Almost Twenty Years Later: Lessons Learned from Critical Resistance and INCITE! on Building an Organizing Framework to Tackle Violence at the Nexus of State Violence, Gender-Based Violence, and Structural Islamophobia

The late Rose Braz, one of the cofounders of Critical Resistance, stated, “Even though the goal we seek may be far away, unless we name it and fight for it today, it will never come” (Berger, Kaba, and Stein 2017). Braz’s words describe the integral role Critical Resistance–INCITE!’s “Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison-Industrial Complex” played in laying out a powerful mandate for social justice movements to “develop strategies and analysis that address both state and interpersonal violence” outside of the carceral system (2006). This mandate was particularly important given the ways mainstream anti-violence and social justice movement strategies and analysis excluded women of color survivors. Working-class, immigrant, Black, Brown, and indigenous survivors of color didn’t fit the problematic constructions of the ideal victim and were often forgotten by movements, disposed of, and had organizations turn their backs on them when they needed their support. In other instances, the very movements that survivors entered to attain justice re-created systems of abuse that further pushed them out of movement spaces. Certain groups of women like Muslim women were rarely mentioned within these circles, and still continue to face gendered forms of Islamophobia from mainstream social justice and anti-violence movements.

In 2001 INCITE’s statement offered a critical intervention to warn against the long-term impact on survivors of color, given the mainstream anti-violence movement’s decision to collaborate with the criminal enforcement system, particularly as a result of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994. While VAWA has undeniably played a critical role in meeting the needs of many survivors of interpersonal forms of violence, and serves as a key funding stream for direct service providers, the law was part and parcel of the broader 1994 Crime Bill that further expanded mass incarceration. VAWA did disproportionately invest resources into the criminal enforcement system over community-oriented solutions. Simultaneously, as noted in the Critical Resistance–INCITE! statement, the professionalization of the anti-violence movement redirected energy from investing in mass-scale collective movements that tackled gender-based violence by addressing root causes, including holding the state accountable, to building professionalized services that were in many cases restricted by state funding sources. This analysis has been helpful as a framework for organizers and advocates who navigate the complexity and challenges of tackling state- and gender-based violence on a daily basis within communities that are facing assaults on all fronts, and are often unsupported by broader social justice movements, community, and the mainstream anti-violence movement. Without clear values and lessons from the past, we can easily replicate mistakes that hurt our ability to achieve collective liberation.

In the past eighteen years since the release of the statement, there have been inspirational efforts to actualize the vision set out by INCITE! Most notably, groups such as Survived and Punished, Project NIA, Love and Protect, Black Youth Project 100, and the work of notable scholar-activists and organizers like Dr. Beth Richie, Mariame Kaba, Dr. Angela Davis, and Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, alongside many others, have been central to actualizing a vision where survivors of gender- and state-based violence are centered. The collective work produced from Critical Resistance–INCITE’s statement has inspired and moved me personally in my own journey, and has inspired the work of Justice for Muslims Collective in further developing a framework and praxis that organizes at the nexus of state violence, gender-based violence, and structural Islamophobia.

Before delving deeper into the work of Justice for Muslims Collective (JMC), a community-based organization I cofounded and codirect with Dr. Maha Hilal that seeks to dismantle structural and institutional Islamophobia, and the ways we are integrating the principles laid out by Critical Resistance–INCITE!’s statement through our programming, it is important to contextualize the expansion of the prison nation since Critical Resistance–INCITE!’s statement was released in 2001. At that point, it would have...