In this thought-provoking episode of Radical Remembering, I’m joined by Marva Richards, an educator and public health expert, to explore the deep and transformative power of restorative justice. Drawing from her rich background in education and community work, Marva shares her journey into restorative practices and how they align with a lifelong commitment to fostering wholeness and healing within individuals and communities.
Together, we delve into how to create spaces for authentic storytelling, accountability, and communal healing. Marva explains how restorative justice is rooted in African value systems and how it plays a crucial role in addressing societal imbalances, fostering connections, and encouraging self-discovery.
We also discuss the importance of integrating these principles into our daily lives and why dismantling systemic barriers is essential for true liberation and collective well-being.
Watch Radical Remembering: Season 2 Episode 9 and find inspiration on your journey towards liberation!
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Radical Remembering is a podcast that covers personal growth, self-awareness and awareness of topics at the intersection of mental health, spirituality and self-help. Each episode will leave you with intimate knowledge of the liberation process, sprinkle a little healing magic, and leave you with wisdom for your journey into living out your purpose. Stay tuned for the next episode. Thank you for listening to the Radical Remembering podcast! Listen to our next podcast and tell a friend about us.
TRANSCRIPT
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Welcome to Radical Remembering with psychologist Dr. Norissa Williams. This is a weekly conversation where we explore ways we've internalized oppression and consider what it really means to live liberated. Each episode would leave you with intimate knowledge of the liberation process, sprinkle a little healing magic, and leave you with wisdom for your journey. As you get settled in for today's episode, please make sure to like and subscribe. And if you've liked what you heard at the end, please share.
So welcome to another episode of Radical Remembering. We are here with Marva Richards today. I'm excited to speak to you, Marva. So I guess first I'll start with telling the audience why how we met and why I would like for you to go to why I ask you to talk. So I do a show on the network, Knarrative.com on Sundays called Wisdom and Wellness.
And Marva commented months ago, actually, I think it was over the summertime, on one of the links for the show or whatever. And I don't know. I just really liked your energy from then, and you started talking about restorative justice. And I was like, that's what I'm talking about, restorative justice. And even from then, I know we talked a little after that, but from that first interaction, I was like, okay.
When I get back up with the podcast, I'm gonna invite you. So welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm so grateful to be here.
I'm practicing. I I have been practicing. I have this practice that I've been doing for years now, which is a gratitude practice. Mhmm. And I every little thing, I I I'm always saying thank you for the ands, for the this, for the that, for everything.
So I am just always looking at what is in front of me that I should be grateful for, and I'm grateful for you. Of course, I'm grateful. I acknowledge narrative and Knubia as the as the space that brought us together. So I want to acknowledge that as well, but I'm really grateful. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. What we also found that we have in common is, as you all know, you can hear Marvie's accent. Oh, yeah.
Accent characteristic of Trinidad and Tobago, and you and you all probably have heard me before say that my family is from Trinidad as well. So I hear you, and I hear it. It's so sing song. I think I told you this before. Like, sometimes I could be, like, just closing my eyes to hear you talk because it just feels so much like home for me. So, like, comforting for me.
So we also have that in common too. And, you know, I don't even hear it myself. You don't you don't hear yourself. Right. Because I always talk like how I talk with, you know, with the, you know, the nouns and the pronouns in place most of the time and so on and so on.
I've always talked like that. So I had no need to change anything. So, therefore, my accent never changed since I'm Mhmm. I've been living here for so many years, but I've never felt as though I had to switch anything. I love Mhmm.
Yeah. And so I don't hear myself anymore. So when people tell me what first of all, people ask me, where are you from? Then I know, oh, I sound. It's like sound.
But we never have an accent to ourselves. Right? Like, I don't think that I well, I actually I know that I have an accent, but it's context dependent. It's when I'm in this country or that country or the other. But we never think of ourselves as the other person that Right.
Right. So, but, anyway, I love that that concentric circle that we share and and well, so many concentric circles that we share. So can we start with talking about restorative justice? What is restorative justice? So it's a set of practices.
They're loosely based on the indigenous idea that people should not be thrown away. Mhmm. So that everybody in the community is valuable, even those that cause harm. And so, loosely and this is these practices have been sort of popularized since the 19 seventies in the western well, in America. But these practices are used a lot in the justice system in k through 12 schools, and it's the idea of repairing harm.
But set while centering the people or the persons that have been harmed, actually calling back the person who did harm to be accountable and to find a way to repair that harm and then integrate that person hopefully back into the community so you don't throw them away. Mhmm. And if you think of what Brian Stevenson has said that you are not the worst thing that you've ever done. Mhmm. It's kind of like bringing people to the understanding that, okay.
You've done something wrong. You may not be a bad person. So let's correct and repair what it is that you've done wrong and who you've harmed, and then let's go on from there so that you can, you know, be sort of reintegrated back into yourself and into the community. Mhmm. Mhmm.
I love it. What about restorative justice appeal to you when you heard of it? So I think I've been having this kind of restorative mind for a long time. So my background is in education and public health. So I spent a lot of years, in, education with k through 12 and also within medical schools, you know, helping to teach medical students the social determinants of health so that when they go when they become doctors, they understand who this person is that is in front of them.
That is not a disease that's in front of them. It's a person with a whole history and a whole story, and that they shouldn't understand that story. So with that background of being an educator and being, somebody who's interested in the community and the impact of the community and the person and the person's well-being, it sort of aligns restorative justice sort of aligns with all of that. You know? So it's all about what makes a person whole. Yeah.
And, and what makes a community whole, and what's the relationship between a person who is integrated in the community and and and that community to them and all of that? So all of these things sort of made me aware that and, also, I had this habit of, when I was working. So I've retired recently. I call myself rewired, not retired. And so when I was when I was in the, in the academy in the institution, what what used to happen is that people, not just not just medical students, but, you know, staff, people used to just knock on my door, come into my office, close the door, sit down, and, you know, can we talk to you?
And so I have this sort of, I don't know, space for people so that I can listen. And I think that is part of, you know, the practice of restorative justice, sort of making sure that you open space for people to be able to tell their story so that they themselves and I'm not a psychologist. I never studied psychology in the sense that you are a clinical psychologist. So I am not trying to actively heal people, necessarily, but just making space so that people can actually hear themselves think, if you if you will. You know?
And I found those principles really, embedded in restorative justice. Mhmm. And when I had the opportunity to train and get certified, I said, you know what? Let me let me do that and carry all of this accumulation of practice that I have into that. So I mentioned the re requirement as a point of not entry into restorative justice, but a continuation of what I've been trying to do all along.
Mhmm. Yeah. I think, there would there's so many directions I wanna go, but I like this point of rewirement. I like that reframe first and foremost. But I also like how continuously you've thought of your life in that way because we think of rewirement, that period in our life as, like, you know, as a discontinuous part of the rest of our life.
Like, it's something so separate. But how could you separate yourself from the whole thread of your existence? Right. And how can you not integrate all of the life that you've lived up to that point into whatever it is that's coming, you know, or whatever it is you decide to do? Some people, you know, whatever they decide to do, everything that you've lived up to that point feeds into the rest of your life.
Yeah. And it should inform anything that you're doing. Hopefully, you know, body, mind, and spirit is, you know, is part of the wellness work that we are doing. Yeah. That we can live, you know, vivaciously and is what I say so that you can, you know, really activate all of the wisdom that you've accumulated up to this point. But if you have done that, I think you're blessed, first of all, and that's why I'm always, you know, in this gratitude practice.
And then, the next thing is, okay. So how can I use this to make the play you know, whatever space I'm in better? Mhmm. And then and so that's the piece of where we're gonna hopefully go next in terms of talking about liberation because it definitely has to do with how are you going to free up whatever life you have to accommodate all of the things that you've brought to this life so far. You know?
Can you say that again? How are you gonna free up? Go ahead. How are you gonna free up the life that you have now? So Mhmm. So, you know, there are all kinds of things that we go through as we get older.
You know? Whether it is, you know, family stuff or, you know, preparing financially, your financial structure, your life structure, this help. But but inside of all of that, which is sort of the everyday mess of living, there's a space there's a space there that you could free up to bring that which you've lived all of this time to be part of this whole thing. So I have a theory about time. Right?
Yeah. I have this theory that and I don't know. I haven't confirmed it, but I have this weird theory that we live different lives at the same time. Mhmm. So we think about time as linear, but Yeah.
The more I experience life, I feel as though I'm living then it's a time stamp and not a time. Right. You know? So while we're doing life, there's also more life to live. Mhmm.
You know what I mean? That's that, yeah. So that freeing up freeing up that space so that we can live even though we're living part of the life is messy, right, which is the everyday stuff of life. But part of that life has room in it, I think Mhmm. To bring more stuff in and to and to explore more ideas and to and to just extend the value the valuineness, if you will, of the life that you're living in these various spaces, in these various dimensions, if you will.
That's why that's why the whole thing about mind, body, spirit Yeah. It's about not separating these things. I have this T shirt. I want mind, body, spirit today. Uh-huh.
It's about not separate. We tend to silo things. Like, okay. This is the mind time, you know, when we're going to school. This is the body time when we're taking care of our body, and this is spirit time when we're meditating or going to church or doing whatever.
It's not siloed. It's all together. Yeah. That's the integrated human. You know?
And that these are your essential conventions. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And separate.
Yeah. Exactly. So so to always be reminded of that where we can make space for all of these things happening together. Mhmm. Whether it's just that our bodies might be, you know, rebelling against us, you know, for whatever reason.
If we still have our mind active, then we can, you know, work on one of these things together. But the part that I am trying to figure out is how to integrate all of these thoughts into something that I can actually work into my restorative justice practice? Mhmm. But I like it. I like it.
And so when you think what connection is, what is ringing to me in all of what you're saying. And when I'm thinking about this let me see if I could put it in words, super visual person. And so I'm seeing what I'm seeing, and now I'm trying to translate what I'm seeing, but I probably won't do it justice. Right? So even in thinking about how you conceptualize time, I conceptualize time similarly and Oh, okay.
Increasingly so as I get older. Right? So the title of that movie, Everywhere, Everywhere Everything All at Once kinda helps us into thinking about this. Right? So the conceptualization of past and present helps us now in this time stamp to be able to organize social behavior.
So you and I said today that we are gonna meet at a certain time, so it helped us this time stamp helped us to organize our social behavior. But in reality, our past is happening at the same time as our future, at the same time as the present, as well as we are multidimensional. So our past lives, if we believe in past lives, and our future lives are also occurring at the same time. So what you're doing in any one point and instance is affecting all of the cells, the individual within that lifetime and then across various lifetimes and then another dimension deeper across generations too, across our ancestry behind us and before us. Right?
And so I yeah. So as I'm seeing that, I'm just seeing, like, this thread of connection that holds it all together that is seemingly disparate because we can socialize to think that way. And then I'm also thinking of what you said about mind, body, spirit, and also just seeing connection. Right? Just also seeing that this is so nicely actually seen together, but we've been socialized out of that thinking.
And I'm also applying it now to restorative justice and community. If we are all connected in all one in all those in all those ways, then we could get deeper with this conversation and thinking about how your multiple selves and multiple time points and mine in the same space and, you know, and and what have you. But just thinking about community and our connectedness and us all being one and how that's that's central. Because that's it's a value system what of what you're saying too. Like, it was your original value system, so this work matched who you were.
If you enjoy listening to Radical Remembering and would love to get the season dropped before everyone else, if you want exclusive invites to live and virtual events and could benefit from daily liberation inspiration, like affirmations, thought provoking questions, and daily guidance, then download our free app, Living Liberated, in the App Store or on Google Play. You can also find the link below in the description box. Exactly. And so what you know, the thing about narrative in Nubia is that we are we're coming into the recognition of these principles that are our original value system. Yeah.
This Africanized way of thinking Yeah. About who we are to each other and then, you know, really taking a good look at, oh, who are we to other people. And so making sure that we understand that you are not gonna tell me who I am. I'm going to see to myself who I am. Mhmm.
And and and that's the thing. The thing about, you know, integration is that it's always happening because we always, you know, trying to figure out, okay. Who is this cell? What am I learning from this cell? So we are always in touch with these cells.
It's just that we're becoming more attuned to it. Yeah. In community spaces like this where we actually sort of challenging, you know, ideas and challenging each other to to think more deeply. This is what is causing all of the pushback and backlash Mhmm. Yeah. In the society right now.
Right. Right. Because we are, it's not about waking up. It's because we were never sleeping. It's not about waking up.
It's about remembering. Exactly. Making sure that we understand that we are members of a community that needs reading. You know? Yes.
So bringing us back. Always bringing ourselves back and always bringing us back in community with each other because we've been intentionally separated. You know? Mhmm. And, I mean, when I think of all of the ways that we've been separated as African people in the diaspora, on the continent, I mean, it's just tragic.
And so this remembering of our original principles, which we're studying in narrative in Nubia, is just a blessing because it's like, you know, you know, opening up different portals now Mhmm. Mhmm. For us to really, you know, really see. Oh, okay. Yes.
Yes. This is happening. This is really happening. And so I can imagine that just as the backlash is taking place with DEI now Yeah. There's going to be that same thing once it is recognized that restorative justice, this buzz term, is a thing.
Even just as how people don't understand what CRT is and they gasp, like, you know, it's gonna happen. But what I'm hoping is that restorative justice can be taken inside Yeah. And not be performed outside. Mhmm. Mhmm.
And that's what I think the foundation of my work is in restorative justice. Trying to make sure that these seeds are planted wherever I do the work, make sure I'm making sure that these seeds are planted so that they can grow inside. And by the time people who want to cancel, you know, the movement Yeah. Realize that it's a thing that they wanna cancel, rules have taken hold. Yeah.
I agree. You know what I think? It was years ago and this is funny because this is maybe the second time I'm remembering and talking about this this week. But years ago, this was actually 2016 when I was applying for my faculty position at NYU. And I did a talk that was diversity related focused on intersectionality and understanding our social location and how that impacts how we see the world and different things like that.
And someone in the audience asked me a question because Trump was running, and they were like, well, what do you think about this? Because we were seeing how much support Trump really had. And, you know, and at that time, I was like, okay. He's not gonna win. But little did I know.
Right? But what I said then, and I still hold to it years later, almost 7 years well, 7 years later. What I still hold to is that I feel like it's a purge. Right? So you know I'm sure you know, like, when you were taking, boil some herbs to take a purge or a healing, everything ugly comes out.
So you get wet on your skin, bumps, and all those kinda kinda things. Have to use the bathroom because it's purging and it's detoxifying. I feel like where we are in the collective is in the detoxification stage. Mhmm. I also feel like this has been a developmental process.
Right? So the work of the civil rights era, it's relatively recent. I mean, I don't wanna say it so that it, you know, provides an excuse, but it's relatively recent given the larger context of time and given the history of that period of enslavement. It's still relatively recent, so it's almost like in its adolescence. Right?
And so in its adolescence, lots of unpredictable things happen in adolescence like hormonal chaos. Yeah. Also, it's a chaos before it coalesces into this mature adult. Right? So in my conceptualization or the way that I see things, I feel like this is the worst and it and it it is intentionally so at a collective and spiritual level because in it and it it makes people so we're gonna have people who dig their heels in as staunchly as they are and act as desperately as they are with, you know, trying to do away with critical race theory, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Like, it's, like, it's and it's absurd. Right? And they're acting that staunchly, digging their heels in, but then you have a whole other collective whose eyes weren't open and thinking about these things at all. Yes. And we're like, wait.
What? And then they and they're like and it makes them like, wait. What world do we live in? And asking that question, getting the answers so that they can turn in the direction of kinda, like, cultivating the awareness that that you and I are talking about. So I feel like, ultimately, as disgusting a period as this is. And I am 100% an optimist, so you might be listening to me and thinking, okay.
This is Pollyanna. But I think that where we're moving you know, I think that we are at a tipping point in the collective and that where we're moving is out of these systems of domination. And I can also situate that in, a planetary understanding in that, Pluto, the planet of, like, destruction and everything like that, is now in Aquarius. I mean, it'll return back to Capricorn before it goes into Aquarius, seeding changes for the age of Aquarius, which is, you know, in time to come, but a humanitarian age where there will be more equity and equality and all those kinds of things. I love that.
And I'm so you, you gave me hope because that's what I'm thinking is that this is so, you know, Martin Luther King, quoted this famous line, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. And then former attorney general, Eric Holder said, but it is we who have to pull it toward justice. You know? It will bend, but it will bend so slowly that by the time it gets there, you know, things have deteriorated so much that there's much more work to be done. So the people who are working on calling this arc, you know, have that responsibility to pull harder because this change first of all, it may not happen in this era.
Right? Because when we talk about time, we don't know how the cosmos, you know, thinks about time. Yeah. Life is such a drop, a little you know? But in terms of when and how to measure time, it's going to happen, and then it might shift again.
Yeah. So that another generation has to do this work all over again. Because if you look at how many times the same kind of thing happened, it's it it it's kind of like it's kind of like it goes around. It comes around. It happened.
You know? So the era of the civil rights movement was one of the times when that op was being pulled. Yeah. And then now we have the black rash. So we have to pull it again.
Yeah. And then we're gonna enjoy, hopefully, probably not in my lifetime. You know, this era of perhaps some peace and prosperity and and, you know, wholeness, but then it's gonna shift again because that's the nature of the human being, unfortunately. Mhmm. Yeah.
I've heard that. I'm optimistic. Yeah. But I'm also looking at history and how, you know, we've been talking about transmutation Yeah. For 1000 of years.
Yeah. You know? Can you say more about transmutation? What transmutation is you know, in the days of antiquity, there was much more of an attunement to what we now call magic. In other words, using forces to create passages in time that are complementary to the type of people who are living at that time and need it.
Like, for instance, in Kemet. Right? Mhmm. And so we've lost a lot of that pay cap or magic as, doctor Beatty was just talking about in the lesson today. Mhmm.
We've lost a lot of that, and we and a lot of it has been removed intentionally from our experience and our memories. So we've not just lost it. It's been stolen. It's been taken away. And we are now, I guess, transmuting what is still deposited in our genes Mhmm.
Mhmm. Mhmm. Into something that we now have to birth into the present reality, which is it would it so this is why we see one of these movements in terms of, you know, piece work and, DEI and and and all of these things that people are now getting sort of away from. Right? And then you're seeing the backlash in terms of, okay.
No. This is we not can't allow people to realize what we've been doing. We gotta suppress this and keep them in chains. You know? So it never stops.
It always comes out, gets stripped away, gets exploited. Who knows what the next iteration will be in terms of how it will be, you know, changed or removed or whatever, but we can't stop working at it. That's the whole thing. Yeah. I agree.
I'm thinking a lot of things. Let me see. What promise do you think you know, because after the murder of George Floyd when people were saying defund the police, and they were people who thought it was, like, madness. Like, wait. What?
Like, what are you talking about? And my thought was, like, actually, like, we weren't operating with police systems. And if, I believe as Melodoma Patrice Somay says in, I can't remember which book. If it was ritual healing wisdom of Africa or one of the books he books he was saying that though he can know when a community is sick, it has police. Because the community itself is supposed to be the one who is regulating itself.
And if we have connectedness with each other, then I've seen it. I've seen it in small environments too. Right? So Trinidad is not big. It's not big, but it's bigger.
It's relatively big compared to Grenada. So when I go to Grenada, where my husband is from, I'm able to see the power of community in a different way. The population is about 113,000 now. Right? When we leave the house, everybody knows everybody.
You know? And if they don't recognize them physically, when we're at some place, my husband could easily say, such and such a son. Right? And they would know who he is. Mhmm.
And so with this sense of connectedness, if I know Marva Miss Marva from up the street Mhmm. And if I know Marva's son from, down the block, I'm I I could never do I could never do, Marva's son wrong because I know it would ultimately hurt Marva, and our families are connected. Right? So having community so it's because we've been so socialized to think reactively. They're like, oh my god.
No. We need a police system. But if we thought preventively and we had community building if we weren't so individualistic Yeah. With community building as a value Mhmm. I don't think we would need the police in the ways in which we have them.
What are your thoughts? Right. And we would police ourselves. That's the whole thing. The whole thing is that so for instance, the example that you use, when I was a child, we didn't have telephones.
Yeah. If I did something in the school yard or around the school, before I got home, my father knew about it. How did he know? Exactly. We don't have time. Nobody had a telephone to call him to tell him, but he would be waiting on the step for me. You know what I mean?
How did he know? It's that they had a way. Yeah. Of remain. Okay. Run down the street and tell Miss Agatha to go next door and tell Miss Fiona to run by the thing and tell mister Hamill than his daughter acting up in school.
Okay? So they had a they you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And They had their way of communicating. So by the time I got home everybody was looking out, not just for you. Yes. But also to make sure that you were held accountable if you did anything wrong. Yeah. They did not care if my father used the belt, if he used the words, if he used the the global width or whatever it is.
Yeah. But he they know that if we don't, you know, keep this child Yeah. Countable, you know, we don't want her to grow up like weeds. You know? So every the whole village is looking out to make sure that you don't harm anybody.
You don't harm yourself, and you don't get harm. Yeah. Liberation is 100% about being in right relationship with our power. It's so easy from day to day to disconnect from our source and forget who we really are. On our app, Living Liberated, we have the tools to keep you plugged in.
You'll find a library of affirmations, guided meditations, guided journeys, and tapping sequences to keep you in a state of alignment with who you really are. Topics range from self love, healthy relationships, activating our DNA, to guided journeys with your ancestors. Download our free app, Living Liberated, and start your free 7 day trial now in the app store or Google Play. You can also find the link for Plugged In in the description box below. Yeah.
And it reminds me some I'm smiling because it does my grandmother would stories like that too. There was a miss maybe on her block. Like, so if something happened in school, miss maybe would beat her, miss this one would would give her a pat, and this one, she got home and she was still getting beat. Right? And so what I hear in that story, what I hear in your story, when I think about the individual body, because it's the micro is the macro is 1 and the same, is that systems have a way of self correcting.
Right? Body is a system when it is unbalanced, when there is sickness. If provided the proper context, then it can find its way back to balance and it can find its way back to health. Similarly, the community has self writing, you know, systems in place to bring it back as well. And so that's one of the and I'm not saying, you know, because I'm not I'm not saying some people will hear that and be like, see, you know, they're saying I'm beating.
Right? That's not what we're saying. Oh, no. No. We're saying that it it whether it's a self correcting system.
Yeah. I mean, that everybody in the community is so connected that everybody is involved. It also makes me think of it's different but similar, this concept of the self and how individualistic the concept of the self here in the west is. I was interviewing my grandmother. I was doing a study when I was in grad school where I wanted to explore. It's actually published too.
I wanted to explore resilience, but I was very interested in the cultural context of the development of mental health and help seeking behaviors. Still very interested in that. Right? And so I interviewed my grandmother to get one Trinidadian woman's perspective. Right?
And so I was asking her about what are the things that she did for, like, everyday coping and different things like that. And so everything I ask her, we we we. Right? So me in my bicultural frame, both Trinidad and American, was still like, well, no. What did you do?
Right? And there was no she was defaulting to a we. Like, there was no conceptualization of an I. Not to say that there's no conceptualization. Conceptualization is not the same.
Well, when we well, we you know? And she was saying that because she's been cooking since she's 8 years old. Right? How did she develop that? This one used to bring over the peas, and this one used to bring over the rice.
And if this one had a little extra beef, they brought it. And then she, you know, pushed a chair to the stove, and she would begin to practice and cook. And these are all the neighbors. Right? Mhmm.
And so this development of this conceptualization of the we so that I can't harm the we because the we is me. Yeah. You know? They're all dependent on each other. That's the thing.
I have this, this thing behind me. If I can, just come out of a screen view and if I can just show it, I will. Let me see if I can because I have to. I think if you go to the little arrow next to the stop video where it says and you can go up to blur my background and take it off. Okay. Alright.
Yeah. There you go. Okay. So I have this. I don't know if you can see it. Is that the market scene with the woman?
No. It's a baking scene. It's a mud mud. Oh, I have that. I have that.
You have that? Right. Where all of the neighbors bring their bread to be baked in this neighborhood mud oven. And, you know, the pit I love looking at it because it shows that, you know, the community comes together Yeah. Because they need each other.
You know? This is where the bakery is. Right? The person who is doing the actual baking I mean, the whole technology is just wonderful. But she has a little girl next to her who is kind of like the apprentice, and she's the hand and the head, but she's kind of looking on.
And no doubt the lady who is doing the baking is talking to her all this time and telling her what she's doing. So she's probably explaining why she's using the banana leaf to hold the bread and the paddle to take it out and probably telling her why the pie has to be underneath and, you know, all of this stuff. And then all of this scene is going on around them. So there's little boys playing marble, and they're pitching around here. You know, there's somebody waiting.
This gentleman probably is somebody's husband who brought the raw, the dough to be baked, so he's waking up waiting on it. The whole scene just talks to me about how community works where people get together based on the idea that we are dependent on each other. Right? And that we cannot harm each other if we depend on each other to keep the community safe and and together. You know?
So it's it it just makes me, you know, remember the kinds of values that we had that we lost. You know? Yes. Yes. Yes.
So true. I was sharing with my class this morning about a study of social a study of social cognition. Right? Social cognition meaning that the social environment directs how we think about things. Right?
It shapes how we think about things. Yeah. So in this particular study mind you, this is years ago. Maybe about 15 years ago, this was published. Right?
But in a particular study, they had Chinese if I believe it was Chinese, participants as well as they had white American participants, and they showed them pictures. And they asked them to describe a picture. The white American where they would say, oh, okay. I see Marva right there. Right?
You know, I see a person. They were more likely to describe the individual. Yeah. Right? The Chinese participants were more likely to describe the context.
They were more likely not only so their the social They were more likely not only so their cog the social cognition is so directed to community and to context and to collective that they would they would see the room first and describe it, and they might describe the picture behind you and the light. And you are a person in the room rather than a central feature of it. Right? That is huge when we think of, 1, the fact that culture does shape how we think. Right?
We can't deny that too. But in our ability to even see and develop community if we are trained in an individualist lens and that's why we have to remember. That's why we have to come back and retrain and come back to ourselves as you were saying earlier. Yeah. I wanna speak to the other part of this movement, which is transformative justice, which is actually describing how communities take back their power to regulate themselves and to heal themselves as opposed to relying on authority figures and punitive authority figures like the police to come in and police them.
So there was a story, a few months ago now, I think, about a community in Brownsville in Brooklyn. Mhmm. Mhmm. And this was in the New York Times where the black men of the community said to the police, give us a I think it was a week or something like it wasn't a whole I don't think it was a whole month. It was either a week or a few days.
Give us this time. You all don't come around and let us police our own community. And so what they did was they were patrolling, right, monitoring. And before anything, they look because they knew the kids in the community. They knew them.
They knew how they could tell by the way they were moving, you know, that something was about to happen. They were up to some mischief or something, and they would inter inter they would interrupt that there. Yeah. And notice the word that I'm using, interrupt. Yes.
Not intervene. Yeah. They would interrupt. In other words, they would go in and talk to these kids and say, what are you up to? What are you what's what's happening?
Why did you know, if you continue with that, next thing you know, you are fighting. Come. Stop that. What? And engage them in some kind of activity that would bring them back to themselves, right, before something jumps off.
As opposed to waiting until as opposed to not being part of the community Yeah. Coming in and intervening when something has already happened. Yeah. You know? And then and then using a kind of punitive approach to punish something that could have been probably done differently that like, these black men were doing.
Yeah. So this and so the police were not far off, but they were not in uniform. Yeah. They were, you know, sort of mixing without being seen in plain clothes because these gentlemen, if something did happen, they had no powers of arrest or anything like that. And, also, they didn't want to make sure that, you know, they wouldn't cause any more harm.
Mhmm. You know? So they had complete confidence that they knew the community now, that they would be able to interrupt things before things actually jumped off. Mhmm. And they have had nothing happened for that whole time.
No crime. No mischief. Not anything. Right? And so they made the point that, you see, we can, if given the opportunity, manage and com and and police our own community.
You don't have to commit. You know what I mean? And so it was great. I mean, Brownsville is a and it seems like it's an exceptional play kind of place where people are actually willing to try these kinds of experiments. Well, I mean, but Brownsville and, like, the it used to be very high crime in the eighties nineties and stuff like that too.
Mhmm. Mhmm. You know you know, when you say so when you're sharing this story, in my early days as a social worker, when I used to have to I'm just laughing because it's so true. When I used to have to go to my clients' houses, right, and I went to homes everywhere in the projects, so, you know, different things. And so, I mean, I grew up between Brooklyn and Long Island.
So for me, there was never there was nothing ever raised in me. Like, oh my god. This is dangerous. This is not Right. Remember being at work and people were like, you went into those houses?
And I'm like, yeah. They're people. You know? But they knew how to talk about how self regulating they were as a community. When I didn't realize they were watching me, they knew who I was.
They knew where I was going. They knew when I came or whatever. And I used to be in plain clothes. Right? So one day, I was going into a building.
The guy was like, And I'm looking at him like, I'm like, he knew where I'd never seen him before, but clearly he had seen me. And not only had he seen me, he knew where I was going Mhmm. And that they weren't here. And I was like, oh, okay. Well, I'm just gonna check.
Right? And they still weren't home. Right? Point of the story is , you know, he had eyes for the company. That's right.
Helping. He was super respectful to me too. Right. You know what I mean? Like, they don't.
And so, you know, I I I know when I've seen firsthand what you're saying too, and that's even without an intended effort. That was just a spontaneous action of a community member. Mhmm. So I really like that. Yeah.
And they use, you know, there are many, sort of aspects of this transformative justice taking place in various communities. We just don't hear about it. Yeah. The term interrupter is actually a term that's used when time has taken place, and there are trusted messages in the community who will go to like, for instance, I just moved from Albany. And when I was living in Albany, I had a colleague who I worked with a community colleague who I worked with in very many instances for some years now.
He and I worked together on various things in the community. And because I was director of community outreach at Albany Medical College. So as part of my job, I would be doing these kinds of work with these different kinds of people who are working in the community, community activists and different, different, things. Things that don't even have labels anymore. Right?
But he was somebody who would they would call to go to the hospital, the emergency room when somebody got shot when a usually a young person because he would stop things from going further because, you know, there's all this this thing about, you know, revenge and, you know, things can just just keep going on and on and on without any interruption. And he was an interrupter who would actually be called when something happened to go to the person who was who was harmed. Right? To sit with them and try to find out what's going on in their mind and see if they and this was a lay person, but with so much experience in the community that he was able to sort of make connections before things happened that probably would cause a problem. And then and then he would be able to say, okay.
You know, this is not gonna make sense if you're thinking of this because here's why and so on. Right? And how many people how far this could go and the ripple effect and if you know? And all of this. And so it's just so layered, the kind of skills that community Yes.
Rich, rich, rich Rich, rich skills that community has. Why not why not use these skills in these communities ? I don't like the word empower, but to liberate them, right, to be able to manage their own communities, which is so much better. Yeah. So transformative justice, which is what I'm very interested in doing, is helping bring these talents together in communities so that they can actually work on their own, you know, if you will.
You know? Bring move themselves away from this punitive attitude of policing to much more of a restorative way of managing their community. Yeah. I love it. I love it.
And it just makes me think about what a deficit perspective is. Well, first of all, we know that police in the United States have only started to catch, quote, unquote, runaway slaves. Yeah. Mhmm. And so if I mean, right there, I mean, there's nothing more and nothing less than you said that it has a Yes.
Secure foundation. Right? But then as it's continued or the justification of it, it's based on a deficit perspective to think that people cannot regulate themselves, that a group of people cannot regulate themselves. In Cuba, I went to Cuba. The police didn't have not even if they didn't have oh, very few had guns.
Right? Very few even had batons. Mhmm. Right? Because there's a culture of community where people are and the thing about that too.
Right? In the United States, they will say, oh, there's more violence in lower income areas. 1st, I mean, that's not they don't have a recognition of the ways in which these areas have been intentionally impoverished. Yeah. Mhmm.
But it's not that as much as it is the inequitable distribution. Mhmm. Right? Because if you don't have a social comparison group, then you don't have poverty. Similarly, in the same interview when I was talking to my grandmother, I was asking, well, how did poor people quote?
And her answer was, was it poor? I don't know. Yes. Yeah. Because everybody was poor.
You know what I mean? And everybody was. We didn't know we were poor. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
And so if we move away from this deficit mentality and believe that people are capable of guiding their own lives as well as communities are capable of moving the community, then we don't have then we don't think that we have the need for a policing system. Yeah. At least the policing system as it is as it exists today. Because one, we could spend money other ways. We could spend money developing transformative justice Internet, which was literally happening anyway.
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And and and other prevention and community services and social work and different things like that. Yeah.
And and people need, I mean, people need things to let people you know, you need stuff to live. And when that stuff is not available and people lose hope and people don't feel as though they have worth Yeah. You know, then, you know, all kinds of things happen. Well, you know, there's a story. The same, colleague of mine, told me once that right when COVID was kind of ripe and and, you know, we were still trying to find a vaccine, He was walking past a basketball court, and, you know, everybody else was inside.
But this group of young men were playing basketball, and they, you know, were jumping on each other with no mask or anything like that. And he's like, you all know there's a pandemic. Right? And they said, you know what I'm saying? We're gonna die before we turn 21 anyway.
Mhmm. What's the point? We you're gonna die soon anyway. Might as well enjoy life. That kind of loss of hope, what do you say to that?
Mhmm. You know what I mean? What do you say to people who because they have been treated as though they have no wood Yeah. To the society. They have nothing to contribute, and they're not.
They're less than human. They only expected to, you know, to be problems. Yeah. What do you say to them? You know?
They they've already internalized the fact that they're not gonna live. Either somebody gonna get them or they're gonna go to jail or that's their life. Yeah. And he was telling me this, and I it brought tears to my eyes because I have a son and 2 grandsons. I'm like, oh my god.
Black men, black boys are losing hope. Yeah. You know? So it's very the work of any kind of work that we're doing that can, you know, just make people human again Yeah. Yeah.
Is necessary. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm shaking my head because I want to make human people human again. Right?
Like, we have so much to undo. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, it's, like, just crazy that we have to just remember. Like, like, the major task that we have is to remember our humanity.
Yeah. You know what I mean? To remember what we had in our indigenous community because of these ugly forces of, you know, colonization and capitalism, imperialization, and all those deep domination systems of that. These are all these isms. Mhmm.
Yeah. Exactly. And it creates such a toxic culture as, doctor Gabor Mate says in the trauma who talks about this toxic culture that you shouldn't be surprised when, when the toxic culture breeds toxic people. Yeah. So, you know, people who are dealing with trauma are you know, you wanna know what happened to them and not you know what I mean?
Yeah. I'm not not trying to, you know, make them victims. But so it's it's a very all of that it is helping me to understand, you know, how much communities can transmute and transform themselves Yes. By understanding that, yes, we are in this toxic brew, but there are ways to detoxify ourselves so that we don't continue to be toxic in this group. And, hopefully, by doing that, because people are the threat of the community, hopefully now heals the community.
Mhmm. And so there's a lot of promise for sort of justice and transformative justice if we remember Yeah. That we used to do this before. Yes. Yes.
You know? I mean, I tried it. The origins are from indigenous people. So the First Nations people, this is they don't call it restorative justice. That's just how they live.
Yeah. Yeah. And I was reading just this morning. I was like, of course, I read this this morning. I was reading it in Maladoma's book Healing Wisdom of Africa, where he was talking about how it happens in the Dagar community of Burkina Faso.
Mhmm. And it's the same thing. You know what I mean? The person brings the person who was harmed brings their grievance. So people sit in a circle, and everybody is facing each other in this circle.
And then there's an outer circle where people who were, like, less directly involved are also facing each other in the circle. The person who was harmed in the center saying, without blame, but really focusing on impact, what the offender, for lack of a better word, did. And then the person who is now wanting to come back into right relationship with it is responding based on the impact, not defending, based on the impact. And that's how we come back into right relationship. Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, my conceptualization and I'm sure you probably noticed it when hearing any of the things that I say that my conceptualization of liberation is very much based on a restorative justice frame. Yes. Yes.
Yes. Yes. Yeah. So how I think about liberation, for those who have not heard me say this, is that it's about coming back into the right relationship with our power. Right?
So even on the individual level, we've not lost connection with ourselves and we're not in right relationship with ourselves. And so we come back into right relationship with ourselves and balance this and we experience internalized justice If multiple individuals, points in lights of consciousness are experiencing internalized justice, we have a world where there is justice, and that is the norm on the macro level Yeah. Based on the experiences of the many within that system. Yeah. Yeah.
And I think of it as personal. You know? You have to actually run away. Mhmm. The way that people are putting you in spaces to think the way that everybody else is is thinking.
Yes. Because if you are, because the distraction is the outer life. Yeah. The reality is the inner life. And so coming, I call it because you can do this while people are looking, and they don't even know what you're doing.
You know? You bring your own inner work. Right. Right. They will see, hopefully, the fruits of that.
Yeah. But you don't have to, it doesn't have to be broadcast and, you know, do all this or the you know? Exactly. It doesn't have to be you don't have to do it in a way where people are, like, look looking looking and view. I keep saying I'm from the day that I transition, I'm going to be learning because I consider this a school.
I consider that this is an old school, and so I can't, you know, be resting on, you know, I can't be resting on any laurels. Even though I'm a lazy person, I love to just daydream and do nothing and read and just be. Mhmm. Still, the work is just just percolating, percolating, percolating inside. Yeah.
Yeah. And I wouldn't even say that you're not lazy. You are rightly balanced with your divine femininity and just being and creating and and what have you. And using rest as resistance. Exactly.
Exactly. So you do consulting. What kind of consulting do you do, and how can people find out more about you as a consultant? So I usually work on a team of practitioners who do a lot of training these days. So I work in high end spaces, medical institutions because restorative justice is kind of like a new thing in the medical institutions.
Can you imagine that? Can you imagine the kind of transformation that will take place in faculty, understanding what kind of harm and if doctors are understanding what kind of harm that they can be doing to patients and also, trainees who are becoming doctors? So that too to make sure that because one of the one of the most harmful places is in the medical profession. Mhmm. Health care Yeah.
Health care harms people like crazy. Mhmm. And so we're doing a lot of work in training Mhmm. People in the medical schools practice restorative justice and to and to to train others, higher ed as well. So I'm doing a lot of training, and the training consists of just giving people an overview of the 3 tiers of restorative justice, which is the community building, which is the big, big piece.
Because as I said, you know you know, sort of, regularizing this toxic society and this toxic environment that we're in. And then the second tier is the conferencing, which has been done to be able to bring people together to repair that harm. Mhmm. And then the third tier is the reintegration, bringing people back after a period of absence so that things are, you know, coming back to whole again. And so I'm doing training now.
I do really wanna work in communities where there is the need for building community so that the prevention of harm will take place as opposed to waiting until harm happens. But if that is a need where there's a need to bring people together to have conversations about it and calling people back instead of calling people out. I'm calling people back to accountability and to repair and, you know, creating spaces where people can work again, instead of, you know, getting rid of them because we can't lose anybody. You know, humans are so valuable. Yeah.
And that's, you know, kind of the way that I'm working right now. Mhmm. Love it. Love it. So as usual, we will have in the description box below how you all can get in touch with Marva if you need to.
Do you have any closing words for our audience? I just feel that, you know, we are in a space right now, as you said earlier, that we are in this time stamp where a lot of this is happening, this kind of realization that there is more to be done in terms of, reintegrating society. And I just wanna make sure that people understand that a lot of people are doing this work, people doing work on themselves, and that we all have to do it. It doesn't have to be black people, white people. First of all, white people need to do it.
Oh, absolutely. More so. Yes. Right? And and there should be no resistance in terms of what will take place if we dismantle some of these barriers, it's going to be it's going to redound to the better situation for all of us because, you know, if if the as I said before, if the if the environment is toxic, we're gonna breed toxic people.
We're gonna continue to breed toxic people. So just like nimbyism, if you, you know, you don't want people who look like somebody else in the back end living near to you, well, where are they gonna live? If they you know what I mean? But if we get to know each other and we get to understand how we all are human, we all have all of these things in common that we can work with, then we can live together. Yeah.
You know? So that's that's the message. Good. So thank you so much for this rich and engaging discussion. Thank you for having me.
I'm so grateful. Thanks for listening. If you've loved what we've had to share and wanna be the first to get releases of our new episodes and learn about events, download our free app, Living Liberated, in the Apple or Google Play Store.
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