of the things I appreciated about your retelling of the story is that you also told a little bit about Allen and I told a little bit about Allen too but part of what kind of brought Allen back to my intention was just riding the BART train years later and seeing Allen on BART and we had kind of lost touch and kind of got back in touch and I learned that he was suffering from cancer and it was just another reminder of the lack of care in our society, right, and the way in which if we had a more preventative actual healthcare system, right? And so many people have read, who know about the healthcare system, really describe it as a “sick care” system rather than a healthcare system, right? It's responding to folks after they've been diagnosed with real ailments rather than- and this is starting to change somewhat, but we really need to focus on a more preventative approach to healthcare which models in my mind how we need to adopt a more preventative approach to safety as well.  

And so some of what the book does is not just track Durrell’s story and not even just track Durrell and Allen’s story because I talk about well, what if rather than sending Durrell to some remote group home, what if you actually provided a social worker in the home to support Allen who's a struggling, working class dad and Durrell, that would be much less expensive than a group home, let alone a youth prison. What if we actually invested in the kind of preventive care that says well, Allen is, you know, of the demographic that is particularly susceptible to these kinds of cancers and how is his diet going and how is his you know, those are the kinds of things that I think we could be doing, are not doing and we have a political power problem that I think we’ll need to overcome in order to shift that dynamic but I think it's a hundred percent doable. If we start looking at the right levers and moving those levers in the right directions.  

sonya: Totally. Yeah. I had two questions. I think I’m going to try to remember them both. [Zach: Okay, sorry.] No. No you’re- it's all good. We're just flowing with it. So, I think the first one was around like post-George-Floyd, not even post, but in the wake of, in the wake of a series of police-state-sanctioned killings, in the wake of that, in the wake of uprisings and continued uprisings and that the fact that we've all failed, myself included in the humanization of Black communities and Black families and Black people. [Zach: Yeah.] Do you feel at all like the needle has moved at all, you know, do you feel any sense of like, oh people see us, you know, we're a little more humanize, or do you not and I'm just curious to hear you speak to that a little bit.  

Zach: Yeah. It's a hard question for me to answer right at this moment. I think I was telling you before something happened to me a few weeks ago that related to policing that I think is a story I want to share because it's indicative of a larger point that I want to make.  

And so, I had went with a friend and my partner and my kids, kinda to celebrate, you know, I think we were kind of celebrating his birthday. He's darker skin African American friend of mine. We went on this long hike, we’re coming back through Walnut Creek and it's nighttime by now and first there's like one cop car, and then I think there's two and I pull over and I'm like, “oh, they're really after somebody” because I think I see three cop cars and…but they're not moving from behind me. They don't have their sirens on, so I go through the next intersection, my daughter’s like, “I think they're after us, Daddy you need to pull over” so I do and stop and then I hear, you know, “roll your windows down, throw your keys out the window, come out with your hands up”.  

And, and so I'm you know, trying to navigate these different signals and I'm like because actually the first thing they said was roll your window down and stick your hands out the window, which is what I did. And then they said throw your key…I’m having a hard time remembering that exact sequence of events, but I'm thinking to myself but if I reach back into the car, what's going to happen? I grab my keys and I throw them out the window. Then I get out of the car. My hands are up. You know, it's “lift your shirt up”, which I do too, you know up to my chest and I'm spinning, you know, I'm turning around slowly. And then they say, “back up with your hands up”. And I'm doing all of these things and I notice as I'm backing up away from my car that my license plate is actually different than my license plate. And so, as I'm kneeling down on the ground, they're putting handcuffs on me and then they take me to the to the car, I say to the officer, “I think someone stole our license plate.” So, I didn't realize totally until I'm down on my knees that there are like probably seven to ten different guns pointing at me and that my kids in the backseat are watching this whole ordeal. And you know, part of what happened for me through this incident is like, long story short, they take my friend out of the car. They handcuffed him. My daughters are taken out of the car. My partner is taken out of the car. And you know, through this process, I start to think about all of the different ways, even as I'm sitting in the car, this could be going wrong. And thankfully the things are not happening, you know. I- they- one of the officers come back to me and says, you know, after asking me a bunch of other questions says, you know, “we think we figured this out, you know, there's a car that has your license plate. Someone has swapped your license plate. We pulled you over based on the license plate readers here in Walnut Creek” and he, after a few more minutes, lets me out of the car and unhandcuffs me and you know, I say, “can I go to my kids”? My kids run over to me; they’re bawling, they're crying. They're hugging me. And you know another one of the officers comes and he, you know, says something, something to my older daughter like “I'm also an older brother. Thanks for taking care of your little sister. Um, you know, we, you know, we're sorry” and kind of you know says something that has me label him as a good cop, right? Like okay, this is someone who did something decent. Another cop who was kind of more gruff and abrupt, you know, had a stars and stripes bandana across his face that didn't give me a lot of comfort. I sort of labeled, in my mind, as kind of a bad cop.  

But fundamentally, like as I've been thinking about this story and reflecting on it, like I don't think it's about good cops or bad cops. It's really about the way in which we've deployed police officers in our society to protect a society that is fundamentally unjust, right? And so, we deploy cops when workers are demanding a fair wage and they never intervene on the behalf of workers. Right? It's always on behalf of owners. We deploy cops, you know, we did a civil disobedience at a school board meeting and got beat up by police officers at a school board meeting in Oakland, and to me it was indicative of the way in which you know, when people are demanding fairness and justice it’s often the police who are responding and not in ways that amplify or enlarge the possibility of marginalized folks.  

And so, one of the things that gives me hope is that there's starting to be, I think, a more structural analysis of these problems where people are able to depersonalize it a little bit more, you know, as someone who has a ton of law people who work in law enforcement in my own family, you know, it's important for me to not, you know, demonize or otherize people on either side of the bars, right? I don't want to demonize my cousins who are locked up. I don't want to demonize my uncles and cousins who have worked in various capacities in law enforcement, and I see that there is starting to be this kind of more global picture understanding of policing and the need to shift resources away from only first responders who are armed and wear badges. You know, why would we send people who are in military gear to respond to someone who is suicidal, right? We should be sending people who are trained mental health workers. And that level of analysis more so than the structural racism, I still feel like we have a long way to go but I think, from a sort of conceptual framework, I'm starting to see more traction than I have in the past. 

sonya: Yeah. No, absolutely. Thank you for sharing something that's more recent and you know, it's again how these things hit us really personally and then putting it in the context of everything around, so I appreciate that a lot. I feel like, like so, you know, when we talk about like these real things, these real strategies of how to create a culture of care, of collective care mechanism and I agree with you. I also feel like I'm seeing more traction around crisis counselors instead of law enforcement, you know, the move towards changing resources, moving resources from policing to mental health and crisis counseling. And hopefully street-oriented crisis counseling and community guardians, not the mental health industrial complex, right? [Zach: That's right, that’s right.] Because that's also a whole system that otherizes as opposed to just like the Devones of the world who know how to get down in the street and be like, “are you okay and what do you need? And I'm your people,” right? And so really having people understand the relevance of that. There is something else that you mention that I love- [Zach: Just and just one thing I want to say] Sorry. 

Zach: -say about, no, just one thing I want to say to illustrate what you were just saying if that's okay. [sonya: Please.] You know, we experience this in terms of like, you mentioned the distinction between people who are known and trusted in the community and who can respond to harm in ways that are appropriate, understanding, you know culturally competent obviously gets overused but. Versus a sort of you know, kind of clinical and/or just bureaucratic approach to safety and for me, one example of the difference between the two is we fought long and hard to move some of Alameda County's resources away from the sheriff and probation department and towards kind of what we believe should be community-based re-entry supports for people coming out of the jail.  

Quick context is that the state have been sued as a result of overcrowding in prisons. So, the state of California says we have too many people in prisons, people convicted of less serious offenses, counties, you're now going to deal with these folks and gave counties a bunch of money in the tens of millions of dollars to respond to these folks. And most counties were giving all of the resources to the sheriff and probation departments. And so, we, you know did the civil disobedience, we went to the Board of Supervisors. And finally, we're able to move them to move resources towards away from the sheriff in probation department, towards public health approach. Now what happened was a lot of the contracts that went out in the RFPs were quickly snatched up by the entities who knew how to write the RFPs and to be responsive to the RFPs more than they knew how to be responsive to communities. Right? And so part of what we decided to do in that moment is really go back to the drawing board and say, “what do people who are directly impacted by violence in communities who are survivors of crime and also who have survived criminal court systems, what are they saying about what's needed in this moment?” And people lifted up restorative justice from, you know, by folks who are trusted in the community. They lifted up economic opportunity in the Bay Area. They lifted up really being able to- people being able to stay in their homes as being intimately tied to community safety.  

And so, what we tried to do is embody all of those things in a physical building that we call Restore Oakland that is located in the Fruitvale. One of the most diverse neighborhoods within a super diversity of Oakland, and we're really trying to put forward what community safety looks like when it's actually done in the interest of community members and Restore Oakland houses a dedicated space for restorative justice, a restaurant that will be run by formerly incarcerated and folks and others who have been locked out of- locked out of opportunity. But it also just going to host some damn good organizing to make sure that people have an opportunity to participate and to shift budgets in ways that actually reach communities and that work of supporting folks and providing folks with services but also the means to really change the conditions inside of Oakland and the Bay Area. We believe is fundamental to safety and we really wanted to lift up like a physical example of what community safety looks like, partly because you know to bring it back to how we started, when people hear the term public safety oftentimes, they think of prisons or handcuffs or policing. [sonya: Right.] Even though our felt understanding of safety is different than that. And so, we really wanted to provide a kind of visual aid, if you will in terms of demonstrating a different way forward for safety and I think as an example of like, that shift away from a sort of clinical public health approach, the RFPs that are responded by the same old players to actually, you know, having a responsive approach that is grounded in community. 

sonya: Yeah, totally. Added to that, there's a moment in your book that you talk about this idea in smaller communities, about that smaller communities, let's say Indigenous communities came from having these multiplex relationships, right, where people had various relationships with each other. So maybe if the person I bought my bread from was also my student and his mother was also the person who cut my flowers and so we have, you know, I'm getting to this notion of like, how we create a collective responsibility and interdependence in urban 2021, right, and not in these, we’re not in the small communities, but I love the notion of the multiplex, you know, relationships that cause us to want to deal with harm and conflict.  

And so, when you translate that to 2021 and you're talking about, you started talking about how some things like engagement right, like political engagement, book clubs, like engaging actually can create the same sense of collective responsibility or interdependence because I think it's really deep for us to get to the point where we have to almost like, do behavioral change to realize that we are interdependent and [Zach: Yeah.] we are collectively responsible. So, I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit [Zach: Yeah.] to like what do you think we do in 2021 [Zach: Yeah.] to create that?  

Zach: No, I really appreciate that. Like, you know, for me and this will be obvious to you as an expert in restorative justice, but for the sake of the audience, I feel like you and I are just talking but I know that there are people watching and listening [sonya: Yeah, go for it! Go for it!], right?  

sonya: You know, I’ve avoided the term restorative justice this whole time [Zach: Yes!] because I told you I- if I never say the word again, I'll be happy but you gotta break some stuff down! [Zach: I get to go, I get to go! Okay.] You go, you go! 

Zach: So, you know, I think that our court system is emblematic of that same, you know, divide, divisive way of thinking, right, it’s the person who has caused harm on one side, the person who's been harmed on the other, and they're all lawyered up and the judge sort of decides and then the person who's caused harm is, if in the criminal court system, is sent to some remote prison, right, restorative justice is completely different than that.  

The person who's caused harm, the person who's been harmed are sat in a circle. They're surrounded by the people that support them. And every single person in that circle is really thinking about the question of what might I have done to prevent this harm from happening. Right? And so, there's this way in which that gives folks an opportunity to think about interdependence, to think about mutual accountability and that framework absolutely works, right, you know people who have caused harm are much less likely to recidivate if they go through a restorative justice process than in the criminal court system. Victims of crime, survivors of crime report much higher satisfaction rates with restorative justice processes because they can see the accountability that has happened. They feel it and it impacts them. And finally, all of those folks who are in the circle surrounding those two individuals also benefit from restorative justice because we're collectively developing this accountability muscle where we are dealing with those hard questions. We're not just having the knee-jerk responses. We're really thinking about our own accountability and to me, it gives us an opportunity to really build the muscle of holding the powerful folks accountable, whether it be a powerful restaurant owner who is sexually harassing women and gender non-conforming folks in their restaurant or allowing that culture to flourish in the restaurant. Whether or not be politicians at the state, national, or local level, right?  

And so really developing this framework where we can see how our actions are tied to one another but also be in the practice of dealing with some thorny questions that would enable us to really bring these questions, not just to the most marginal folk, the folks who have been most marginalized, but really to the folks who are the most powerful and I think that is, if anything, going to have the most ripple effects. When we start to see powerful people held accountable in ways that aren't about, you know, necessarily ostracization or you know ending, you know, their lives but really about, really demonstrating that everybody is part of this interdependent framework. And therefore, everyone should be held accountable and it's our responsibility collectively to do so.  
 

sonya: Yeah. Yay. Yes. Absolutely. I want to just ask one more question [Zach: Sure.] and it's kind of, I wanted to dial back to sort of a- the topic of like sexual harm and [Zach: Yeah.] domestic violence for a minute and you know and kind of come at this from a personal place of like, you know, I know, I am a deeply, you know, interrelated and interdependent like come from like deep in my gut, you know, solidarity place. But one thing that gets difficult for me is when I don't feel that like patriarchy is seen in the same way that other systems as equal to other systems of deep inequity or when sexual harm and domestic violence are kind of seen as the brushed off non-real harms, you know, I go like, ugh, you know, I start to feel like well if you don't see me, how do I stay in solidarity with you? If you don't see me [Zach: That's right.] how do I stay in solidarity? How do I hold on to my interdependence? And then I notice myself being like well, then I'm not going to see you either [Zach: Yeah.] and you know, I mean, this is like a decolonizing question right, like, like in my gut and my soul, I want to stay in solidarity. But when particularly, you know, silence is endemic to you know, violence against women and then you don't feel seen, you know, and I can imagine if we turn that around and we're talking about violence on Black communities and then Black communities continue to be humanized by people like me. There's this kind of like, well, you don't see me. [Zach: Yeah.] you know, so I'm just like, you know, and it's- we know the strategy of divide and conquer and crabs in a barrel and all of that, but I think there's something really so deeply like personal about how to like decolonize and stay in relationship. [Zach: Yeah.] 

I know for me. I really lean on my, my spiritual practice and like the causes and conditions of the deep fundamental nature of reality that helps me to get out of an ugly place and I'm just curious for you and maybe for others like what are some of your practices or strategies to sort of stay in solidarity?  
 
Zach: Yeah, no, I really appreciate that question. I think, you know, one thing I will just name is like I have really tried to own my own privilege as it relates and, and not always successfully for sure. But as it relates to being a light-skinned African American and understanding that my experience is different than my father's experience. And so, I think part of it, because patriarchy was so deeply ingrained in me as a young person, recognizing that it's harder for me to overcome it. Like I have more work to do as a cisgender man than I do in the context of other forms of privilege that I occupy and inhabit. And I think that when I have been thrown off by folks not seeing or not recognizing me, I have tried to, you know, just, I'm an introverted person, if you can't tell based on the conversation thus far and so some of it is just going to remember that care in a broader sense actually starts with some level of self-care, right?  

And that in the context of social justice is also a little bit contrary to a lot of our culture, right, which is kind of a burnout culture and a work as hard as you can…and so some of what I've recognized is that when I take care of myself, I have more capacity to be there for others even when I don't necessarily feel like they're showing up for me in the ways that I would like them to. But you know to be honest, like I think you're right. Like I think we need do a lot more work, you know some of what I described in the book is the way in which our economic system continues to undergird patriarchy and so many, you know, so it's about violence and it's about harm but it's also about really structural levels of capitalism that reinforce the undervaluing of women and their labor in ways that facilitate their exploitation through a violence framework and or- not framework, just their subjection to violent harm, right?  

So let me be more clear: my partner runs an organization called One Fair Wage and she describes the way in which the levels of sexual harassment in the restaurant industry are higher in states that maintain a sub-minimum wage. So most restaurant workers are women and then the states where women are more reliant on tips, they also have to put up with all kinds of sexual violence and harm and so that kind of structural analysis is something that I think should be more broadly in our consciousness, is not as yet, and I think that you know, we need to get better at doing the work that Kimberlé Crenshaw really helped illuminate in terms of really recognizing these intersections and lifting them up and calling each other in when we don't do well.  

So, you know, I wrote a blog about what happened in Atlanta and you know, I have written part of it prior to actually what happened in Atlanta and the murder of predominately Asian women in Atlanta and it didn't actually meet the mark in terms of being intersectional in some of the ways that I described and I was talking with a friend and colleague about that and they kind of pointed it out and say “hey you didn't really pick this up”. And so, I just appreciated that, and I hope that you know, we can try to be graceful with one another and if we can't take a nap, [sonya laughs] you know, go eat some snacks, you know, we've been trying to have a better snack policy at the Ella Baker Center and I tell you, it has been game changing. [sonya: I love it.] So yeah, those are some things that I think…snacks, naps and intersectionality. 

sonya: Snacks, naps and intersectionality sounds like the name of your next book. [Zach laughs] Oh, it’s the best! Yeah, so let's just, you know, kind of do a little check out, you know, see if there's any kind of closing thoughts or feelings or anything you want to say, anything we want to say before ending. So just to give you a moment, because I know you've been talking a lot. [Zach: Yeah.] I just want to really thank you for your work.  

You know, it’s so great for me because I never get to read anymore. And so, before an interview like this, I get to read this book and I really, really like, I felt like for like 4 days sort of just like swimming in the words that you wrote and really felt like I said, a little bit more connected to the history of like Richmond and Oakland and just places…I felt like there were little pieces that like weren't about restorative justice, were other strategies towards safety and all the examples that you gave that actually were really helpful for me on a, on another level [Zach: Right on.] on a more professional, I guess, level and just yeah really appreciating. [Zach: No, no, yeah.] Thinking about all these things. So that's what I want to say to close. [Zach: Okay, right on.] We're giving you lots of appreciation and love. So yeah, nope, you're cutting me off trying to make me stop appreciating you! Gotta just take it all in [Zach: Okay. Okay.] Take it all in! Whew! Have some snacks. Take a nap, you know, all that stuff. So, I thank you very much and just want to turn it over to you, see if there’s anything you want to say. 

Zach: Yeah, no, I thank you so much, sonya. Yeah, I would just say let's keep breathing. Let's keep doing the work and let's keep responding from the love that's in our hearts. Right? And I think when we start with that perspective in place, that we have an opportunity to be successful and you know if I believed my rational brain when I first started this work, I probably would not have done it, right? If I listened to all of the hate and fear that was being broadcast around youth super predators as I was a high school student and a college student if I had succumbed to that, I would have never started this work and we have achieved incredible progress.  

And so, I want to just leave that with folks, like as much as we've talked about the ways in which these systems are acculturated, I've seen just incredible progress in terms of really moving away from a framework of fear, and people really understanding that we need to take care of one another if we're going to take care of safety. And so, I'm inspired, despite a lot of challenges. I hope that you are as well. And I hope that you take the time to take one action coming out of this conversation, be it large, be it small, that you can say help shift us in the direction of taking care of one another.  

sonya: Thank you so much, Zach.  

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
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