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Famous Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha Quotes

“I want to see how people can operationalize kindness online. It would be good for people to take that as a value from which to work, before launching into things that are about destruction and about vilification.”

KindnessInternetOnlineDiscourseTransformative JusticeCivil DiscourseReactivityOnline Communities
Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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“I want to start to dream about what transformative justice looks like when someone who causes harm is disabled. I want there to be something - anything - that isn't ableist written about the intersections of neurodivergence or psych disabilities and being someone who's caused harm. Right now, if someone talks about how our psych disabilities or neurodiversity are intertwined in some way with how we've caused harm, either people fall into apologism: "they have psych disabilities, you can't blame them," or we're seen as monsters: "they have THAT disorder, they're toxic, stay away from them." Mostly, it's the latter, and the ableist demonization of people with psych disabilities as killers and monsters leaves no room for us to really talk about what happens when we are Mad and might cause harm. I want something else. I want anti-ableist forms of accountability that don't throw disabled people who cause harm under the bus, into every stereotype about "crazed autistic"/"psychotic"/"multiple personalities abusive killers." Instead, I want us to create accountability recommendations that are accessible to our disabilities and neurodivergence.”

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Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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“I do think I've seen the generation that I've seen grow up have different resources, have different skills and options around dealing with that harm, and that makes a difference for me. But I did have a hope that like, OK, we had to go through all this stuff, but at least we can have this set of children that we can see from here, this set of children that we are raising in this context and they will not have to go through things that are very similar. And they have gone through things that are very similar, and that is something that, you know, intellectually, we understand that these things are intergenerational cycles of violence, and it's really hard to accept that it will be incrementally different, but not totally gone within the span of a decade or two.”

ChangeIntergenerational TraumaTransformative JusticeIncremental Change
Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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“I believe in a path back. I believe accountability can be a step toward greater wholeness, personally and as a movement. The project of building toward collective liberation is too important and too difficult to permanently cut people out when they make mistakes. We cannot afford it. Simply firing and excluding people who harass is a practice that mirrors the ultimately ineffective approach of the criminal justice system.”

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Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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“So many of us have histories of trauma that come from generations of people forced from our land, bent and twisted by patriarchy, slavery, and genocide. If we simply fire those unable to carry those histories, those who perpetuate harmful lessons they were forced to learn, we will lose.”

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Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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“In order to radically transform the way in which our societies function, and to have true sovereignty and liberation, that it would require deep, deep healing. I do see transformative justice work as necessary for sovereignty and liberation. In order to be able to govern ourselves, we have to be able to hold ourselves accountable in loving and ways that are not harmful or create more violence.”

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Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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“It is important to center the needs of those most directly impacted by the harm in a situation. We also hold that recognizing and attending to the humanity of those who harm is a central aspect of transforming our families, communities, and society. Seeing and dignifying the healing needs of people who abuse also runs counter to the idea that some people "out there" are "monsters" who are expendable or need to be "weeded out". By standing for everyone's need for healing, we challenge the dehumanizing logic that is central to systems of oppression, domination, and abuse. By standing for everyone's need for healing, we maintain our commitment to a vision of true liberation.”

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Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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“Real time is slower than social media time, where everything feels urgent. Real time often includes periods of silence, reflection, growth, space, self-forgiveness, processing with loved ones, rest, and responsibility. Real time transformation requires stating your needs and setting functional boundaries. Transformative justice requires us at minimum to ask ourselves questions like these before we jump, teeth bared, for the jugular. I think this is some of the hardest work. It's not about pack hunting an external enemy, it's about deep shifts in our own ways of being. But if we want to create a world in which conflict and trauma aren't the center of our collective existence, we have to practice something new, ask different questions, access again our curiosity about each other as a species.”

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Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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“If folks do the same thing over and over and over again, and refuse to take accountability for that, and don't want to learn, they can actually be banned from a particular space. We do have to figure out the other side of that. Which is, somebody does take accountability, and does what people asked them to do. When are they allowed to rejoin community in good standing? That is something we have yet to figure out how to do in consistent fashion. Because you're never gonna be able to say somebody "You can never come back to society," and expect those people to join accountability processes.”

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Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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“People should not be talking about social media and "real life" as though they're distinct. They are not. What is happening online is happening offline, and what is happening offline is happening online. What happens offline bleeds into the online world, and vice versa.”

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Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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“People mess up. We lie, exaggerate, betray, hurt, and abandon each other. When we hear that this has happened, it makes sense to feel anger, pain, confusion, and sadness. But to move immediately to punishment means that we stay on the surface of what has happened. To transform the conditions of the "wrongdoing", we have to ask ourselves and each other, "Why?" Even--especially--when we are scared of the answer. It's easy to decide a person or group is shady, evil, psychopathic. The hard truth (hard because there's no quick fix) is that long-term injustice creates most evil behavior. The percentage of psychopaths in the world is just not high enough to justify the ease with which we assign that condition to others. In my mediations, "why?" is often the game-changing, possibility-opening question. That's because the answers rehumanize those we feel are perpetuating against us. "Why?" often leads us to grief, abuse, trauma, mental illness, difference, socialization, childhood, scarcity, loneliness. Also, "Why?" makes it impossible to ignore that we might be capable of a similar transgression in similar circumstances. We don't want to see that.”

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Author:Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
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“Is this what we're here for? To cultivate a fear-based adherence to reductive common values? What can this lead to in an imperfect world full of sloppy, complex humans? Is it possible we will call each other out until there's no one left beside us? I've had tons of conversations with people who, in these moments of public flaying, avoid stepping up on the side of complexity or curiosity because in the back of our minds is the shared unspoken question: When will y'all come for me?”

JusticeSocial JusticeTransformative JusticeImagine People ComplexlyCallout CultureCall Out Culture
Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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“For many of us, our survivorhood and our neurodivergence are pretty damn intertwined. As disabled TJ workers, we know what it's like to inhabit secret bodymind stories that many turn away from, as "too much", and that knowledge helps us in our TJ work - people trust us with their survivor stories because they can tell we've seen some shit.”

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Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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“Most people doing transformative justice work didn't get into it because we thought it would be a random, fun thing to do. We do it because we're survivors, or the people closest to us are. We care about survivors; we know what it's like to survive brutal shit, often alone. We want to change the world so this stuff never happens again.”

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Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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“If the only thing I can learn from a situation is that some humans do bad things, it's a waste of my precious time -- I already know that. What I want to know is: What can this teach me/us about how to improve our humanity?”

JusticeSelf ImprovementTransformationMistakesLearning From MistakesTransformative Justice
Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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