Painting the Ocean & the Sky

The Language of Nuance and Purpose in our Non-Carceral Community Crisis Response

By Shira Hassan

A resource by IC Transformative Justice Fellow Shira Hassan for anyone who is working to build collective community-based, non-carceral responses to crisis — and to prevent and create spaces to heal from them, to create and maintain resources that interrupt the almost routine harm and violence our communities experience as we simply move through our daily lives. It is offered in the spirit of knowing that everything written here can and should change over time, be pushed back on, expanded, and refined.

This piece emerged from Shira’s hundreds of hours of conversation with abolitionist activists, organizers, and service providers at IC’s Transformative Justice Help Desk, and after attending, assisting in co-designing, and facilitating IC’s monthly online Building Coordinated Crisis Response Learning Spaces, and is informed by her decades of experience.

This essay is a small attempt at refining some necessary language that current abolitionist activists and organizers are using when building coordinated structures of care that are alternatives to police/carceral emergency services. In our liberatory communities, we work hard for our terms and language — the meaning of words matter. In a workshop led by the Detroit Narrative Agency at the Allied Media Conference, facilitators offered the phrasing “Clarity is a love language.” Getting clear creates a collective understanding of our work, allows for boundaries, gives us room to see ourselves, our power, and our formations so we can continue to nourish our resistance movements. Intentionally naming who we are and why, how and what we are creating is of crucial importance to continuing to build complex and viable community-led responses that do not involve the state.

When painting a landscape we need to “differentiate the blue of the ocean from the blue of the sky” so that we can see the horizon and know where we are going and how to get there. In this resource, Shira paints some broad strokes to help us to make critical distinctions and ask ourselves critical questions as we build coordinated community crisis responses and learn from our work together.