For Aprina, for Cierra, and for Me: Questions and Commitment to Abolition

I remember where I was when I got the first call. “M, ’Prina is missin’. Her mom said she ain’t heard from her. Dis ain’t like ’Prina. Wat we gon’ do?” At the time, I had no idea who Aprina was, but that didn’t matter. This happened in October 2013 and I was twenty-eight years old. As a survivor, I had long learned that there is very little space between fear and privacy, so it didn’t take long for the worry about Aprina to become my own.

I got a second phone call from the same voice at the end of the first one, a young Black stud/gender-nonconforming nineteen-year-old who I had been building with through my queer youth work at Freedom Inc. The voice cried out, “They found her. She’s fuck’n dead M, they found her.” And then, seconds later, “He chopped her body up and burned her! They roasted marshmallows over her M, fuck’n marshmallows,” and the voice turned from a fire and rage, to a helpless plea. There were screams. There was silence. Then there was me breaking. It was more than I could take. The phone call ended for me before I hung up. I went static, offline. I didn’t remember where I was for about a minute before I snapped back to my organizer go, go, go mode. I wiped my tears, called on my ancestors, and went to Freedom Inc. to rally the crew.

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Freedom Inc. is a nonprofit and grassroots collective of Black, Hmong, and Khmer women and girls, and queer and trans folx, based in Madison, Wisconsin. Our mission is to end violence within and against low-income Black and Brown communities. We define violence comprehensively to include both systems of violence such as colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism, and the range of interpersonal expressions such as sexual assault and intimate partner violence. In order for us to accomplish this work we are grounded by a set of frameworks: gender justice, queer justice, Black and Southeast Asian liberation, anti-colonialism—which are rooted in radical Black queer feminisms, Hmong and Khmer feminisms. We use these ideologies and frameworks as our compass to building movements that help to realize our mission and meet the immediate needs of our folx.

Our strategy to accomplish our mission is threefold: 1) to provide gender-, generation-, and culturally specific lifesaving services to survivors of gender-based violence, 2) to offer leadership development that focuses on and works with the same survivors to develop a sharp analysis of how their personal experiences are connected to broader issues of power and oppressions, and equips them with tools to create change around it, and 3) to develop grassroots campaigns led by survivors that uproot the root causes of violence. Some examples of our campaigns have been fighting to stop jail expansion, fighting for community control over land with the Take Back the Land Movement, fighting to stop deportations with the Southeast Asian Freedom Network, and fighting to end state violence against Black people with the Movement for Black Lives.

Given the work of Freedom Inc., we often straddle multiple issues and act as brokers to bring disjointed movements together, and in particular have really worked to help align the anti–violence against women movement with queer justice movements and prison abolition movements. We know intimately how we and our communities are failed when we don’t. In our work, the praxis of building an abolition movement that centers solutions to gender-based violence as outlined in the Critical Resistance–INCITE! statement is critical (2006).

As we organize for justice, liberation, and wellness for survivors, we are continuously challenged by the penultimate questions of abolition: What do we do in real time when violence is happening that we can’t stop? What to do with people who won’t change and who are harming the most vulnerable among us?

Though we are faced with these questions, in many ways, we share an analysis with many survivors that the prison industrial...