Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities

Listening to the Movement: Essays on New Growth and New Challenges in Restorative Justice, 2019

We are a multi-generational, geographically dispersed group of white-identified individuals in the restorative justice movement. We have all been involved in racial justice activism and have participated in various anti-racist white affinity groups. We acknowledge the long history of anti-racism organizing by people of color broadly and especially by practitioners of color within the restorative justice movement who have been calling for a more explicit focus on dynamics of race, power and privilege within restorative justice. Our intention is to add our voices to a conversation already in progress, because we believe that our silence perpetuates further harm. We come to this conversation with humility and the recognition that we have more questions than answers. We are speaking from our perspective as white-identified people, specifically to and with other white people. We believe that white people have a role to play in the struggle for racial justice, that it starts within ourselves, and that it must continue within the all-white and predominantly white spaces to which we have access. We hope it is in the spirit of Stokley Carmichael's 1969 Black Power speech, in which he asks, "Can white people move inside their own community and start tearing down racism where in fact it does exist?" Mika Dashman, the Founding Director of Restorative Justice Initiative, a New York City-based advocacy and organizing project, brought this group together. In 2015, she began developing an anti-racist circle model for white people called "Racism Stops With Me." She presented this model at two national restorative justice conferences, including the Restorative Justice in Motion Conference at EMU in July 2016 where she collaborated with Anna Lemler and Mikhail Lyubansky. When Mika learned about the "Transforming Whiteness for Racial Justice: A Restorative Approach" workshop that Kat Culberg, David Dean and Julie Shackford-Bradley offer in the San Francisco Bay Area,

Listening to the Movement: Essays on New Growth and New Challenges in Restorative Justice, 2019

This anthology of ten chapters revolves around new developments in the restorative justice movement as well as assessments and concern areas regarding the current state of the movement. A common thread throughout the chapters is the recognition that restorative justice can no longer be confined to the realm of programs that serve clients. Rather, it is becoming a social movement that promises significant social transformation on many levels of society, connecting both systemic change with frameworks for individual and relational heart-change. Chief among those unfolding changes are matters of race relations, movement leadership and community empowerment. The context for this anthology stems out of a three-year, grant-funded project conducted by the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice. The first two years included a facilitated consultation of select restorative justice leaders who grappled with future scenarios of where the field may be headed (2015), as well as a larger conference (Restorative Justice in Motion: Building a Movement) that allowed diverse groups to articulate both new successes and new challenges (2016). Out of that event (in 2017), contributors for this anthology were invited to write about those new applications and about current barriers and challenges to movement integrity. The ultimate aim for this third year project was to get the message out to a larger audience connected to the restorative justice movement. Co-Editors: Ted Lewis, Center for Restorative Justice & Peacemaking Carl Stauffer, Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, 2020

Any discussion relating to the role and potential of restorative justice (in this case, as an approach to decrease racial disparities in school discipline and criminal justice) must start with the question: Which restorative justice? A movement this large and this diverse can be divided and categorized in many different ways. To that end, I see three types of restorative justice vying for influence in the U.S. landscape: (i) a gentler kinder method of gaining compliance from others, (ii) a set of skills and techniques that individuals can learn to deploy to work through interpersonal conflicts, and (iii) a systemic response designed to challenge existing power hierarchies and provide a more democratic, community‐owned way of responding to conflicts and acts of injustice. Within the first two types, there is also a tension between those who see their restorative efforts as part of an internal set of values and principles that they carry with them from one context to another and those who see restorative justice as a professional role that is useful in a particular context (e.g. a school) and limited to that context in practice. From my perspective, all of these restorative justice conceptualizations have value, but only the third has the potential to contribute to a more racially equitable society.

Contemporary Justice Review, 2019

In 'Reimagining Restorative Justice,' Schiff and Hooker create analytic space aimed at developing a greater understanding of how 'restorative justice' language hinders or supports achieving right and equitable relationships. Despite what appears to be a more narrowly tailored focus on linguistic constructions, their desire to grapple with the practical and imaginative limits of language establishes a broad container from which to explore multivariate tensions within the field. As such, 'Reimagining Restorative Justice,' places restorative justiceas a movement, project, theory, or practiceat a crossroads. This article enters into the crossroads in the following conceptual manner. First, it contends that prior to (or at least concurrently with) the re-languaging of restorative justice there must be an interrogation of the framing, transmission, and institutionalization of restorative justice values and ideas. Second, it posits that such examination will expand the possibilities of 'restorative justice' language by underscoring the need to shift away from defining it relative to systems. By introducing these ideas, this article seeks to enrich the conventional restorative justice literature by highlighting new lines of theoretical and empirical analysis, which may in turn expand the lexicon of restorative justice itself.

… Community Corrections Association (ICCA) Journal on …, 1997

With all the activity surrounding restorative justice and the diverse forms it is taking, it seems appropriate to address core areas concerning its its origins, practices, contexts, and challenges. Origins and Practices Twenty years ago, when the first victim-offender reconciliation programs were being set up in Canada and in the midwestern U.S., and when few academics or practitioners were aware of indigenous justice traditions, the term restorative justice did not exist. In subsequent years, it gradually emerged as a concept in the writings of Colson and Van Ness

Proceedings of the 2019 AERA Annual Meeting

Restorative practices are touted as an answer to the racial discipline gap; yet they perpetuate racial disparities (Author, 2016; Anyon et al, 2016; Payne & Welch, 2013). In light of this year's AERA conference theme, we go beyond the quantitative data on discipline disparities to understand what about restorative practices make them effective sites for improving student behavior and overall school climate. Through an ethnographic case study of one charter high school in urban Texas, we found that the school's self-proclaimed 'critical' approach to restorative practices led to more vulnerability and empowerment for both students and staff. Our findings have implications for others trying to implement restorative practices, as well as those researching them.

Routledge eBooks, 2023

Everything about Indigenous research tells us we have to locate ourselves in our research. First, we write our own stories and share our position in the world before we write about the world. This is a big task because first we have to come to terms with who we are and how we come to do the work we do. (Linklater, 2014, 11) Positionality is the notion that personal values, views, and location in time and space influence how one understands the world (Sánchez, 2010). Gender, race, class, sexual orientation, education, and experience influence how one thinks about things at any given moment. Both positionality and privilege, which according to Memmi (1965) is at the heart of colonial relationships, are essential to consider when writing about decolonization and restorative justice (RJ). We, as authors and researchers, actively consider how our positionality and privilege impact our understanding of our work. Here we attempt to both locate ourselves and articulate where we are in our process of decolonizing ourselves.

Hungarian Journal of Legal Studies 59, No 3, 2018

This paper outlines the broad philosophy of restorative justice, comments on the differences between restorative justice and other prevailing conceptions of justice and identifies the constitutive elements necessary for a restorative justice practice. The paper then considers contemporary restorative justice practices, presenting information on guiding principles, procedures and goals and identifying concerns that need to be addressed in the design and implementation of such practices.

2019

As I learned more about restorative justice, the large number of books, papers, and essays on the subject was astonishing. Not surprisingly given my lifelong journey as a racial justice activist, I was particularly interested in exploring the intersection of racial and restorative justice. A Google search, however, turned up not even a handful of publications addressing race, whiteness, the civil rights movement, mass incarceration, or the overrepresentation of persons of color in the criminal justice system. Nor had there been any conferences or other gatherings on the subject. The restorative justice movement appeared to have no racial justice consciousness!

2019

In Stout, Margaret (Ed.). The Future of Progressivism: Applying Follettian Thinking to Contemporary Challenges.